Page 198 of Ex Somnis

Of course, he is.

He’s the best builder of any of us. Tessa is standing where he was, perfect, top to bottom, and it is so deeply, skin-crawlingly wrong that I have to look away from the face of my best friend on the man I…

“That’s, yeah. That’s exactly right,” I make myself say. “Ridge, that’s perfect.”

“Obviously,” Tessa says in Ridge’s flat voice, and the dissonance nearly takes my knees out.

Paul’s done, too, but he got the hair wrong.

“Your hair’s too warm,” I tell him. “Hers is darker than that. Cooler. And the part’s on the other side.” He nods, closes his eyes, concentrates, and I watch the color cool and the part slide over. “Better. That’s her. Now the hands, hold on, your hands are still your size. Think about smaller, yes, that’s good.”

Nevan is having the worst of it, and not because he can’t do it.

He can. He gets there, but he can’t hold it. He thinks Tessa into being, and she flickers, six-foot-seven and broad one second, smaller and slipping the next, his freckles bleeding back through her cheeks every time his focus slides.

I see the lucidity threatening to go each time, that loosening at the edges, the dream trying to drag him back under into the not knowing.

“Hey.” Paul-Tessa steps in close to him. “Don’t grab at it. You’re squeezing. Pick one thing. The eyes. Hold them and let the rest follow.”

Nevan breathes out a long breath.

And it works.

Tessa’s eyes settle into his face, and then the face follows them, and then the rest of him. He wobbles once, twice, his jaw tightening with effort every few seconds like a man holding a plank, but he holds it.

Four Tessas stand on a planet of yellow flowers under the whole spilled galaxy, and it is, without question, the single most upsetting thing I have ever willingly dreamed about.

You’d better wake up after us doing this for you, Tessa.

I make a slow circle around them. Checking hair, hands, and the way they stand. Ridge’s is still flawless. Paul is convincing, and Nevan holds, white-knuckled, but he’s holding onto the illusion.

“Okay,” I breathe out. “Okay, that’s it, you’ve all got it, that’s good, that’s really… change back. Change back right now, please. That is creepy as hell.”

Ridge chuckles, and when the sound is gone, he’s already back to himself again. Nevan bounces back the second he lets go, and Paul changes back to himself in a breath too.

I stand there in the middle of Ridge’s whole universe, three beautiful men around me and a galaxy over my head. All I can think is…

How did I get this?

How did I get to keep them?

All three of them. How does someone like me get all three?

“Lemon, baby.”

I blink a few times. “Yeah?”

Paul smiles. “We want your pretty eyes back, darling.”

“Oh, right.”

I change back to myself, and they look me over at the same time, with the same expression. It’s not the one I expected, because I can read it in their eyes. It’s the exact thought turned around and pointed back at me, like they’re each privately doing the same math and coming up just as stunned that I’m theirs.

My pulse trips over itself and forgets, for a second, how to be a pulse.

I don’t know if that’s important, given that I’m dreaming.

“Right,” I murmur, feeling the heat rise in my cheeks. “Looks like we’ve got it.”