Before I Wake (6 page)

A little voice in my head spoke up. Something in his dreams might really be trying to kill him. Why did I have to know that was possible? It’s rough trying to be clinical and analytical when you knew there were things out there that defied science—when you were one of them. But for now I had to approach this in a professional manner.

Noah believed what he was telling me, and what I believed didn’t matter. For the moment, I wasn’t going to entertain that there might be something in the night trying to harm him and treat this situation like a therapist should. Because that’s what he expected me to do. I only thought otherwise because of my own recent experiences, and I should have known better than to bring anything personal into a session.

“What’s happened that has you believing that your dreams are trying to harm you?”

“What’s happened?” Disbelief and anger lit his features. He didn’t like how I was handling this. Neither did I. “My dream tried to kill me.”

I pressed on. There had to be a rational explanation. Please God, let there be a rational explanation. “Have you recently suffered an upheaval? Or a significant change in your life? It could be that your subconscious is reacting to this change in a way that leads your mind to believe you are in some kind of physical danger.”

He eyed me for a moment. “Don’t go all clinical on me, Doc. I came here because you’re the only person I could think to turn to, not because I can’t deal with reality.”

His words humbled me. “I’m sorry, Noah. I’ve never encountered this kind of…problem before.”

A slight smile curved lips the color of a juicy peach. “And you have a patient waiting.” I’d fantasized a couple of times about kissing those lips, laughed more than a hundred times at the words that came from between them. Now the sight of them just made me feel sad—and more guilty than I was willing to admit.

I didn’t question the stability of his mind. I didn’t wonder if he needed more help than I could give. But even if something in his dreams was trying to kill him, I wasn’t the person to help him.

“He wants you to be,” that little voice whispered.

“I do have a patient waiting, yes, but—” He cut me off by standing.

“It’s okay, Doc. I’ll see Bonnie about an appointment.” Stuffing his hands into the pockets of his battered leather coat, he started for the door.

After the mess I’d made of this, he was still going to come back?

“Noah.” I couldn’t stand the idea of him walking out that door thinking I didn’t believe in him.

Still wearing that blank, but somehow disappointed, expression, he turned.

And said nothing.

I took a breath and pushed back my chair. “I’ll be going to dinner at six. Want to come?” It was my duty to help him, and I wanted to help him.

Again with the slip of a smile—and just the tiniest frown. “Are you asking me out on a date?”

I smiled uncertainly—an expression that made me very attractive, I’m sure. I was crossing all kinds of lines I had no business crossing. “You’re paying.”

He nodded. “Of course. McDonald’s okay?”

I must have looked horrified because his “slip” turned into a full-fledged smile. He had such great teeth. He must have had braces as a kid. Smiling made him downright beautiful. I basked in it, even after I realized he was teasing.

“Don’t worry, Doc. Even I have more class than that. I’ll pick you up at six.”

He left, closing the door behind him—a fact I was thankful for as I sank into my chair like a boneless heap. What had I done? I’d just asked a patient out to dinner. Granted it sounded like he was screwed six ways from Sunday, but I had asked a guy out. I hadn’t done that since…well, I never had.

I sat there for a second while the shock of what I’d done wore off. Slowly, a big-ass grin spread across my face. I was going to dinner with Noah Clarke.

Wait till I told Bonnie.

At 5:50 I said good-bye to a patient and pulled a brush and a small bag of makeup out of the top drawer of my desk. I released my hair from its clip and let it fall. I ran the brush through quickly, then turned my attention to freshening my makeup.

I love makeup. I like to think of my face as a canvas that I can paint however I want. I’ve been blessed with fairly good skin—at least it looks good when I have a tinted moisturizer on it. My eyes are my best feature, and I play them up with colors that bring out the blue and green. I also have big lips, so I usually play them down unless I really want to make a statement. As a kid I was teased mercilessly for them; now, every lip gloss seems to promise “plumper” lips, and doctors offer to inject collagen into skinny mouths. You know I’ve actually been asked if my lips were real?

I brushed on a little extra shadow and used a fine brush—that great bent one that Benefit makes—to darken my eyeliner. A little powder took the shine from my T-zone and Clinique Black Honey gloss—a gift from the makeup gods—finished the transformation.

