Page 87 of Ex Somnis

Text shifts in dreams. I know this.

I put the e-reader down on the duvet and stare at it as if it might apologize for not being real.

It doesn’t.

Time is soup, and I’ve been in this apartment for what feels like years and also possibly twenty minutes. I can’t tell which.

I’ve played with the honey, then let the muffins sing until they ran out of material and started taking requests. I alphabetized the kitchen cupboards in my head. Then I sat on the bed and tried to read.

“I’m going crazy in here, buddy,” I tell Mr. Muffin, who’s resting against the headboard where I left him.

“You might be,” he agrees.

I am off the bed in zero seconds.

“What the…” I back up until my heels hit the wall and press my hands to my chest and breathe, breathe, breathe, while Mr. Muffin is sitting there looking at me with his little stitched face. The voice came from him. It absolutely came from him.

I look down at my hands.

Breadsticks.

Right. Yes. This is a dream.

That is the whole fucking problem.

I breathe out through my nose, and my pulse starts to find its floor again.

“And now I’m talking to my plushie.” I press the back of my wrist to my mouth. “Perfect, Lenny.”

Mr. Muffin makes a sound that is unmistakably a chuckle.

“I liked you better when you couldn’t talk back.”

“No shit.” He wiggles, and I swear if he starts walking and ruins Mr. Muffin in real life for me, I will never forgive him.

I open my mouth to say something cutting, but then I feel it—a pull that feels like gravity deciding to pick a new side.

I turn, expecting Ridge, but it’s Tessa standing in the middle of the room. I look at her, and she looks at me, the weight of everything that passed between us in 5D settling between us. But then I cross the room in three steps, and my arms go around her.

“Tessa.”

Her arms come around me, too, but she only holds on for a short moment before she lets go and gently pushes me back. “Lenny.” She frowns down at me. “What did you do?”

“What did I do? I’m trying to save you. Save us. Both of us.”

She huffs. Not angry, exactly, but something adjacent to it. “There is no saving. I told you I made a promise. Everything you’re doing is prolonging it and making me suffer for it.”

“You are mad at me.”

“No, what I am is in the in-between again. I told you what that was. The pull between here and there, him and you. I’ve been in it for twelve years, Lennon. Years. And you feel it now, too, don’t you? That going-mad thing. Your body fighting your mind.”

I look at Mr. Muffin, and he shrugs. An actual, tiny, fabric shrug.

Unhelpful.

“Yeah,” I admit. “I feel it.”

There’s a tug in both directions.