Her hand remained up, and she glared about the group until two others - myself and Tom - joined her. Reluctant - it seemed - on Tom's part as he weighed his hand in a weird tilted climb as if to say almost. Cheyenne skipped any questions and focused on the stragglers.
"What are you doing wrong?" she demanded.
Marie crossed her arms over her chest. "Who says we're doing anything wrong?"
"Well, you aren't lucid dreaming, so obviously, you did something wrong."
Drumming his pen in an off-beat on his notebook, Tom hummed. "Yeah, but I recognized I was dreaming, but it wasn't like I could do anything but keep going. Like - yeah, totally not actually taking a test with no pants on but 'oh well, where's my number two pencil?' Ya know?"
A slight wriggle of Cheyenne's jaw followed. Her eyes, however, remained on Marie. "Recognizing you're dreaming is step one. If you can't do that, we've halved our sample size for step two."
"Failure to obtain data is data in and of itself," Marie retorted.
Now, her - I wanted in charge. No nonsense and the least talkative out of everybody - she would get work done. Even better, she'd probably do it herself rather than ask any of us. Not the best for learning, but it wasn't like Psych 101 had anything useful in it that wouldn't be repeated a thousand times in every subsequent class.
Leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head, Alexander sighed and grumbled, "Pretty sure I don't dream."
"Pretty sure you've been black-out drunk every night since we started this project," his roommate, Chad, snapped though the second his voice jumped in volume - almost cracking on 'drunk,' he winced. "I hate you so much right now."
Without missing a beat, Alexander laughed and kicked Chad's chair. "Nah, man, you love me."
"It won't work if you're drunk!" Cheyenne shrieked.
Rolling her eyes, Marie clucked her tongue. "Forget about the project. How are you getting alcohol already? It's barely a month into the first semester. You want to be kicked out?"
"Legacy baby!" Alexander cheered.
"God, can't you be quiet?" Chad growled.
Cocking one brow, Alexander grinned. "For a smoothie."
"Fine. I'll buy you a smoothie if you shut up."
"Two smoothies."
"What?" Chad's head snapped up, and he rocked in his chair, putting a hand to his head to steady himself. "I'm not negotiating on this - one smoothie."
"Two. One for coming to this dumb meeting like you promised me this morning. Another one for being quiet. Two smoothies," Alexander counted them on his fingers, wiggling the two digits in front of Chad's face.
"Fine, whatever! Shut up!" Chad snapped. If Chad didn't kill Alexander by the end of term, it’d be a miserable
Cheyenne gave one last glare before tossing her brown curls over her shoulder to focus on Tom and me. "So?"
Tom wiggled his fingers. "Extra digits then - BAM! I'm awake."
"That's good," she cooed. "It's a start. Now, you just need to stay in the dream."
Her eyes shifted to me. Immediately, everyone else focused on me too. Great. Just what I didn't want. Psychoanalyzing Gray and the bullshit manor seemed like a literal nightmare, so I leaned back in my chair and focused on the minimum. They needed basics. Nothing fancy. Nothing that might lead to some weird diagnosis (because when didn't new wanna-be psychologists offer unsolicited and ego-destroying analysis).
"I know I'm dreaming, but not like how it says in those articles - my fingers are all there. I can read fine. It's just the same weird house every night, so - not really useful, right?" I reported, scrolling to my notes in the shared online document. "Did find out that I apparently paid more attention to my Granddad's Red Sox golden age rants than I thought."
"What do ya mean?" Alexander prompted.
I shrugged. "There's this card in the dream - Ted Williams. Don't remember ever seeing one, but I looked it up online, and it's exactly the same in the dream as it was in real life, so I must have at some point."
Focused on the card. Honed into the almost normal - the things I had already traced and connected in my life to something understandable and not controversial. No talk about my sexuality personified into a nerdy, Victorian twink. Nobody needed to know my kinks. I wasn't out and proud about being gay, and dealing with tastes that would make Oscar Wilde preen could be left for my future self - my rich, independently successful, impossible to otherwise critique future self who had a hot Victorian-cosplaying gothic twink boyfriend.
