Page 45 of Ex Somnis

“The sleepwalking?” I prompt.

“Oh.” He looks back at the window. “I don’t think she knows.”

“What? You said you have been doing that since you were a kid. How could she not know?”

He shrugs with one shoulder.

“Nevan, I⁠—”

“I have ways of keeping it contained,” he cuts me off, then mumbles, “Most of the time.”

“Which would be?”

“Sleeping bag. Mittens. Tie my wrist to the bedframe when it’s bad.” He says it as if they’re simply the list of things you do to manage the situation because it’s yours to manage.

This boy. This twenty-something-year-old boy is running an inn alone on two jobs, sleeping in a bag with mittens on, tying his wrist to furniture, and presenting all of it as simply his life because nobody in it has ever told him it doesn’t have to be like that.

My throat closes up, and Ridge’s voice echoes in my head.

“It looked like it amused him to torture Nevan.”

Fuck.

“There is medication for this. You could manage it almost entirely with the right treatment.”

He shakes his head. “I read about it online. There are side effects. I can’t afford to be drowsy through breakfast service, and I can’t sleep eight hours minimum when I’m working two jobs. It doesn’t work for me. Not to mention it’s too expensive.”

“And walking half naked to the other side of town isn’t a side effect?” I counter.

He shrugs again, and I want to shake some sense into him.

“Given that I’ve probably missed breakfast service, you might have a point.”

“So, do you want me to prescribe you something?” I offer.

“No, thank you.”

I nod once.

Of course.

You don’t drag people into treatment for something they’ve already decided is the cost of functioning. It has to come from them. Otherwise, they’ll abandon it the first time it inconveniences their life, and judging by the way Nevan is holding himself together, inconvenience is not something he has room for.

“Well, I’m not specialized in sleep directly,” I say instead.

He turns. “You’re not?”

“No.”

“My specialty is lucid dreaming.”

“Oh.” He glances at the spray can in his hands, then back out the window. “Okay.”

I wait for the obvious question, but it doesn’t come. And that, more than anything he’s done or said, irritates me.

He kissed my soulmate. And now he’s… what? Opting out?

“Don’t you want to ask me about Lennon?” I hear myself say, sharper than intended.