When I arrive outside the park home, the landlord is waiting to meet me. (His name is Westley Warwick, I remind myself. My lease is only for a year. If he’s awful, if the town is awful, I won’t be tied to the place. I won’t have to rip up deep roots again to go somewhere else.)
He puts the key in my hand, and I let myself in to a house of beige carpets, beige walls, and kitchen cabinets that haven’t been updated since the ’80s, furnished with a bed and armchair and dining table, all trying to be so generically inoffensive that they loop right around to being hideous, but there’s a tiny fenced-in garden out back, and the first thing I do is plant the flowers I got to keep.
The delphiniums don’t make it. It’s autumn, and they don’t have the energy outside their growing season to repair from the sudden damage to their root systems. (I don’t heal well, either. I think environmental shock doesn’t just apply to plants.)
It takes a month for me to venture out much, and when I finally visit the spring and sink beneath the surface, the world goes quiet enough that I hear it singing in my ear.
Do you have a home?
(I did once, but I made a mistake. I made my home a person so the breakup felt like an eviction notice.)
I surface from the spring. I, Tal, surface from the spring and the dream. No, I’m suddenly, viscerally aware it wasn’t quite a dream. A memory, but not mine. Kessian’s.
I’m not in the spring anymore. I’m in the kitchen of 37 Culpepper Avenue, light beaming through the window, a sun catcher throwing rainbows across the parquet. A calico cat grooms one paw while sat on the counter next to a steaming teapot shaped like a peony. The smell of cinnamon and apples wafts from the oven, a crumble baking within. I pour a cup, and there’s a ring on my finger, then warm arms slip around my waist.
It doesn’t last. A cloud blots out the sun, and I sink. Through the floor, through the soil, into the underground grave of the Shearwater strid while water fills my lungs.
I woke gasping. I would have jerked upright, but a tight, binding arm around my chest held me down.
Kessian stirred, making mumbling, sleepy noises. He had one arm and a leg thrown over me, the smallest of big spoons. Soft, even breaths tickled the back of my neck. Neither of us had a shirt on, and it was like I had my back to a bonfire, warming me through.
“Bad dream?” he mumbled, only half aware.
I’d frozen, disoriented and unsure what to do. It felt so much like that moment in the dream, standing in the kitchen while someone embraced me from behind. That part had felt like a proper dream, the kind where the real world leaked through, but before that—
That had been too real.
I felt the moment Kessian woke up properly. His body went stiff with the awareness of our proximity.
“Shit. Sorry. I’m like a limpet in my sleep.”
“It’s all right. I did have a bad dream,” I said.
“About the strid?” He extricated himself, the air cool where his skin had been pressed against mine.
I turned to face him. It was invasive to know what I now did. I hadn’t asked to, but something had let me see—no, not just see—experiencethe breakup that had precipitated Kessian’s move to Shearwater.
I didn’t know whether to tell him or not. It was private. When I’d asked, he hadn’t volunteered to tell me. He’d said they were memories he’d rather not revisit, and I’d visited them myself. Probably through the same magic that allowed us to visit the future while bathing in the spring.
Withholding it didn’t seem right, either. Perhaps his abilities were not limited to the spring, or our connection to the strid had connected us. Either way, we ought to investigate how it had happened.
Hesitantly, I asked, “Did you have any dreams?”
“Maybe. A bit fuzzy, though. I don’t really remember. Doesn’t mean we can’t talk about yours, though.”
I stumbled over my words, not sure how to broach the subject.Sorry for the invasion of privacy, but I may have just eavesdropped on what looked to be an extremely painful breakup.Then I remembered the second part of the dream and flushed.
“Oh, I see.” Kessian smirked, shuffling closer. “You know, kinks and sexual fantasies are all very natural. We all have them. And, frankly, I’ve seen some things in my clients’ heads that would curl your hair. Or your toes, depending on your predilections.”
I flushed harder. “It wasn’t that.”
Unless you counted fantasies about being financially stable and cooking apple crumble with your husband in a mortgage-free house a kink.
I didn’t want to marry Kessian—I’d only just met him. But dreams of domestic bliss had been a staple of my imaginary playpen from the moment I’d left Shearwater. Something I did all the time, with whomever caught my attention, wherever I happened to be, in order to soothe the pain of never having that sort of reliable, sturdy love in my life. My chances of it in reality were slim, so imagination was as good as it got.
Kessian read my expression and said, “Oh. Was it particularly vulnerable, then?”
I steeled myself. “Yes … but not for me.”
