He could never be a nightmare.
I knelt up gingerly, afraid that the wrong movement would make the dream dissolve. I reached out and cautiously pushed his hair back. It felt so real, even though he didn’t move, didn’t respond, to my touch. I ran my fingers through his hair because when I was awake, I was scared I would do it too much.
But this wasn’t real, so there was nothing to be scared of. I ran my finger, my hand, along his jaw, enjoying the scrape against my skin. Touching him felt natural but possessive, and I wasn’t sure how far he would let me go.
Not far, apparently. Noah looked down at me with translucent eyes. His stare was desolate and hopeless.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered, but he didn’t answer. His expression frightened me. Looking at his face and into his eyes, all I wanted was to make him feel something else.
With a boldness my waking self didn’t have, I took his face in my hands, tilted him toward me, and kissed him. Not deeply. Light. Fresh. Soft.
He didn’t move toward me, not at first. He closed his eyes, shut them tight like I had hurt him. I blushed, stung, and backed away.
But then. He pulled my hair back from my face, brushed it behind my shoulders. With the flat of his palm, he pushed me down against the mattress very softly. He moved over me, pressed soft kisses against my skin, teased me with his mouth. I heard him whisper in my ear but I couldn’t hear his words—my own breath was too loud. He slid his hands into mine then, and kissed my lips lightly, one last time. Then he withdrew, leaving something behind in my open palm.
It was heavy but soft and fit perfectly in my hand. I couldn’t see what it was in the dark, so I cradled it to my chest. Followed him out onto the balcony, out of his room.
But when I stepped outside my feet touched nothing. I was weightless. I turned back to look at Noah’s house, but dark vines crawled over it. Trees burst from the ground and cracked through his roof.
I didn’t want to see this. I closed my eyes. Wake up, I told myself. Wake up.
But I opened them just in time to watch the bay soak into the ground. Buildings were crushed and crumpled in seconds beneath the weight of the forest. The jungle had been let in, and now there was nothing I could do.
I closed my eyes and twisted inside myself. I willed the nightmare to end.
But then I heard voices. Footsteps. They were approaching, but my eyelids were filled with lead; they wouldn’t open. Not until I felt the brush of a feather on my cheek. My lungs filled with breath and my eyes opened, drenching my world in color. When I woke, I was not myself.
A man knelt before me; he looked familiar but I did not know his name. He withdrew the feather from my cheek and placed it in one of my hands. My thumb caressed the edges. It was so soft.
“Show me what is in the other,” he said kindly.
I obeyed him. Uncurled my fingers to reveal what was inside.
It was Noah’s heart.
I woke up in the kitchen, facing the dark window above the sink. Noah was next to me. I had sleepwalked again but I was flooded with relief as I glanced at his chest—it was very much whole, and he was very much alive.
The nightmare wasn’t real. Noah was all right.
But when I looked up at his eyes, they were desolate. Hopeless. It was the expression he wore in my dream, before he gave me his heart.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him, panicked.
“Nothing,” he said, and his hand found mine. “Come back to bed.”
Noah woke me a few hours later and urged me into my own bed before the rest of the house woke up. I left because I had to but I was unsettled and didn’t want to be alone.
I felt sick. My muscles were tight and sore and my vertebrae crackled when I stretched my neck. My skin felt hot and the brush of my clothes against my skin seared my flesh. I felt wrong, like someone had poured me into a different body overnight.
What was happening to me?
I walked into my bathroom and turned on the light. I was shocked by what I saw.
Looking at myself in the mirror was like looking at a picture of myself in the future, like I had aged a year in an hour—I was still me, but not quite the same. The curves of my cheeks seemed hollow, and my eyes looked hollow too.
Was I the only one who could see it?
Did Noah see it?
“All you can do is watch,” I had said to him, in his bed but lying alone.
“I have been, Mara.”
If that was true then he had to see me changing, and whatever he saw I had to know. Noah seemed so haunted when I woke up in the kitchen: I’d sleepwalked before, but he never looked at me that way before. . . .
I was profoundly uneasy. I climbed back into bed, but it was a long time before I finally fell asleep.
“Morning, sleepyhead,” my mother called, her face peeking out from behind my door. “It’s almost noon.”
My eyes felt like they were pasted shut. I pushed myself up on my elbows and groaned.
“You feeling okay?”
I nodded. “Just tired.”