Page 188 of In Somnis

Right.

Sydney. The hallway. Second chances.

“Sure.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Lennon

The beach goes on forever in both directions.

That’s the first thing I notice, how it stretches, farther than any beach I’ve ever stood on, the sand so fine it looks like powder.

The second thing is the doors. Hundreds of them, standing upright in the sand without frames or walls to hold them, in every color I can think of, and some I don’t have names for. Some are tall and narrow, some wide enough to drive a car through, some barely knee-height, painted, weathered, and studded with brass and draped in driftwood. All of them are facing the water, and all of them are closed.

The tide is out as if it left the doors behind.

This is… a weird beach.

I look down at my fingers.

Breadsticks. All of them are breadsticks, slightly glistening…

… I’m dreaming.

The lucidity clicks in like a light coming on in a dark room, and I breathe through it, feeling the dream lock around me. The sand under my feet becomes more itself. The sound of the water fills in properly, wave by wave.

I’m still standing there, orienting myself, when Tessa appears next to me.

“Very good, Lenny.” Her smile is wide when her arms come around me, and I’m holding on with both hands, pressing my face into her shoulder, breathing her in. “You’re getting so good at this.”

“I found you,” I murmur into her shoulder.

“You did.” She pulls back, both hands on my arms, looking at my face. “You found my dreamscape, but I would have come to you. I always come to you.”

“I know.” I wipe my eyes quickly. “I think it was the tea. A friend gave me herbs. Said they were good for dreams, and it felt… easier than usual. Like the door was already open.”

Tessa nods, unsurprised, as if this information fits somewhere she already knew about. She links her arm through mine and starts walking along the waterline, and I fall into step beside her, the doors stretching ahead of us in both directions.

“This is the dream,” I say. “The one you wrote about. The beach.”

“Everyone has one.” She looks out at the water. “A place where the subconscious lives. Your essence, I guess, if that doesn’t sound too strange. The place everything else builds from.” She glances at me. “Yours is the kitchen.”

I think about the kitchen in almost every dream I can remember. “Yeah, I guess that tracks.” I watch a wave pull back from the sand, think about how she’d described this place in her journal, and why she found it in the first place. “Do you know what Derek’s is?”

Tessa’s arm tightens in mine. “Why do you bring him up?”

“I don’t know.” I keep my voice casual. “He seems nice.”

She gives me a look that is entirely her, the sideways quality of it. “I know what you’re trying to do.”

“I’m just saying…”

“It won’t work, Lenny.” Her voice goes quieter, not hard, just careful. “It’s not like my mother doesn’t try to bring him up all the time to get a reaction from me. And it’s not like he ever came to visit.”

I stop walking. “Nora can lucid dream too?”

“No, but she sits with me.” Tessa keeps her eyes on the water. “Sometimes I can hear her.”