That didn’t have tentacles.
Turns out it’s a woman in a blanket fort trying to make us coffee.
“Gunnar.” Erik’s not grinning now. He’s watching my face. “Don’t.”
I wasn’t going to. Not with her ten feet away and no idea that four strangers just walked into her apartment and every one of us knew her on sight.
“She built you a blanket fort,” I say.
He watches me.
“I thought it was a nest?”
I’m not answering that.
I close my eyes.
She’s a real life fairy tale standing in front of me with those big green eyes and frizzy hair shoved out of her face.
She shouldn’t exist.
She’s definitely not mine.
Absolutely fucking not.
Chapter 16
Elara
The doorframe catches me and I let it.
One second. I get one second of holding on like the building might tip, and then I’m around the corner, out of their sight line, and my legs carry me to the counter before they resign.
Okay.
Okay okay okay.
Coffee. I said coffee. Coffee is a sequence of small, achievable steps, and I am a woman who can achieve steps.
I open the cabinet. I close it. I don’t remember what I was looking for in there, which is fine, because I open it again and it’s mugs. It was mugs. Obviously it was mugs.
My hands are shaking hard enough to hear.
I turn the faucet on. For the coffee. Coffee needs water. The fact that running water also covers sound is a coincidence I am simply benefiting from.
“I know those eyes.”
There. Said. As a whisper, but that doesn’t matter. I said it out loud, technically, in the legal sense — at a volume that doesn’t make things true. That’s how volume works. Everyone knows that.
Because I do know them. I got half a second at the door, half a second before I made myself stop, and half a second was plenty, because I looked at a complete stranger and I already knew him. I didn’t decide. It was waiting for me.
“No,” I whisper aggressively. “Absolutely not.”
Here’s what actually happened. A door exploded. Adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream like a fire hose. The brain, under stress, grabs the nearest familiar-shaped thing and staples it to whatever’s in front of it. That’s science. I have written articles adjacent to science.
“Stress,” I tell the faucet. “That’s all this is.”
Except the dream was last night and the stress was tonight, and staples don’t work backward.