Not that it was much of a transformation, but I felt a little more prepared to be out in public with Noah.

I slung my lab coat over the back of my chair, grabbed my purse, and locked the door on my way out.

When I entered the waiting area, Noah was already there, being chatted up by Bonnie, who was watching him like a fat tomcat eyeing a lame pigeon.

Noah turned as I approached. I’d like to say that his jaw dropped at the sight of me, but it didn’t. He just stopped and watched with an expression I couldn’t read but warmed me right down to my toes.

He had shaved, and his hair was artfully mussed rather than accidentally so. He wore clean jeans—no rips—with a lightweight gray sweater underneath a leather coat in much better shape than his usual.

He cleaned up good. More importantly, he’d cleaned up for me.

He was staring at my head as I approached. “Something wrong?” I asked, feeling the top of my skull for foreign and potentially humiliating objects.

Noah’s intense gaze shifted a little, traveling down to someplace around my shoulder. “I’ve never seen your hair down before.”

“Oh.” What else could I say?

He looked slightly bemused. “I was trying to think of the colors I’d use to paint it. Your hair, I mean.”

I smiled. I wondered if he saw all of life as a potential subject for his art. “Did you think of any?”

He frowned in contemplation. “A couple. I’m not sure they’re right, though.”

“Well, maybe you’ll figure it out over dinner.” I turned to Bonnie. “I’ll be back before the eight o’clock.” I was doing some work for Dr. Canning tonight, and that meant I’d be hanging out in the sleep lab later.

She waggled her fingers in a wave. “You two have fun.”

Noah said good-bye to her, and Bonnie waited till his back was turned to give me an openmouthed wink. I rolled my eyes.

It was a nice night, so we walked. I figured this would give me a chance to find out more about Noah, but I ended up doing most of the talking. It wasn’t that Noah was curt, he just didn’t waste words on himself. Maybe if I’d asked him about painting, he would have yakked my ear off, but I stupidly asked him about his family—about him. Obviously, he wasn’t much of an egotist because he kept his responses as short and uninteresting as possible.

It made me wonder what he was hiding. Made me want to play doctor and not in a sexual way, because I was fairly certain he hid something that needed facing.

Luckily, we only had to walk a few blocks. The restaurant was a great little family-owned Indian place just off Sixth. I felt a little tingly as I remembered his assumption that I liked food with a lot of flavor. Sensuous he had called me.

We ordered drinks, appetizers, and main courses. I waited until the waiter had brought our drinks and appetizers before daring to open my mouth.

“Okay, so explain to me why you think your dreams are trying to harm you.”

Noah took a bite of spicy potato and chickpeas. I can never remember the names of this stuff, only that it tastes pretty freaking good. He chewed and swallowed. “Not so much my dreams, but what’s in them.”

I loaded my fork as well. “And what do you think that is exactly?”

I looked up to see him staring at me—hard. “Are you mocking me?”

I stopped midchew and swallowed. If he only knew. “No.” No, I was hoping he was imagining it all. Praying, actually.

He sighed. “Look, can you stop talking like you think I’m making this up?”

Yes, I could. I just didn’t want to. “I don’t think you’re making it up.”

“But you don’t believe it really happened.”

If I told him I did, would he think I was nuts?

“I don’t even know what ‘it’ pertains to.” I sighed. “Noah, my job is the human psyche—uncovering what inside you makes you feel this way and helping you make sense of it.” I wasn’t trying to aggravate the guy, but as someone trained in a scientific field, I wasn’t supposed to believe that something in Noah’s subconscious manifested itself and tried to kill him.

That scientific part of me didn’t want to believe in dreams trying to kill people. But the nonhuman part of me believed and was afraid.

I tried again. “Why don’t you tell me about it, so I can better understand what happened to you?”

He set down his fork. In the glow from the table lamp, the fatigue on his face was deepened. It didn’t matter what I believed; it was obvious that something was keeping Noah from sleeping.

Regardless, this was my job. And Noah was more than a patient. I liked him, and I wanted good things for him. In a weird way I guess I looked at him as something of a friend.

Who was I trying to kid? This guy was on my top-five list of crushes, right after Johnny Depp and right before Jensen Ackles.

