The Dream Thief (5 page)

Oblivious to this dilemma, Will moved on, turning away from the smoking ruins of my burn pile and entering the house, which I'd left unlocked due to the lack of a key. This was Williamsville, after all, and it wasn't like there was anything inside worth stealing. When I entered, right on his heels, I was braced for insanity but felt nothing. Not even a hint of rage or revenge. He walked through the rooms for all the world like a traveler returning to the homestead, without comment, until we reached the scene of the crime.

"My God, Jesse, was this really necessary?"

He had a point. The walls of my old room needed to be scrubbed one last time. Bits of adhesive gave them a scabrous, diseased look. The floor was ridged with brown glue, remnants of rubber carpet backing still stuck to it here and there.

And it felt, to me anyway, faintly evil.

"Bunny rabbits. There were bunny rabbits on the wallpaper."

He just gave me a look and I sighed. "This is the scene of the crime. Marsh spilled a dream on himself and it got splattered all over—"

"Poor Marsh."

"He deserved it. Poor room. It never hurt anybody." I closed the door on the devastation and turned back to the problem of Will. "I think you should sleep outside."

"It's raining. There are mosquitoes. I don't have a tent."

I just looked at him and he looked back. Finally he said, "It's a dream, right? A nightmare? If it gets bad we just wake up—how bad can it be?"

Pretty damn bad. Marsh was evidence of that. I wasn't entirely sure how much of an effect the nightmare was going to have now that I'd stripped and scrubbed. Maybe not much. Maybe it had dissipated and nothing bad would happen. Maybe we'd both dream of puppies and kittens.

But I had a very bad feeling as we unrolled our sleeping bags on the living room floor. At my insistence, we'd chosen the farthest corner of the house from my room. When we were kids we'd done this very thing more than once.

A lot had changed in ten years. Will, tanned and tall and all grown up, looked a far sight different in a pair of boxers than Will at ten, and I began to wonder if I'd wandered into some sort of purgatory. He was gorgeous. I loved him. And he was entirely off limits.

We didn't talk, didn't even say goodnight; we just lay there in our sleeping bag cocoons, shutting each other out. For a long time I listened to his breathing, heard it grow slow and regular, felt myself drifting into sleep behind him.

I woke in a cold sweat to Will shaking me, the glare of the living room light stabbing into my eye sockets.

"You were screaming," he said, in response to my mumbled protest.

His hair was dark with sweat and his eyes were a little wild. He stumbled around the house turning on lights and I lay there and watched him. Even in the middle of the night, huddled in my sweat soaked sleeping bag, frightened and miserable and pissed off as I was, I couldn't help but appreciate the site of Will roaming around in his boxers.

I know a lot of women prefer the sort of blatant body builder sort of thing that Marsh has going on—gym-built muscles, with abs you could scrub laundry on if you had the mind. Will, on the other hand, is a well-built man who works and plays hard. Besides that, he's always had an incredible summer tan. About a generation back in his genetic tree there's some good Native American blood. It's invisible in him—he's as blue eyed and blonde as any racist pig white supremacist. But he tans this deep golden brown every summer, which just makes his hair more golden and his eyes more blue and…

Yeah. Emotionally I was about sixteen.

He padded back into the room on his bare feet, slid into his sleeping bag, but then sat up to look at me, his eyes searching my face as though he'd never seen it before, as if somehow studying every line was going to tell him something deeply important.

I shifted position, letting my hair fall as a screen between us. "What?"

"So much hate, Jesse. So much." He sounded bewildered instead of angry, with a lost look in his eyes that I wanted to soothe.

But there was no answer I could make to that. I considered the classic "I'm sorry," but it felt inadequate and wrong. Explanation was beyond any words I could come up with. I lay down and turned my back to him, hiding the quiet tears that welled up and spilled without any permission at all from me. "What's going to be in your dream, I wonder?"

I heard a rustling of his sleeping bag as he lay down. "Memories. I want to remember what happened that night."

"I spend all my time trying to forget."

