Page 14 of Ex Somnis

“No.”

A beat of silence.

Then the line goes dead.

I set the phone down on the armrest and do the thing I haven’t let myself do in front of anyone in years. Three days of it, all at once, head in my hands in a room with two women who can’t see me fall apart.

When I finally have a sense of composure, I look up. Lennon’s hand is still open on the pillow, as if still waiting for someone to fill it.

I stand and walk back up to her side and do the only thing I can.

I take it.

CHAPTER FOUR

Ridge

Thanks to the sap smell, the cold mud under my cheek, and the log across my back with the same weight distributed across the same two points that have been screaming at me since the last three times I bothered to close my eyes, I’m very fucking aware that I’m dreaming.

I have known what this is after maybe thirty seconds of being here, which is the small and only mercy of being a lucid dreamer with a recurring nightmare. The moment of arrival, where the architecture clicks in, the rational part of my brain catches up with the panicking part, and says, “Right, this again.” Then it sits very still and waits for the panicking part to stop trying to crawl out of the situation through sheer adrenaline. It takes varying amounts of time depending on how much actual sleep I got before I ended up here.

Tonight I’m estimating forty minutes. So… yeah, not great.

The pain doesn’t care that I know this. That’s the thing about reliving the worst moment of your life inside your subconscious. It is committed to the bit with a professionalism I have to reluctantly admire. The weight is real. The two vertebrae that changed everything are real.

In waking life, I don’t have sensation below a certain line.

In here, I have all of it.

The whole archived record, full volume.

Sweetheart, I think, past the pain, the smell of sap, cold mud, and the sound of absolutely nothing moving in this fucking forest.

What the fuck did you do?

Three days.

Three days on top of a hundred, of closing my eyes and ending up here again, every time, pinned under several thousand pounds of wood that keeps me efficiently occupied and away from anywhere useful. Three days of trying to push past the edge of this nightmare and finding the same wall. It’s starting to feel less like a boundary and more like a very personal fuck you.

I can’t get to her kitchen, can’t get to Tessa’s beach, or anything that isn’t this stretch of forest, this log, this fucking inventory of everything I’ve mishandled.

He’s thorough. I’ll give him that.

I’d give him quite a lot, actually.

I have a list.

Alphabetized. Frequently updated.

But there’s been a pull the entire time I’ve been pinned here, this directional thing in the center of my chest. It pulls in a direction, the way you know which way is up even with your eyes closed, underwater, or in a forest that has swallowed the sky and has no exits. Something in me knows she’s somewhere.

Just somewhere.

Somewhere is the least useful word I know.

I put my forehead in the mud and take a personal inventory of everyone I’m angry at, because if I’m going to be held here, I’m at least going to be productive about something.

Nevan.