Page 170 of In Somnis

The classroom door opens somewhere behind me, and an adult voice says in a bored tone, “Not good enough, Nevan. Still not good enough.”

What a dickhead teacher is that?

I turn while I’m already composing the yeet. I have a window picked out, and I know exactly which desk I’m going to use as a launching mechanism, but then I see him, and I go completely still.

He looks exactly like he did last time, which is to say, he looks like nothing in particular and everything wrong at once. It’s a face your brain tries to file away and keeps losing, a face that exists in the space between recognizable and forgotten. He’s standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, green eyes already fixed on me, and the wrongness of him radiates through the air like a sudden drop in temperature.

He smiles, and if it didn’t send ice down my spine, I could almost understand Tessa. This Man is devastatingly handsome in the way dangerous things are, magnetic and absolutely terrifying.

“What are you doing outside your forest, Ridge Wells?”

“How do you know my name?”

He tilts his head. “Who do you think keeps you there?”

The forest. My subconscious stuck in my worst nightmare. My powerlessness.

Who keeps you there?

“Why,” I question carefully. “Would you do that?”

“Maybe I’m bored.” He lifts one shoulder in a gesture so unbothered it borders on obscene. “Or maybe I didn’t appreciate you wandering around dreamscapes.”

“Why would that concern you?”

“Ridge Wells.” He says my name once more as if he’s tasting it. “How about you mind your own business, and keep your nose out of mine.”

“Tessa. Is she what you consider your business?”

“She was happy.” He looks back at me, and there’s something in his expression that might be genuine, which is somehow worse than if it weren’t. “I made her happy. You and your doctor friend decided to interfere with that.”

Paul?

“We were trying to help her⁠—”

“Tessa,” he cuts in, his voice dropping low enough that the air in the classroom drops with it. “Is my business.” He takes one step closer, and the fluorescent lights flicker overhead. “Until the lot of you understand that and keep away, you’ll get what you deserve for it.”

I glance at Nevan.

He’s still writing.

SPUTID. SUTPID. STIPUD.

Tears are running down his face silently now.

What the hell could he have possibly done to Tessa to deserve this hellscape This Man obviously invented for him? He would’ve been way too young even to know her when she was still awake.

“I’m stupid, so stupid,” Nevan murmurs through tears.

No. I’m stupid.

I think about Paul, the falling out, the things Paul said and didn’t say, and the things I said that I meant and the things I said that I didn’t. Paul pushed me out, shut the door, and I told myself it was ego and professional distance, the friendship curdling under the weight of everything that went wrong.

I’m less sure about that now. Paul doesn’t make careless decisions. Everything he does is deliberate. Which means whatever he chose five years ago, he did on purpose, and that means something. Only I don’t know what.

“I thought I had you pretty well contained in your forest,” This Man says pleasantly. “But first I find you in Lennon’s dream, and now here.” His smile widens. “Nose. Business. Et cetera.”

“What do you want from Lennon?”