by J. Sterling
Last, but never least, The Boy. Blake always gets a thank-you, not only because he threatens me if I don’t (honestly, what’s he going to do to me?!), but because he is my most favorite human on this whole entire planet. Thank you, Blake, for not always understanding what I’m doing, but understanding why I do it.
In Dreams
J. Sterling
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to those
(living and otherwise)
who inspired me to write this story.
You know who you are.
xoxo
Chapter One
They held hands as they walked down a familiar street. It was the street of her childhood, yet somehow it was different. The houses weren’t quite the same and something didn’t…well, it didn’t quite feel right.
Katherine glanced up at the boy whose hand she held. Her mind was keenly aware that she didn’t “know” him, but her heart told her otherwise. His hair was short, and the light brown color reminded her of the sand after it had been washed over by a wave. Her gaze traced the shape of his body through the shirt he wore. She could see the muscles in his arms, and the broad shoulders his shirt couldn’t hide. His face appeared flawless; it took every ounce of willpower she possessed not to run her hand down his cheek, just to feel the softness of his skin.
Then there were his eyes. Rimmed with thick, dark eyelashes, they sparkled with such blue radiance that every time she looked at them, she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to look away. It was as though he could see right through her, knowing her every thought and desire. She knew she should be uncomfortable with all of this, but for some reason, she was completely at ease with this stranger. He looked down at her and smiled. His perfect teeth and full lips drew her in, making her wonder how those lips would taste.
As they walked, he talked to her. Told her things that didn’t make sense at the time. He described where he grew up and how his house wasn’t there anymore. He talked about a fire, and horses, and mentioned something about a soldier and war. Katherine listened intently to all the information, but her brain couldn’t fully process it. She felt a little lost and confused but stayed silent, content to bask in his attention.
She tried to take in the details he shared and make sense of it, but logic was pushed out of the way. She was too caught up in how she felt. The pure love that consumed her every time she looked at this boy was unlike anything she’d ever known before. If soul mates could be real, this stranger was all the proof she needed. It was as if nothing else existed or mattered in the world around them.
She wasn’t aware of the noise at first; she was so caught up in the blue of his eyes. Then she heard it more clearly, the sound of quiet screams that began to fill her ears. Or maybe it was more like muffled wailing. She wasn’t sure. But at that moment she felt her stomach drop to the ground beneath her.
“I’ll be right back. I have to go in there.”
He pressed his lips against her hand and then slowly began to untangle his fingers from hers. “No. Please don’t go.” She pleaded with him to stay and gripped his hand as tightly as she could.
“Katherine, I have to help.” He smiled at her, his blue eyes filled with confidence, and then repeated, “I’ll be right back. I promise.”
“You promise?” she pleaded.
“I promise,” he repeated reassuringly. She let his hand fall from her grasp and watched him slowly disappear through the front door.
Grief immediately washed over her. She fell to her knees and clutched at her queasy stomach, experiencing unease and a sickness she couldn’t define. She knew with unfailing certainty that he would never walk back out of that house. The pain and overwhelming sense of loss that thought caused her were so severe, her breathing hitched and nearly ceased completely. And then she heard it, that sound she was expecting, but couldn’t have known was coming.
A single gunshot.
****
“Katherine? Katherine, are you okay? Wake up.” A familiar voice startled her awake.
Katherine’s eyes shot open to see her roommate, Taylor, standing above her. She focused on the blue eyes staring back at her. Although they had only been roommates a few weeks, they had bonded instantly. Katherine felt like she had known Taylor her whole life.
“My God, Katherine, are you all right? You’re crying so hard. I mean, you’re like really crying. What the hell were you dreaming about?” Taylor’s normally pretty face was pinched with concern.
“Dreaming?” Katherine said softly. “I was dreaming? He was a dream?”
“He, who? Tell me everything!” Taylor’s demeanor instantly changed from concern to girlish excitement as she plopped onto Katherine’s bed, her blonde hair bouncing against her shoulders.
“I can’t…talk about it right now, Tay,” Katherine stammered, barely able to get the words out. “I don’t even want to move. It felt so real.”
“Dreams always feel real when you’re in them,” Taylor reminded her.
Katherine averted her eyes, looking around at the white walls of the dorm room. She focused on the corkboard across from her bed where Taylor had pinned pictures of the ocean and quotes she liked.
“I know, but this was different.” Katherine struggled to put her feelings into words. “Everything was so intense…and the guy. I’ve just never felt like that before.”
“What guy? Come on, Kat, you have to tell me. I mean, you were crying! Like real tears! And you’re acting so weird right now,” her roommate begged.
“Taylor, I know this sounds stupid, but right now I’m still processing the fact that everything I just felt and experienced was a dream. It wasn’t real. I can’t believe he wasn’t real.” She wiped at her eyes.
“Crying again? Really? What the hell, Kat?” she asked, cocking her head to the side.
“I’ll tell you everything, I promise. I just need a minute. Please?” Katherine closed her eyes as she pleaded.
Taylor pouted and stood up to leave.
“I know it’s crazy, Taylor. It’s just the minute I move, everything’s going to fade away. It’s all going to disappear.”
