So. Fucking. Sweet.
Me: See, when you say stuff like that, I almost feel guilty about stealing undershirt number six now.
Bowen: Don’t. Between the two of us, we’re a whole damn crime ring.
I sucked in a sharp breath when a picture came through. He had wide eyes and my black lace thong hooked on his finger. Rolling over in bed, I buried my face in my pillow, laughing.
Bowen: Though, for the record, I didn’t steal this as much as you left it behind. Due to my failing business after losing my best client, I will be unable to afford postage to mail it back to you. Though you are welcome to come to Atlanta and retrieve it at your earliest convenience.
I giggled for a while, typing and deleting flirty messages that would no doubt spiral into more conversations and likely a trip to Atlanta if I wasn’t careful. If I’d had my way about it, we would have spent the rest of the night on the phone, talking and laughing like the last four months had never happened. Or better yet, like the last year had never happened. However, pretending with Bowen Michaels was what had gotten me into this predicament to start with.
Before I had the chance to overthink my next move, the phone vibrated in my hand.
Bowen: Hey, you should probably put a collar on Sugar. He’s a runner.
The strangest feeling struck me. It was somewhere between being enveloped in a warm blanket and slamming into a brick wall face-first. Both startling and bizarre, comfortable and uneasy, it settled on my chest like a boulder. Yet I could breathe around it.
I stared at his text, reading the short two sentences over and over again. My dream of us chasing Sugar rose from the fog in my brain until it was all I could focus on.
“Why’d you take his collar off? You know he’s a runner.”
It was a common phrase. Sugar was in fact a runner and tried to take off every chance he got. That was nothing new. I took his collar off when we were in the apartment because, short of diving out the window or secretly hiding opposable thumbs, there wasn’t any way for him to get out.
Still, no matter how unextraordinary the statement had been, the hairs standing on the back of my neck said otherwise.
Holy shit. What if that dream hadn’t been a dream at all? What if it had been a—
No. Wait.
Of all the shit that could have possibly come back to me, my brain had picked an innocuous day when Bowen and I had chased Sugar down the road? Not, say, an actual plane crash, or a kidnapping, or the most horrible depression a person could face if I had been willing to end my own life, but a day of chasing the dog, capped off with a trip to Home Depot for a bed swing and hydrangeas?
I rolled my eyes at myself. This was stupid. It wasn’t a memory. I loved that swinging bed on his back porch. We’d spent many a night swaying back and forth, making love under the stars. Hell, our very first time—in this timeline—had been on that porch. The hydrangeas in his backyard were beautiful. Obviously, I’d noticed them. Before I’d written off flowers for plants, hydrangeas had been my favorite. There was not one single detail of that dream I hadn’t seen, witnessed, or experienced.
The brain was powerful, but in my case, it was far better at manifestations than memories.
With a sigh, I typed out another message.
Me: Yeah, I know. I’m in an apartment though, so even if he gets out, he’s stuck in the hallway. Unless he miraculously learns to open the door to the stairs.
Bowen: Well, let’s hope he’s not hiding any opposable thumbs in that fur then.
I smiled. See? Dream, memory, manifestation. None of them had to be involved for Bowen and me to share the same thoughts. We were two of a kind. He could read my mind from over two hundred miles away.
Me: Get out of my head, Michaels. I already checked for thumbs.
Bowen: You come get these panties and I’ll be happy to get in somewhere else.
I shook my head, wishing it were all that easy.
Me: I should let you go. I’m sure you have a crazy day of playing catch-up at work tomorrow.
Bowen: Ah, yes. The IBALS aftermath. I have a full day and Tyson roped me into going to pick out suits for his wedding on my lunch break.
That same damn boulder I’d just shoved off my chest landed on top of me again.
I’d dreamed about Bowen a lot over the last four months. Sometimes they were just flashes in the middle of nonsense. How he meticulously and evenly buttered his toast, corner to corner and edge to edge, leaving no surface untouched. How he rinsed out cans and jars before throwing them away. Who cleaned their trash? How he always pressed the lock on his key fob until the truck beeped twice so that it was extra locked up. How he always mated his shoes—and yours too if you didn’t do it yourself—at the door. Then there was that little hum in his throat after he laughed out loud. Or the way he looked me in the eyes when he said he loved me.
