Page 94 of Ex Somnis

I put a hand over my eyes. “I’m sorry. I feel like I’m going crazy in here.”

His lips brush my hand, and I lower it.

“I know.” He takes my hand and kisses it again, this time softer. “Don’t be sorry. Just tell me you believe me. Tell me you believe me that you’re the only one for me.”

“I believe you.”

I really do, which might be the biggest sign so far that I’ve truly gone mad.

He hums against my cheek. “Good girl.”

He gives me one last peck before he gently sets me back. He then looks around the apartment properly, at the white walls, the suitcase and the mess, and the e-reader abandoned on the duvet.

“You can’t read in dreamscapes.”

“I know.”

“Then why were you trying?”

I let my head fall against his shoulder. “Because I really wanted a book.”

The admission sounds pathetic even to me.

He grips my thigh, squeezing in sympathy. “Oh, darling.”

I shrug. “I just needed to do something different than staring at the bare walls.”

His other hand moves up and down my back again.

Don’t say it.

“I keep thinking about the tubes,” I hear myself say.

His hand stills.

“Tessa’s been in here for years, and I know that there’s a whole system keeping her alive. The feeding, the breathing monitoring, the repositioning so she doesn’t get sores. Now I’m in here, too, and I don’t know if whoever’s on shift tonight remembered to…” I press my lips together. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening to my body right now. Or if Tessa’s breathing is doing that thing it started doing. And I can’t do anything about any of it, so I picked up the e-reader.”

“I know exactly what is happening with your body because you’re at my house, under my care.”

I look up. “Tell me, please?”

“Your body is in Ridge’s bed downstairs. My body is currently lying next to it. Nevan fell asleep on the floor beside it, and Ridge… I’m sure he’s somewhere nearby too.”

That pulls a smile from my lips.

“I have the nursing team Nora uses on a rotating shift, the ones I vetted, not the ones on the Vaughn payroll by default. I read everything I could find on prolonged unconscious states in otherwise healthy individuals. I’ve spoken to three specialists in the last forty-eight hours.”

My bottom lip starts to wobble, and he lets his thumb glide over it.

“I’ve got you. That’s not going to change while I’m breathing.”

The tight thing in my chest doesn’t disappear entirely, but it loosens.

“I must look horrible,” I say, because apparently that’s where my mind goes next.

The corner of his mouth twitches. “Ridge refuses to call you anything except Sleeping Beauty now, so I rebuke that.”

“That idiot,” I mutter, but I say it smiling.