LUCID DREAMING
1728 Words
SUMMER
Sleep didn't come.
I'd known it wouldn't, not really, but I'd tried anyway — lying still in the beautiful lavender-scented bed, eyes closed, willing my body to believe that the night was over and it was safe to let go. My body wasn't convinced. My body remembered a dark hallway, and hands in my hair, and the cold air on my shoulder where fabric had torn, and it had decided, firmly and without negotiation, that staying alert was the responsible choice.
By midnight I gave up on sleep.
I sat up and looked at the room — the timber beams, the sage curtains, the armchair by the window with the wool blanket folded over its arm. Everything quietly, beautifully unfamiliar. Even the dark here was different from the dark at my old house. Fuller, somehow. Like a house full of sleeping people made the darkness heavier than a house with just one.
Water, I thought. Or milk. Warm milk, maybe. That was a thing people did.
My mother used to make it when I had nightmares — she'd heat it on the stove with a small spoon of honey and sit on the edge of my bed until I finished it. I hadn't thought about that in years. I thought about it now, in the particular way grief worked at three in the morning, arriving without announcement and making itself comfortable.
I pushed the covers back and reached for the cardigan I'd left on the armchair.
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The house was a different place at night.
During the day, I imagined it was grand but lived-in, full of the small sounds and movements of people who belonged somewhere. At night it was purely itself — all high ceilings and dark timber and the occasional creak of old stone settling, the kind of building that had been standing long enough to have opinions about the weather.
I moved down the main staircase slowly, one hand on the banister, my bare feet quiet on the steps. The entrance hall was dark except for the faint light filtering through the tall windows — moonlight, thin and silver, lying in long rectangles across the stone floor.
I was certain I was approaching the kitchen, but then something stopped me in my tracks —
Voices. Low, from somewhere to my left. Not alarmed, not raised — just the particular quiet register of people talking at a time of night when they didn't want to be heard. Light leaked from beneath a door that wasn't quite closed, a warm amber sliver against the stone floor.
“—Besides, why was she lying?” A voice said. It sounded like… Maddox.
“I’m sure she had her reasons.”
I should have kept walking. But I moved closer instead, because apparently self-preservation was something I did in the daytime and abandoned after midnight, and stopped just beside the door where the gap was wide enough to see through without being seen.
The room beyond was a study of some kind — bookshelves, a low lamp, three young men who should have been asleep.
Logan stood with his back to the window, arms crossed, jaw set. Maddox was in the armchair across from him, legs over one arm, watching his brother with the particular attention he reserved for things he'd decided were interesting problems. Rhett stood slightly apart from both of them, leaning against the bookshelf.
"So are you going to tell us now?" Maddox said, "What exactly you were doing out there tonight?"
Logan's expression didn't shift. "I don't know what you mean."
"No one needs to be training until midnight. What were you doing out there, so close to enemy line?” Maddox tilted his head.
“Me? What were you guys doing out there?” Logan asked back.
"Rhett had that vision thing again and sensed something was happening out there, which is why we went. And then we found Summer. And you appeared out of nowhere approximately four seconds later." He paused. "Interesting timing."
"I was running the border," Logan said. "Routine."
"Mm." Maddox didn't sound convinced. "Nothing you want to tell us then? Nothing at all?"
A beat. Logan's jaw tightened by one degree.
"No," he said.
Maddox turned to Rhett and Rhett only shrugged. He turned back to Logan, held his gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable, then let it go with the ease of someone who was choosing to let it go rather than being forced to. He unfolded himself from the armchair and stretched. Rhett pushed off the bookshelf without a word.
"Fine," Maddox said lightly, in the tone that meant it wasn't quite fine but he was tabling it. "Night, then."
They filed out through the far door, and I pressed back against the wall in the hallway, heart going faster than the situation strictly warranted, and waited for the soft sounds of their footsteps to disappear up the back stairs.
Silence.