"You don't get it, Jesse. I destroyed everything that mattered to me. I did that. I got behind the wheel under the influence, I rolled the truck, I killed your father. At least that's what they tell me. Because all I remember is the beer and rolling the truck. And dragging you out of the lake."

I remember enough for both of us. Unlike Will, I wish I didn't, but I can't make it go away.

I'm so cold and I can't catch a full breath. The water is a weight on my chest that makes it hard to breathe and my arms and legs don't want to move. He's down there somewhere, though, my father. Slipped out of my hands and I've been under over and over and over trying to find him but it's dark and I can't and then strong hands drag me away, toward shore.

I gasped, as though surfacing from dark water. "It wasn't your fault. There was a cow."

"Jesse—"

"You didn't even drink a whole beer. And you drove because I'd had two. It was dark, it was raining and there was a cow."

"You're not making sense."

I sat up then and made myself look at him and feel what I had done. All of the guilt he'd carried for ten years. Pointless. Much of it mine, the rest of it some stupid fate inflicted by the universe.

"Did they make you do jail time? Did they know about the beer?"

He shook his head. "By the time they got us all out of the lake and up to the ER it was burned out of me. I never told. I got charged with reckless driving, but mostly everybody was sympathetic. Chalked it up to an inexperienced kid behind the wheel. But I was a better driver than that, Jesse. I knew I wouldn't have rolled the truck without a reason, and I knew I'd had a drink—"

"Which makes the cow important."

And then I told him, everything this time—well, almost everything. He didn't need to know how I'd felt about him, only what happened.

Will beside me, warm, his body soft and hard all at the same time. My senses full of him, the pressure of his arm against mine enough to melt me into a puddle of teenage lust. My father on the other side, weary and in pain. I can feel that, too, in the way he holds himself, his head tipped back, eyes closed. Pleasure on one side, pain on the other, and then we come around a corner and there is the cow, turned broadside and blocking our lane.

An instant of brakes, of realizing she isn't going to move. An intake of breath and the truck swerves to the right, throwing me against my father. A catch as the wheel sinks into the soft shoulder and then the weightless moment as the truck tilts…

"So I swerved to miss a stupid cow."

I was sitting up by then, my knees pulled up against my chest and my arms wrapped around them, struggling to breathe, to keep my voice calm. "It was dark. You'd had one beer. Which I made you drink, in case you were wondering. And then my dad called and said he needed a ride. We went to pick him up. I made you drive, because I drank more."

Thanks to the bond between us, I could feel the catch of his breath in his throat, the pressure of the tears he couldn't shed, the weight of the guilt. I huddled into myself, shivering, waiting for it all to turn to hate. In that moment I wanted only to comfort him, to be able to hold him and soothe him, but I'd lost that right, and all I could do was wait, helplessly, for him to reassemble all of the pieces and see me for the monster I truly was.

"All these years," he said finally. "And I couldn't talk to anybody. Maybe I should have. I was afraid of what would happen. I'd lost so much. Worst thing was I lost you and—" His voice broke and I was utterly undone. There was no way to make this up to him. No way to pay it back, to make us even, to ever begin to make it right.

Still, I tried. "Will, I—"

"You wanted to blow me up, Jesse. And even that wasn't enough—you needed to kill me again with a tire iron, and burn down the mill and even kill my father—"

"No, that's not true. I—"

"The dream doesn't lie. The deepest desire of your heart, isn't that right? Go to sleep, Jesse. Please."

I needed to tell him that the dream did lie. That it morphed and grew and that even if I had wanted those things I didn't want them anymore. But I couldn't find words. I could only lie there and listen to his ragged breathing, to know he was actually crying—Will, who never cried even as a child—and that I had lost the right to comfort him.

After a long, miserable time he grew quiet and I hoped maybe he'd drifted off to sleep. But I heard him rustling around in the sleeping bag, and when he emerged he had his jeans on, t-shirt in hand. "Get some sleep, if you can. Tomorrow we'll figure out how to break this binding thing. I can't spend another night in the same room with you."

"Where are you going?"

"On the deck. I should have listened to you in the first place."