“It started a few weeks ago.” He was looking at his plate, not me. “I tried to change a dream and couldn’t.”

It was unusual for him, but nothing surprising. Sometimes the subconscious was a little stronger. Or sometimes the dream dug its heels in. “That’s happened before, hasn’t it?”

He nodded and raised his gaze to mine. Leaning his forearms on the table, he closed much of the distance between us, closing in to what felt like our own little corner of the world. “That’s why I shrugged it off. But it started getting worse.”

“Worse, how?”

“There’s this guy.” His brow wrinkled, and I wanted to reach out and smooth it with my fingers. “I don’t know who he is, but he started showing up in my dreams. At first he simply talked. I ignored him, then he started getting physical.”

This was sounding a little too familiar. “Sexual things?”

He looked offended. “No. Jesus, Doc.”

I shrugged, trying to hide that I was both relieved and bitter. He had gotten off easier than I had in my dream. “I need specifics.”

“He became aggressive—pushing, trying to get me to fight him. Last night he tried to stab me, but I woke up.”

It made me think of the “stabbing” the man in my dreams had given me. “Do you remember what he looked like?”

His frown deepened as he tried to conjure a mental picture. The fingers of his right hand touched the top of my left, stroking softly.

It gave me goose bumps. I don’t think Noah even noticed. “He had weird eyes. I didn’t recognize him.”

Weird eyes. Okay, that might mean anything. It didn’t necessarily mean pale blue with spidery rims. “Dreams of a stranger often can mean fear of the unknown. As for the aggression…Do you feel pressure from some aspect of your life?”

He shook his head. “I have a show coming up in a few days, but nothing out of the ordinary.”

I thought about it. The upcoming pressure of a show could certainly manifest in Noah’s dreams, but it hardly seemed a likely catalyst for dream-violence of this caliber.

“Doc.” Noah was pale as he regarded me across the table. “I tried changing the dream, and he took it away. It wasn’t my dream anymore. It was his.”

The words—and the look on Noah’s face—sent a shiver down my spine. Noah had been lucid in his dream—lucid and powerless. He must have been terrified. Dreamkin will shift a dream, but they won’t take it away. They weren’t allowed.

The thought that one had done this to Noah made me angry. Very angry.

“You said the man spoke to you.” The therapist side of me was rapidly losing out to the Nightmare side. “What did he say?”

“He said he was coming, and neither me nor the nightmare would be able to stop him.” His lips twitched, as though he tried to smile but couldn’t quite manage it. “That’s weird, right?”

Were it possible for a person’s blood to turn to ice, I’d be able to sink the Titanic at that moment. It couldn’t be. It was impossible.

“Yeah,” I agreed hoarsely. “Weird. Any idea what he means?”

Noah shook his head, but when he looked at me, there was a strange glimmer in his dark eyes. “Not a clue. I thought you might be able to decipher it.”

“Me? Why?”

“Because you know more about dreams than anyone I know.”

Yep, I suppose I did. More than he could ever imagine. I smiled at the compliment regardless, then slipped into therapist mode.

“How did this dream make you feel?”

He stared at me for a second, like he knew I was thinking more than I was saying. “Powerless.” He said it so softly that I barely heard.

“Did that frighten you?”

His jaw tightened, the muscle there ticking. How did guys do that? “Yes.”

He didn’t like admitting to being frightened—who did? But it gave me something to think about. “Being made a victim is unpleasant for anyone.” I watched his reaction; a subtle darkening of his eyes. “Perhaps you are afraid that you will be made a victim—or you have been in the past.”

I’ve never seen Noah angry before, but I was willing to bet it looked a little something like he did now—only much worse. His nostrils flared with a sharp breath, his gaze brightened, and his cheeks flushed. “Maybe.”

He wasn’t going to give me any more, damn it. “Noah”—I tried to keep my voice gentle—“do you really believe something in your dreams was physically trying to harm you?”

He leaned closer, the fabric of his shirt pulling taut across his biceps and shoulders. A couple of inches on my part and we’d kiss.

“Do you believe it’s possible?”

I held his gaze and said the one thing I swore I wouldn’t. “Yes.”