We’re still tangled up, but in the bedsheets and pajamas and—
The transition between dreaming and wakefulness hit me like a bucket of cold water. I jolted with it, my arm still around Kessian’s waist, my palm brazenly splayed against his belly under the T-shirt I loaned him, pulling him back against my—
Oh no. I was hard. I was very hard.
Kessian looked over his shoulder. “Fully awake now, are we?”
I leapt backward, trying to gather the covers to hide myself, for all the good it would do. He’d have been given a stiff poke in the backside with how I’d been spooning him.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be embarrassed.”
“I’m mortified.”
“It was a dream. Perfectly natural response. If it makes you feel any better, I’m just as hot and bothered; I’m just blessed with stealthier tells than you.” His eyes flicked down to where I’d bunched the covers over my lap. For a fleeting moment, I thought he would offer to help, but he stuck to what he’d told me, and I had to respect him for it. He was beautiful, experienced, and surely could find somebody else with ninety percent less baggage than me. That plastic bag full of other bags my mum kept under the kitchen sink—that was a decent representation of the infinite layers of my baggage.
He said, “If you need to sort yourself out, I can go.”
“No, no, I’ll go. Just, give me a minute.” I shifted to the edge of the bed, dragging the covers with me. “Maybe avert your eyes.”
He covered his eyes like we were about to play hide-and-seek, and I bolted from the bed, hastily fiddling with the clock so I could hide in the bathroom.
I didn’t think a cold shower would really help as much as rubbing one out, so with my forehead against the cool tiles and the steam pooling around me, I took my cock in hand and imagined how my morning might have played out if I wasn’t so damn terrified. If running away wasn’t my default. When I’d finished, toweled off, and emerged once more, I found Kessian making breakfast, a teapot brewing.
“Nice shower?” he asked with a knowing smile.
I pushed aside the thought of shoving him back against the counter as a demonstration of just how inadequate the shower had been but instead—with as much dignity as I could muster—said, “It’s free now if you need one as well.”
“I think we need to talk about the dream.” At my mortified look, he added, “Theotherdream. I had a less sexy one before, and now I’m not sure I was the only one in it.”
I paused mid-pour of my tea. “You had the same one?”
“I think so.”
“Both of them?”
“One where we saw someone going full Pied Piper on the residents of Shearwater, yourself included. Another where we reenacted the night we first met, yes.”
Waking up cuddling him with morning wood was somehow less humiliating than him experiencing the dream with me. It had been emotionally charged, more intimate than our first time by far. “I need to sit down.”
“If it helps, let’s focus on the first dream.”
I scalded my tongue on my tea.
Kessian continued, “The night you went into the strid, do you remember seeing someone in the woods playing the flute?”
“No. Not at all. This whole time, I thought it was the strid calling to us.”
“I think it’s safe to say the strid had help.”
“The same person who murdered my grandfather?”
“Seems likely. If he was trying to find a way to help you, maybe he stumbled across the identity of the man behind it all.”
I tapped my thumb and pointer finger together in an agitated stim, head buzzing. The only suspect I had was Warwick. It had looked like a man in the dream. He had to be a witch; he’d used a portal to escape. If he’d lured all those people to their deaths to feed the strid on the tithes of their lives, perhaps my grandfather discovered as much, and Warwick killed him to keep it secret.
“The last time we shared a dream, it was my memory. Something straight out of my past. This time, it was your memory, only not really? We weren’t living it as you did, when you went into the strid with your dad. In this dream, we stood on the sidelines, watching the mastermind behind it. So, whose memory were we living?”
