Page 32 of Ex Somnis

Ouch.

“Question it.”

“I do, I mean, good for you, man, but I thought it was permanent.”

“No. Count your fingers.”

The smile slips. “What?”

“Count them. Right now.”

He looks down at his hand, and his brow creases before he looks up at me with wide eyes again. “This is a dream.”

The moment he says it, the dreamscape folds, the horizon going soft at the edges before the whole thing dissolves, and I’m catapulted back into my yellow flowers.

Ah, fuck.

I woke him up.

I sit up with a sigh and let a hand run over my face.

I know Derek will get there, the lucid dreaming. He’s stubborn enough, and he cares enough. In my experience, those two things eventually get you most of the way there. But this sucks. Big time.

I’ll check back tomorrow night.

It gives me the time to do the thing I was dreading.

I close my eyes and think about Paul, which is loaded.

Paul’s dreamscape is familiar territory. I know its texture. I know his subconsciousness, or at least the part of it I used to have access to.

The last time I stepped into that space invited, I made a mistake bad enough that he ended our friendship over it.

The next time I stepped into it uninvited, I spent a hundred days trapped under a fucking log.

So my history with Paul Bennett’s subconsciousness is, objectively, not stellar.

I wonder if he’ll even let me in now.

But Lennon is somewhere unreachable, and Paul is in that Vaughn mansion or wherever he’s set himself up. He is the only person in this situation who has the knowledge base to be actually useful. Meaning, I need him.

It means I have to want something from the last person I wanted something from.

Fantastic.

I think about the set of his jaw when he’s decided something, and there’s no point arguing anymore. The way he wears his glasses lower on his nose than he should, something I used to point out constantly.

He never fixed it.

I think about Paul and how he does nothing quickly and everything intentionally, and how it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that those weren’t the same thing.

Dr. Bennett.

The only person I’ve ever met who makes patience feel like a threat.

Paul Bennett.

Dark eyes behind glasses.