Except it didn’t. Morrison took a breath as if he were waking up, but it caught and held like the blankets were too heavy in the morning. Perplexity danced across his expression and I got the idea that Morrison never had mornings when the blankets weighed too much. “I can’t,” he said in some astonishment. “I never have trouble waking up.”
“You probably never sleep hard enough to,” I muttered. “Come on, Morrison. Wakey wakey.”
“I’m trying,” he said irritably. “I feel like something’s keeping my eyes closed.”
“Begochidi. Damnit!” The first word was under my breath, the second a shout at the skies. “He’s not yours, you redheaded bitch! You want a taste of something that’ll get you through the day, try me!” Power flared with my outburst, silver burning away the black threads that tied me to the dreamworld. Heat sizzled with a nasty dark smell, and Morrison himself flinched. I couldn’t fight from here, inside his garden. It would destroy his mind or his soul or something equally important. I swore again, taking two long strides over to my boss. “This always works in fairy tales.”
I slid my fingers into Morrison’s hair and brought his mouth down to mine for a kiss.
CHAPTER 33
It turned out an inch in shoe height wasn’t enough for either of us to have to give ground in order to share a kiss. It turned out all the times I’d thought he was close enough to kiss hadn’t been quite right, either. There was a hell of a difference between what I thought of as close enough to kiss and actually closing that last half inch or so. Frustration and anger and needing to get the job done and innumerable other emotions spilled away in the compass of Morrison’s arms, leaving me light-headed and warm and absurdly, blazingly happy. Silver-blue peaked and swooped all around me, a dance of joy that lit the insides of my eyelids.
The best part was Morrison kissed me back. There wasn’t even a moment of complete startlement where he drew away before giving in to it. For a few brief, glorious seconds it was just the two of us, surprise flaring through Morrison’s rich colors until our blues tangled together for an instant. Desire and pleasure zinged through me so brightly I blushed. I wondered if astral sex was better than real sex, or just different, and if a girl could manage both at once. Then reality, such as it was, intruded, and I pushed Morrison away. He blinked down at me twice, and the second time, the Rocky Mountain wilderness disappeared from all around me and left me falling through a place between dreams.
There was a sensation of gray cloudiness in the midst of formless nothing, instantaneous and immediate. For a moment I thought I might get away with sneaking through the dreamworld and taking Begochidi unawares, if only I could find my bearings.
My bearings found me first. I tumbled to an upright stop, still breathless and dizzy, though I could no longer tell if that was from falling or kissing. Either way, I had about enough time to look around before a maw of butterflies cropped up out of the dark and swallowed me.
Typically, this was the point at which I would either panic, shriek and try to run, or dig my heels in and hang on to where I was with everything I had. Getting sucked into a vortex of butterflies—or anything else; getting sucked up by vortexes in general just couldn’t be good—was not the best game plan a girl could come up with. Ideally, I’d take a lance and a white charger and gallop my way through the dream realms to throw down a gauntlet at a god’s feet and challenge him to single combat.
But I didn’t have a gauntlet, much less a lance or a white charger, and I hadn’t ridden a horse since I was fifteen, anyway. I had to trust to my silver sword and my array of shields, and I had to find Begochidi one way or another. Letting him scoop me up and bring me to the battlefields seemed as practical an arrival as any.
Butterflies melted all around me, dark dangerous colors bleeding into ordinary walls in a room with no floor. I fell at an alarming rate, jerking upward into wakefulness with a lurch of my heart that made me feel sick. Gary dropped my drum and caught my arm, concern in his eyes. “Jo? Jeez, there you are. You been sleepin’ for a week, Joanie.”
I stared around me at the familiar walls of my apartment, then sank back into my couch with a groan. My left wrist ached like hell, pounding and burning as if a rope had been twisted around it and pulled. I wrapped my fingers around it, encountering smooth heat that I rubbed without looking. The ache went up my arm to throb in my heart. Taking a deep breath lessened the pain enough for me to focus on what Gary’d said.
“A week?” My voice sounded dry, as if I hadn’t drunk anything for…well. Days. “What’s happening? What’s going on? I’ve been having…” I stopped rubbing my wrist and went for my eyes instead, turning over to bury my face in the couch back. The throb came back, less intent as I mumbled, “Awful dreams.” Except the one about kissing Morrison. I felt a tiny grin develop. “Mostly awful.” I rolled back over to stare at Gary, whose bushy eyebrows were drawn down. “I dreamed Morrison had a girlfriend. A cute little redhead. I hated her.”
Gary’s eyebrows went down further, until his eyes disappeared beneath the gray beetles of them. “Mike?” His voice rose, worry still evident in it. My own eyebrows went down far enough to give me a headache. I didn’t know any Mikes. The closest I’d come was what’s his face in my dream. Hey, I’d had a boyfriend in my dream, too. I guess it was fair for Morrison to have a girlfriend, if I got to have a boyfriend. I squinted my eyes shut, trying to remember my guy’s name. Matt. Something like that. Good-looking, sandy-haired. Maybe I needed to conk out for a week more often. His image was already fading, nebulous as a dream.
“She’s awake,” Gary said, presumably to somebody else, since I knew I was awake. “She’s been dreamin’ you got a bit on the side. Got anything you want to confess?”
I heard an inhalation behind the couch, then a rough laugh that had more to do with relief than amusement. “Thank God. All this living a lie was getting too much.”
Gary chuckled while I frowned. I knew the second voice. It was incongruous in my living room, but I knew it, and I knew the scent of the man who sat down on the couch and pulled me into a bear hug. For a few long moments I just knotted my fists in the back of Morrison’s shirt and held on, inhaling Old Spice cologne and wondering why I was trembling. My wrist still ached, all the more now that I was using my hands. “It’s all right now,” he murmured above my head. “Tell you what, I promise to dump the girlfriend now that you’re awake again. You had me worried, Joanie. You had us all worried.”
“I’m okay,” I croaked. “Thirsty. What’re you doing here, boss?” Morrison didn’t call me Joanie. Neither did Gary, for that matter. They had to have been worried.
“’Boss.’” Morrison sat back with a chuckle, looking down at me. “You haven’t called me that in a while.”
“Nah, I guess it’s been ’Cap’ lately.”
Morrison’s eyebrows drew down and he frowned toward Gary. “She’s still not quite awake, Mike. Give her a few minutes.” Gary got to his feet, jerking his chin toward the kitchen. “I’ll get her some water.”
“Thanks.” Morrison nodded at the big old cabbie, who went around the couch while I tried working my brain around the idea of anybody, much less Gary, calling Morrison “Mike.” They called each other by their formal titles, Mr. Muldoon and Captain Morrison, when they had cause to call each other anything at all. It was one of those weird male rivalry things I neither understood nor wanted to understand.
“Mike?” I said, which was intended to convey all that unspoken commentary. Instead, Morrison looked down at me curiously.