Page 167 of In Somnis

What I’m examining right now is the other voice.

I’d bet a pretty big amount that the Shaw boy is in her apartment.

In her bed.

At whatever this hour is.

The thing I feel about this is irritation. That’s what I’m calling it. Irritation, which is a perfectly reasonable response to being kept awake by noise from next door and has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that last night she said yours in a dream with her eyes blown dark and her whole body reaching for me. Then she woke up and did not knock on my door.

Instead, Nevan is currently in her bed.

I consider, briefly, making my way over there. Looking at the Shaw boy and asking Lennon, just like last night. Him or me? Except I already know the answer, and even without full information, she chose correctly. She chose him. In waking life, with her eyes open and her full-conscious brain engaged, she chose him.

The conversation on the other side of the wall eventually goes quiet. They’ve probably fallen asleep, which is a thought I’m not going to linger on, and I’m still lying here in the dark doing the thing I do, which is think.

I think about Nevan Shaw.

Not the dream version, the actual one. The one she called at some point this evening to get comfort, presumably, instead of knocking on my door.

The thing about people who show up for someone in the middle of the night is that they either mean it or they don’t, and there’s no middle ground. I want to know which one he is. I want to know if he’s honest with her. If he sees her how she deserves to be seen, or if she’s a game to him, a soft thing, a girl with sad eyes and a good heart that someone like him gets to feel good about.

I want to know if he deserves it.

The choosing.

Which is, I’m aware, a rich thing to want, coming from me, but also how I decide to do something stupid.

With Paul, sharing dreamscapes was not exactly easy. I had to want it and had to work toward it deliberately, easing into the shared space like opening a door you weren’t sure was unlocked.

With Lennon, it just happened. No effort, no intention. I still don’t entirely understand why, except that whatever she is to me, the dreamscape noticed before I did. Whether that thread extends to someone she’s tangled with is a completely different question, and the honest answer is I have no idea. I’m lying here in the dark at whatever this hour is, awake, irritated, and curious, and those three things together have historically led me places I didn’t plan to go.

I close my eyes.

Think of the Shaw boy.

The last time I saw him in waking life, he was barely an adult. Maybe eighteen, nineteen. Back then, I worked at Bennett Logging, and Nevan did odd jobs around the place like half the young guys in town did. Occasionally, someone would decide that the teenager needed supervising, and I was the one to do it, which I never volunteered for and never successfully argued my way out of. He was all angles and uncertain height, knocking things over because he hadn’t finished learning where his edges were. I was mostly annoyed by his responsibility. Mostly.

I try to pull up the specifics of him now. The color of his eyes—blue, I guess—but I genuinely can’t remember. I didn’t look at the dream version too closely, for reasons I’m not revisiting, but it’s now difficult to find anything concrete to focus on.

I breathe in slowly through my nose.

The Shaw boy.

The voice through the wall tonight. The outline of him assembled from secondhand information, and a dream projection that was probably nothing like the real thing. It’s not enough to focus on. I know it’s not enough.

I breathe again anyway.

Out through my mouth, slow. The Shaw boy. Whatever blue or green his eyes are.

My thoughts start to soften at the edges.

In.

The Shaw boy.

Out.

The Shaw boy…