In the present I hear our mutt, Bruce, pad across the hardwood floor and settle himself down nearer to our bed. Freya snakes her hand across my chest as she snuggles into my arm. She does that in her sleep sometimes so I don’t know if she’s awake or not until she says, “I had an idea. About your dream.”
“What kind of idea?” I ask.
“The next time, stop running after me.” Her tangled hair falls across my good shoulder. “Just sit in the street and wait for me to come to you.”
“You’ll disappear. The same way you always do.”
“I won’t,” Freya insists sleepily. “It’s like with my visions. Whatever I see can be changed. The dream can be changed too. You just have to do something different. And even if that doesn’t work, I’ll still be here when you wake up.”
“I know.” I brush her hair back and bend over her to kiss the tip of her nose.
She lifts her face to kiss me firmly on the lips. Hers are so warm and ready they instantly make me crave more. “If you go back to sleep right now maybe you can slip back into the dream,” she says.
“I’m humouring you,” I tell her. “But if it doesn’t work I have some other ideas about what we can do.”
Freya smiles and then nips me playfully on the chin. “Just try it.”
So I do. And before long I’m sprinting through that same strange city I must’ve seen two dozen times in my dreams. Freya’s twenty paces ahead of me already. Fires rage all around us, the blazing temperature wetting our skin. With every step we take, the gap between us grows. I panic and run faster. I open my mouth to shout at her to wait for me, the same way I’ve done each time I’ve had this dream.
But this time is different. This time I remember what Freya said about stopping and I come to a halt in the middle of the road. The heat closes in, threatening to suffocate me. My body wants to break into a run again, to chase Freya down the street until she disappears into orange. I fight the urge and drop into the middle of the street. I sit and wait for her, like she told me to.
And just like she told me, she reappears in the street, her image growing larger as she approaches. Still, I refuse to move. Only when she’s standing directly in front of me, reaching for ones of my hands, do I get to my feet again. “I thought you were right behind me,” she says urgently. “Let’s go!”
I laugh in my sleep, ready to wake myself up and tell Freya she was right. Ready for us to do something else until the sun comes up. Ready for the next seventy years or however long our bodies will give us. Ready to live my life.
Acknowledgments
I’m extremely grateful to the generous, insightful people who offered their feedback and encouragement on Tomorrow before it was released into the wild: Gina Linko (your enthusiasm for and comments on this project meant the world to me); Kelly Jensen (your astute notes helped me chisel this into the book I wanted it to be); my husband, Paddy, who is the best alpha reader that anyone could hope for; and my brother, Casey, who shaped Yesterday’s outcome when he advised, ‘when in doubt, kill someone’ and also cast a helpful eye here. I couldn’t have done this without any of you lovely folks! Thanks, also, to Leah Wohl-Pollack at Invisible Ink Editing for her marvelous blue-pencil skills, and Shana Corey for getting the ball rolling when she asked if I’d consider writing more about the Yesterday universe.
About the Author
C. K. Kelly Martin began writing her first novel in a flat in Dublin and finished it in a Greater Toronto Area suburb. By then she was thoroughly hooked on fiction about young people. Currently living in Southern Ontario with her husband, C. K. is the critically acclaimed author of I Know It’s Over, One Lonely Degree, The Lighter Side of Life and Death, My Beating Teenage Heart, Come See About Me, and Yesterday. You can visit her website and blog at ckkellymartin.com.
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