“What do you mean?”
Katherine took a deep breath. “It’s like I can feel him around me. Like my dream is lingering in the air. And I know that once I move, it’s going to disappear. I just want to hold on to it for a bit longer. Does that make any sense?” Katherine’s brows drew together with frustration as she tried to explain.
“Not really,” Taylor admitted. “But I’ll give you some space.” She sighed and walked into their bathroom, pulling the door shut behind her.
Katherine briefly thought about going back to sleep, but she resisted the urge. She tossed the comforter from her body and slid out slowly from the warmth of her bed. With every move, she could feel the dream and her memory of him fading. She knew it was inevitable, but it hurt. And that confused her.
“Taylor?” she yelled out toward the bathroom.
The bathroom door opened and Taylor’s head popped out. “Oh, so you’ve decided to join the living today, eh?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I want to tell you everything. This guy—this dream—it was crazy. I don’t even know how to start talking about it because it was more of a feeling than anything else.” Katherine sighed before she continued. “Even saying that out loud sounds stupid, I know, but it’s true. I mean, not much happened in the dream, aside from him getting shot and killed, which was totally awesome,” she added sarcastically.
“What? Who got shot and killed? I’m confused.” Taylor stepped back into the room and shook her head. “You have to start from the beginning. And you need to hurry, because we have class in half an hour.” She glanced up at the clock on the wall.
Katherine filled Taylor in on every detail she could remember. The house. The fire. The gunshot. The soldier and the war. She did her best to put her feelings into words, although she knew no words could ever do her feelings justice. She described the guy, what he looked like
, what it felt like to be around him, her sense of loss when he left her, and her desperation and fear when she heard the gunshot. Taylor wrote it all down, every single word.
“What are you doing?” Katherine asked quietly.
“Taking notes for later,” Taylor explained.
She glanced at her roommate, looking like a detective hunched over her pad of paper and pen as she sat on the chair with her legs crossed. “What do you mean, later? You’re so weird.”
“Really? You have some dream that makes you cry and I’m the weird one?” Taylor teased.
“No, really, what do you mean?”
Taylor paused. “Let’s just say for the sake of exploring all our options that your dream guy is real. We need to write down what he looks like and everything else you remember about him so we can find him.”
“Real?” The concept of her dream guy existing hadn’t even occurred to Katherine.
Taylor’s voice rose as her excitement grew. “Yeah! I mean, what if? What if he came to you in your dream and you’re going to find him in class or something? What if he goes to our school? You never know. Why else would you dream about this guy and have all these crazy feelings if he wasn’t real?”
Taylor’s question sparked curiosity and hope in Katherine. She felt her shoulders relax as she pondered the possibilities. “Maybe he is real. Can you imagine?” Katherine smiled for the first time that morning. “I mean, why else would I have had that dream? There has to be a reason, right? There has to be a point to all of this madness.”
“That’s what I’m saying!” Taylor said excitedly.
“I should probably do something with myself before we leave for class. I mean, what if my dream guy is there?” She hopped up and headed toward the bathroom, smiling.
“You can start by brushing that hair of yours!” Taylor called out to her.
“What would I ever do without you?” Katherine piped back.
Taylor’s voice drifted in from the other room. “Clearly, you’d walk around with nappy hair all day.”
Katherine brushed her long brown hair as Taylor had instructed her to. “Wouldn’t want to disappoint,” she mumbled at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She coated her eyelashes with dark mascara to accent her hazel eyes, and tried to cover up the light dusting of freckles across her nose with some powder foundation.
He could totally be real, she repeated in her head until she found herself saying it out loud by accident.
“That’s what I keep telling you,” Taylor said as she appeared in the bathroom doorway. “He has to be. Oh, Kat, this is so exciting! We have a mission.” Her face lit up with excitement before a cloud settled over it. “It’s too bad you didn’t get his name or something. Because I could search online for him if you had a name.”
“Sorry, Tay, he was too busy getting killed to tell me his name. But if I see him again, I’ll ask.” Katherine smiled at her roommate, happy that she was slowly starting to feel like herself again.
The two girls headed out of the old brick dormitory and walked through the treelined campus toward their class. With fall fast approaching, the leaves were turning magnificent shades of gold and crimson, and some leaves had already fallen, pushed along the sidewalk by a light breeze. Katherine looked around at the stone and brick buildings that surrounded her and smiled. She thought about her home and how no buildings looked the way these did. Southern California was great and she loved it, but had wanted to experience something different for college.
She could have chosen a local college, but knew it would just be more of the same—gorgeous people consumed by celebrity, fame, reality TV, and their future careers. As she sifted through her college choices, she had realized that what she really wanted was a big change.
And what could be more different from the constant sunny days of Los Angeles than the four distinct seasons of the East Coast? When she’d first arrived here, summer was winding down, the days hot and sometimes muggy. Now that fall was near, more often not the days started with a cool bright blue sky that amazed her.