"Like Tris."
All eyes jumped to Marie. I blinked. "What?"
"Like Tris," she repeated. "From Divergent. She just knew it was fake. No tells or anything. Just - not real."
"Lucid dreaming isn't like the fear simulations," Cheyenne argued, but Alexander slammed back in his seat.
"Whoa! You're right!" he cheered, causing Chad to groan at the exclamation. "Dude! You didn't tell me I could lucid dream myself into a movie!"
"That's not what I was dreaming..."
"I'm gonna be Bruce Wayne!" Alexander mimed driving a car, leaning back to bounce from side to side in his seat. "Hit the town in my batmobile and kick some bad guy -"
"Great," Cheyenne interjected. "So you're actually going to try to do the project now?"
The wild smile across Alexander's face grew even larger. His enthusiasm would have been more endearing if he wasn't such a cocky dick most of the time, but chasing after straight guys led to heartbreak. Plus, getting close to him would mean dealing with his partying, and I wasn't a legacy. Scandals got guys like me kicked out of Harvard.
Chad gurgled as he sunk his face into his forearms on the desk. "Can we be done?"
"Seconded," Marie called, already dropping her pen and notebook back into her bag.
"We barely started," Cheyenne complained.
Leaping from his desk quickly enough to almost knock it over, Alexander crowed, "Thirded!" He swiped an arm over Chad's desk, dumping everything into his roommate's backpack - even his own notebook. No pen or pencil though. I could spot a weak link in a group project when I saw one, but he was really hitting it home. "Smoothie time! Smoothie time!" he chanted, pulling Chad out of his seat.
"I still hate you," Chad spat, but he allowed his roommate to carry his bag and drag him off.
Cheyenne continued to complain, stalking Marie out of the study room as Tom leaned over to me. "Odds on Chad killing him versus them boning by Christmas?"
"Not everyone's gay, Tom."
Slinging his bag over his shoulder, he scoffed. "Who said gay? My bet is Alexander is bi, and Chad...maybe pan?"
"Bi-curious at most, and if Chad isn't already in a serious relationship, he's ace. Cheyenne and Alexander in our group - and not a single glance at chest or butt on either one," I explained then shook my head. "I can't believe we're even having this discussion. We're majoring in psychology."
"And my goal is to be a sex therapist."
"Well, if those who can't do -" I began, but the floor went out from under me as I exited the room, and my eyes caught on a lean form stretching up to pull a book from a high shelf.
Standing on his toes, he shimmered like a beacon, and the second my eyes caught on him, I couldn't look away. All around me, the world faded. Every shelf and person disappeared. Only he and I remained.
Was I dreaming? Had I slipped into sleep without noticing it? I traced the hours back from the moment I rolled out of bed until now, but there wasn't anything to suggest I'd stumbled into a dream, yet there he stood. Completely out of place. Dressed in black slacks and a white dress shirt - his jacket folded over one arm as the other stretched upward. His skin so pallid it nearly made the shirt cream in comparison.
My world narrowed, and his name slipped from me - a summons or a curse, I couldn't be certain. "Gray."
Then, like an elastic snapping back, he was gone.
"Yeah, yeah," Tom drawled, smacking me on the back. "You're real funny."
"Funnier than you," I retorted and kept walking.
Chapter Four
Even as I drifted off to sleep, the glare of my computer screen ached, reflecting in the back of my eyelids. Nothing helped. Every post I read contradicted the last. Half of them said I had some psychotic break. Divided personalities or disassociation as a result of trauma - something I never had. My life was boring. Wake up. Eat. Study. Repeat until sleep.
Yet I woke up tired. Embroidery pressed against my skin, indenting paisley on my cheek when I turned to glower at the ceiling. Clean molding tonight.
"You should sleep in your own room," Gray drawled. Sitting rigid and too far forward in a nearby seat, he held his book down upon his knees. A thumb marked his pages. "The sofa isn't terribly comfortable." His eyes scanned down the length of my body. Heat followed in its wake until his eyes narrowed. Frowning when his gaze reached my feet, he clucked his tongue. "Your shoes will sully it!"
