Page 38 of Ex Somnis

“She started when she came here.”

“How do you know any of…”

“Later.” I point my lollipop at him. “You were telling me about your reason, and I’m not letting you off the hook now.”

He holds my gaze for a moment, then relents.

“After he noticed me, my nightmares started up again.”

I saw it, the one time I stepped into his dream space to apologize, before he cut the line entirely. He pushed me out immediately, and then he ended the friendship the next morning.

I thought he had the nightmare again because of what I did.

“I’ve had them ever since,” Paul admits.

“Ever since,” I repeat. “As in?”

“Five years, Ridge. He trapped me in my nightmare, and every morning he made me wake up straight into paralysis.”

I shut myself away for five years, and he’s been pinned for five years.

Fuck.

“Why?” I breathe out. “What did he want?”

“I wondered the same all these years.” He looks at the window. “It’s not like he talked to me a lot, but he made me promise one thing when all of this started.”

“Which was?”

He huffs a bitter laugh. “In hindsight, it all makes sense. He kept me literally pinned, so I couldn’t try to reach Tessa by stepping into 5D. And with the promise, he made sure you’d never try to reach her in 4D with your ability.”

Bile creeps up my throat.

“What did you promise him, Paul?”

“I promised to keep you out of my dreams, or he’d demonstrate on you what he’d been demonstrating on me.” Paul looks down at his hands in his lap. “I couldn’t let him do that to you. The paralysis. Pinned, while he ran through every version of helplessness he could find. I couldn’t let him make you relive your trauma. Not when I had a way to stop it.”

“So you ended the friendship.”

“I made sure you had no reason to come back. If you were angry at me, you’d stop visiting. You’d protect yourself out of stubbornness if nothing else. And it worked.”

“It worked,” I repeat, while barely being able to swallow around the lump in my throat. “And you did that by letting me think you dropped me.”

Thinking I wasn’t worth the complication.

Thinking the friendship had been more to me than it had been to him.

“Yes.”

“Paul, for fuck’s sake.”

“I know.”

“You absolute…” I stand. I need to move, or I’m going to do something with the shadows again, and this time, I’m going to fucking drown him in them. “You monumentally…”

“I know, Ridge.”

“You self-sacrificing idiot.”