Then, from inside the room, nothing. No movement. No sound of Logan following his brothers.
I waited another three seconds, then turned to go.
"You could have just knocked."
I froze.
I turned back, slowly, and Logan was standing in the doorway. Not the far doorway his brothers had used — this one. The one I was standing next to. He'd moved without sound, which was deeply unfair, and he was looking at me with his arms still crossed and his expression doing the unreadable thing, and I had absolutely no defense prepared.
"I wasn't — I was going to the kitchen," I said. "For water. Or milk. I couldn't sleep."
"And the eavesdropping was incidental."
"The door was open."
"It was not open."
"It was ajar," I said, with what I felt was a reasonable distinction.
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "You were eavesdropping."
"I was passing by and heard voices and stopped for a second, which is completely —"
"How long were you standing there?"
Long enough, was the honest answer. "Not long," was the answer I gave.
He looked at me for a moment. Then he stepped back from the doorway, not quite an invitation but not a dismissal either, and turned back into the room.
“Be careful, little girl. In some places you’ll get punished for eavesdropping on pack business.”
I hovered at the threshold, weighing things, and swallowing hard.
“I’m sorry.” I said finally. “I didn’t mean to.”
He looked up at me again, his eyes studying me. I wish I could know what he was thinking because it seemed like he was torn about something.
“I guess… I’ll be off now--” I was about to turn around, but he suddenly came out of nowhere. He grabbed my arm, stopping my tracks.
For a split second, he just stood there. He looked surprised by his own actions, like he wasn’t planning on it. And finally, he let me go.
"Come with me," he said. Was it an invitation or a command, or maybe both?
"Where to?" I asked.
"Warm milk," he said simply.
He crossed the space between us in three slow steps and my brain froze for a split second. He walked towards the kitchen and I knew I need to follow him, so I did.
He grabbed a carton of milk from the fridge, poured it into a pan, and heated it up. Then in a mug, he poured some honey and waited for the milk to get warm. I watched as he moved in complete silence, maybe in a trance. Something about the way he moved, so effortless and so cool.
Once the milk was ready, he poured it into the mug and handed it to me. Our fingers brushed as I took the mug from him and I swallowed hard. I brought the milk to my lips and tasted it.
“It’s really good, thank you.” I said.
He let out a smirk as he looked at me. Then he stepped closer, standing right in front of me. His hand reached out to grab my face. His thumb brushing my upper lip and taking off some cream that was there.
He then sucked the cream off his finger, and I swallowed hard again.
"Mmm. Tastes good." He said, the smirk growing bigger. His eyes were dark in the lamplight, and his hand came up slowly — giving me every opportunity to move, to object — and settled warm against my jaw.
I didn't move. And he took it as an answer. He leaned forward, his face approaching mine.
My eyes flutter close instinctively. I felt his hand gripping my neck, his fingers dug in, keeping me in place. My mouth parted open slightly, and then his lips crashed onto mine, hard and unrelenting. His kiss was hard and rough and his grip suffocated me, choking the air right out of my lungs. I gasped in shock and my eyes jerked open, and what I saw next shook me to my core.
It wasn’t Logan.
It was Finn!
“No!” I screamed.
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And I woke up.
The ceiling of the east room stared back at me, my heart was thumping like a racecar, and the lavender-scented sheets were tangled around my legs.
I lay very still for a moment. What the hell was that?
Well, nothing. That did not happen, I told myself firmly. You were asleep. It was random. It means nothing. Brains do strange things under stress and sleep deprivation and that is all this was.
Silence.
Forget this dream. Ignore it. Don’t be weird. You just got here. You’re safe.
I calmed my pounding heart and stared at the ceiling and deleted the dream thoroughly and completely and with great discipline, until eventually, as the light grew and the house began its quiet morning sounds around me, and I slept.
Properly, this time.
Dreamlessly.
- - - To be continued. - - -
- Writer