Katherine remembered how she’d felt when the information packet arrived from a school in New Jersey she had only vaguely considered at first. But something about this particular college called to her. She wasn’t sure if it was the old ivy-covered buildings or the gorgeous campus liberally dotted with huge, ancient trees, but she knew immediately that she wanted to be there. So when her acceptance letter arrived in the mail, she had been thrilled.
Taylor’s voice interrupted her memories. “Is that him? What about that guy?” Taylor scanned the students around them, pointing out boys who fit the description of her dream guy. “Oh, what about him? If he’s not your dream guy, I’ll take him to be mine. He’s nothing but hotness on a stick.”
Katherine chuckled. “You’re going to make me crazy. How about if I see him, I’ll let you know? And really, hotness on a stick? Where do you get this stuff?”
“We could put an ad up on the school’s website. Or in the newspaper. We can totally do this.” Taylor’s eyes twinkled with excitement.
“How about we just go to class first? For all we know, he could be dead. He did die in my dream, after all.” The memory of the end of the dream nagged at her from the back of her mind. The possibility of him being dead wasn’t something she wanted to accept, so she forced those thoughts aside.
They walked into the large classroom and Taylor motioned toward the last row. “Can we sit in the back? I hate having people sit behind me. It’s like I can feel them staring down the back of my neck.” Taylor shivered dramatically.
“Wherever’s fine. I don’t care.” Katherine shrugged and followed Taylor’s lead.
When they sat down, she noticed Taylor scanning the room and watched with amusement as Taylor quickly jotted things down in her notepad. The sight made her laugh out loud.
The guy seated in front of her turned around in his chair when he heard her laugh. Katherine struggled to breathe as she fixated on the mesmerizing green eyes that focused on hers. His face was handsome, his features so perfectly balanced, that she couldn’t help but feel a little inadequate in comparison. Katherine felt herself flush at the unexpected attention, but couldn’t bring herself to look away. She knew one of them had to turn away, but he was the one who ultimately broke the connection, not her. When he finally turned back around to face the front of the classroom, Taylor kicked Katherine under the table.
“What…was…that?” Taylor whispered toward her.
“I don’t know, but he’s really cute, isn’t he? Did you see his eyes? Good Lord.” Katherine’s cheeks burned.
“Blue?” Taylor whispered back hopefully.
“No, green. But still…hello! Is it hot in here?” Katherine laughed softly and fanned her face.
“It’s just you. And apparently him,” Taylor teased back.
“Ladies, is there a problem?” The professor’s voice rose with irritation as he stopped his lecture and looked pointedly in their direction in the back of the classroom.
“No, Professor. Sorry!” they responded in unison.
Katherine punched Taylor under the table. The green-eyed boy looked back for one more glance followed by a quick smile, then settled into his seat. Katherine’s breath hitched.
When class ended, Katherine gathered up her things and scanned the room. “Well, that’s weird. I mean, where’d he go?”
“Clearly, you scared him so he had to run away,” Taylor joked.
She shrugged her shoulders and pulled Taylor toward the door. “Come on, let’s go.”
They walked outside and into the blinding sunlight. Katherine squinted and quickly reached for her sunglasses. She looked around at the huge green trees and walked toward an unoccupied stone bench.
“Let’s sit for a minute,” Katherine suggested.
“Okay. I want to ask you some more questions anyway,” Taylor said.
Katherine laughed. “What more can you possibly want to know?”
Taylor pulled
out her notepad after they sat on the bench. “Why were you crying?”
“I can’t explain it. It’s the very thought of him. That moment when I heard the gunshot…” A gentle breeze tossed strands of Katherine’s hair in front of her face. She tucked the pieces behind her ear before pressing her hand against her heart. “It physically brought me pain. It’s like I went to bed with a whole heart, but I woke up with it in pieces.”
“Kat, that’s really intense. We’re way too young and too hot to be this crazy over some guy we’ve never met before,” Taylor informed her with a serious look on her face.
“We?”
“Yeah, we. I mean, I’m totally involved in this now too, so…we.” Taylor folded her arms across her chest.
Katherine stood up from the bench and smiled. “You’re crazy. I’ve got to go to my next class. Chemistry. Exciting.”
“I’ll see you at home. Did I tell you that Kylie is stopping by to see our place and say hi and stuff?” Taylor reminded her.
“Who is she again?” Katherine asked.
“One of my best friends from high school. Don’t worry, you’ll love her. I think,” Taylor said with a laugh.
“What?” Katherine’s eyes widened with worry.
“I’ll make sure she’s on her best behavior,” Taylor reassured her confidently.
“Oh my gosh, seriously? Why? What’s her deal?”
“She just…I don’t know. She can be a real bitch sometimes. She’s competitive.”
“And she’s your best friend? How did that happen?” Katherine asked.
“Eh, it’s a long story.” Taylor hesitated before quickly saying, “I hated her at first, but then something happened that brought us together. And here we are.”
Confused, Katherine shook her head and threw up her hands in surrender. “Okay. Whatever. See you at home.”
“You’re not mad, are you?”
“No, you’re just weird.” Katherine smiled and turned to head toward her class.
“You’re the weird one. See ya later, weirdo!” Taylor shouted as she headed in the opposite direction.