I rubbed my hands over my face. "Can't help it. It's too short."
"You're simply too tall."
"If I were under six foot, I'd still be too big for this dumb couch," I grumbled.
I don't want to be here, I thought. Every ounce of me focused on my college-issued mattress. Old and plastic-wrapped, it had at least two inches more padding to its worn surface than the tight-stitched padding on the old sofa, but willing myself away didn't work. For worse, I remained.
Despite scolding, Gray did nothing to get my feet off the fabric. He, instead, returned his attention to his reading. Some foreign language book with a black cover and inlaid scrawl on the front. Probably something fancy and out of time. Victorian clothes - Victorian mansion - 1940s brat beneath it all. Beautiful - not handsome. Pointed chin and large eyes like a china doll. The creepy sort that I wouldn't want in the same room as me when I slept. Lips - too thin. Not the kissable kind. Too thin and tightly pouting with a downward curve at the edges which marked all dour pessimists.
Shit, he'd look good flushed and upset at his own desperate cries. The quiet ones broke like a rushing crescendo, didn’t they? All the notes falling over and on top of each other in a desperate thrumming.
"I'm horny," I declared, drawing one knee to my chest as I sat up.
Glancing over his book, Gray glared. "If you are not going to be quiet, vacate."
I slid closer until our knees brushed. Along his jaw, the muscles twitched, but he didn't move his leg. Probably didn't want to screw up his perfect posture. Leaning forward, I set my hand on his thigh. He was impossibly warm. The heat leaked up my arm, leaving my fingertips feeling burnt, but I edged up and up as his large eyes stared into mine.
"You know what horny means, right?" If I was backed up and needed to give my repressed sexuality a bit of care, then I would. No progress meant dealing with Cheyenne. Sooner this ended, the better.
"You have a room and a hand."
My breath caught in my lungs as my ribs squeezed tight. This ended here. "Sure I do, but I like you more." I pushed forward, brushing my fingers against his inner thigh.
The full weight of his book slammed into my face. Rearing back, I blinked as blood dripped down my front. Wide eyes stared at me. Tears lined his long, dark lashes, and everything in me withered at his terror, but before I could apologize, he flew out of his chair and ran back toward the kitchen. Any hope I had to follow him and try to set things right regardless that he was a figment of my subconscious fell to the wayside as the air thickened around me. Time slowed as he fled. With each step, the grandeur faded. Cobwebs gathered, and carpet rolled into place until nothing of the original house remained. Through its ruination, I sat alone.
But I didn't feel it.
Stones fell into water. Marching one-two, one-two with a sliding scratch across the rug. A presence loomed behind me, casting shadows over the decrepitude. Just like the song, my mind raced, but my heart beat slurred in a slow pulse - sticking to the skip between the beat as my neck broke out into a cold sweat.
Weight dropped onto my shoulders. Two long-fingered hands with sharp, well-maintained nails pressed me down, holding me in place, but for all the weight of their grip, the heat worsened. Wherever the hands touched, my skin blistered and burned as if someone had swept up the still glowing embers from a fireplace and dumped them over me. No matter how painful, my body wouldn't move to scream.
In the vacuum of time, a single syllable stretched out. It bounced around my ears. Slipping through the sludge of what used to be air, the word - whatever it was - just made the hands burn more. Spots danced in my vision. I was waking up. I had to be. Passing out in my dream might send me straight into another, but the way my gut rebelled, I knew this nightmare would be over like how a stomach ache sometimes gets better right after puking.
Only when the blackness right before waking turned to bright white light, the heat and thick air remained. Sweat painted my skin. Up and down had no meaning. Just bright white light. My stomach threatened to go inside out. A molasses mumbling.
Then two new hands grabbed me. They pushed me down, back against sweat-soaked sheets as a shadowy figure loomed above me. "James!" a voice cried out through the murkiness.
"I'm sorry," I gurgled.
Everything hurt. Why did everything hurt?
Words faded in and out. Half-formed sentences: "...no! Mack get the...blow...James, you idiot!"