I buried my face in the sleeping bag, wishing for the luxury of tears, but my guilt would not allow them, and my eyes had gone dry. So I lay still, just breathing, accepting my new identity as the most horrible and selfish person in the world. Somehow I drifted off into sleep. When the dream began I recognized it with a sick sense of déjà vu.

Will sits in his pickup, his tanned arm resting in the open window, fingers lightly tapping to the rhythm of a tune on a CD. When he sees me, he smiles—the old smile, wide open and unafraid. Within the dream something has changed. I am awake. I recognize the sequence, the pattern, and I know I must save him. But when I try to scream, to warn him to get out, to run, my voice won't work and I can only whisper. He doesn't hear me over the music, doesn't seem to notice my situation.

"Come on, J-Bird. The grass isn't getting any greener."

No, it's about to be red with gore and I can't have that. It can't happen. My feet carry me toward him, too slowly, and at the last instant, as the bomb explodes I leap, I fly, as though I've been granted Superman's cape, and I wrap my body around his.

Boom.

The car blows up around us, fragments of glass and steel and plastic like confetti with a mission to kill, but I cling to him as though my love and my body can hold him together, keep him from flying apart.

I woke up knowing two things.

Somehow I had managed to alter the dream and keep Will alive.

The designer dream he'd ordered was ready for delivery.

The second of these things totally wiped out any comfort offered by the first.

All of the rebel had temporarily been pounded out of me and I lacked the energy to fight the inevitable. So I pulled out the briefcase and watched as my fingers navigated the numbers to the combination locks, numbers that my brain didn't know. And when I snapped the case open, a small stone bottle lay nestled into the padded compartment.

It was smaller than most, and looked like it was made of Obsidian, night-black and smooth as melted glass. Dark and dangerous, but Will had asked for the dream, and I was going to have to deliver it.

Behind me I heard the sliding door open and close, felt the cold pre-dawn air hit the back of my neck, smelled grass and trees and the outside. And then Will was standing over me and there was no way to hide this dream, no scheme to keep it from him.

"You could send it back, now," I whispered, my voice no louder than it had been in the dream. I didn't turn to look at him, couldn't face his eyes.

But his hand came down and closed around the little bottle, and that was that. For the first time I realized that if we couldn't find a way to separate ourselves, then I was going to have to share this dream with him. It promised to make for an interesting night, but not one I was likely to enjoy.

"Your Dream person—"

"The Merchant."

"Right. She said I was supposed to help you clean up the mess. When that's done will she cut us loose from each other?"

"Honestly, I don't know."

"What do we need to do?"

Now that was a brilliant question, to which I didn't know the answer. I'd already done everything I could think of to cleanse the house, short of burning it to the foundation. And the only viable ideas I had involved more scrubbing, starting with me.

 

 

A
long hot shower
failed to wash away my guilt, but it did restore me to some semblance of my usual self. When Marsh's truck drove into the yard I was able to muster an appropriate level of snark.

Overnight he'd morphed back into his smooth talking, lady-killing self. Clean pair of jeans, cut to put his cowboy boots and ass on display; western shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his muscle-defined forearms and unbuttoned to let his pectorals have their turn. He'd shaved, fixed his hair to its usual casual perfection, and his eyes were clear.

At least mostly. Marsh has strange eyes. They're hazel, which isn't the unusual part. The right one has a triangular spot in the iris that has always been greener than the rest. And today, though his eyes were more brown than anything, that triangle was a clear bright green that very nearly glowed like a cat's.

He leaned against the doorframe, letting his gaze run over my body and linger on my breasts. Self-conscious, suddenly acutely aware that my hair was still shower-wet and I wasn't wearing any makeup, I felt the unwanted flush crawl up my neck and into my cheeks.

"Morning, Jesse. Wanna make me breakfast?" His tone was insinuating, his smile knowing, but the seductive effect was ruined by my vivid memory of him kneeling at my feet, face shiny with snot and tears.

"Well, don't you look better," I said.

"Better than what, darlin'?" He actually dared to wind a lock of my hair around his finger, bold as brass and without any sign of shame over yesterday's events.