Like electricity, the pain overtook me, and my spine snapped, sending me half off the bed, rolling as I nearly projectile vomited into a well-placed trash bin.
Patting my back, Tom sighed. "What the hell did you take?"
With bile embittering my tongue and a new kind of frustration itching across my skin, I couldn't answer him as I vomited again. There was no relief. Everything hurt. Gray didn't want me. A figment of my imagination ran away from me. That shouldn't hurt. He wasn't even a well-fleshed out delusion. I could count the facts I knew about him on one hand and have fingers left over. Nightmares happened. I feared rejection like any sane person, so this was just a personification of my fear that even if I did come out, nobody would want me. Just another stupid paranoia.
But it hurt so bad.
Chapter Five
A week passed without a single dream. Rejection - even private, even by my own mind - curdled in my gut like a sore. Internalization. I had that. Though I intended to take it to my grave or to wherever I needed to be to feel untouchable, I recognized the issue and its source. Worse still - when I spiraled, my mind wandered back. Some kids pulled on pigtails when they were little. They saw something they liked and wanted to wreck it. A desperate urge to do whatever it took to get attention at an age where attention - positive and negative - all felt the same. Many people never grew out of that urge. Probably they just never had to.
I never cared to pull pigtails. Everybody whose attention I wanted already looked at me. They were my friends, so I played with them whenever I wanted, and by some lucky fluke, I was the kid who everybody thought was their best friend, which meant I never had to worry about a friend liking another friend more than me.
Until middle school. Middle school was a nightmare. I wasn't into girls. Everybody else started to consider the possibilities, and I just stayed the same. I wanted to hang with my friends. Which was fine. I joked, taunting crushes. Desperately trying to figure out why I would hate how much time so-and-so spent thinking of whatever girl had caught their attention. Luckily, my friends had short attention spans, so I could talk myself down without getting too nasty.
Until I couldn't. Until I realized exactly what I wanted. When my own feelings focused entirely on a single boy - Simon. Everybody loved Simon. He smiled all the time with two perfect dimples. With chestnut brown hair and a constant bronze tan - even in winter. Made him practically glow like a demigod. I hated him for it.
We weren't best friends. By middle school, the everybody's best friend became a generally good friend with everybody, but it seemed they had all paired off, having given up on me since I reveled in the attention rather than sticking to any one of them. I hadn't really minded before Simon.
Then I realized I liked Simon. Woke up having dreamt about Simon in the way the health class teacher talked about, and I got sick in the pit of my stomach every time I saw him - especially when I saw that unlike me, who hadn't picked anybody, he had used his everybody's best friend time to pick the dorkiest kid in school - Reggie Huberman.
Dark haired and pale - the flushed red to burning to white lily sort of pale. He wore overalls more than jeans in elementary school, and for some reason, we all thought that was the dumbest thing ever, so most of the boys bullied him. I hadn't. Overalls seemed dumb - inconvenient really - but Reggie Huberman could wear whatever he wanted. Small and skinny and more into books than actually playing on the playground, he had other problems besides his clothes.
Simon hadn't thought that though. He always tried to get Reggie to play with us, and if the other guys were a bit too harsh, he ditched them for Reggie. Nobody knew why. It wasn't like Reggie lived next door or the two of them had known each other before school. Reggie hadn't even gone to our school until fifth grade, but in a single year, he won over Simon and became best friends with one of the most popular guys in school.
It didn't matter to me until seventh. In seventh grade, I wanted Reggie to just fuck off. Still into books. Even more into his debate club and Model UN. And wherever Reggie went, Simon followed like a puppy. Even before I realized what that meant for the two of them, I hated it.
Despite that, I tried to join in. Between practices, I hit up debate club. Reggie could twist words like he breathed air, and whenever he won, Simon beamed, so of course, I studied and got friendly with the rest of the debate team. Eventually, I started winning against everybody else - even Reggie sometimes. Simon went on beaming. After one particularly frustrating afternoon in our sophomore year, in which I won against Reggie in a mock debate, I caught Simon frowning. But it wasn't at me.
All That We Say or Seem Page 2
