Page 91 of Don't Let Me Go
(The Present)
Chapter 36
Jackson
The morning sun, bright and relentless, streams through my window. I can already tell it’s gonna be another sweltering day. Even so, Riley shivers in my arms and pulls the bedcovers around us tighter. Neither of us can shake the chill from our bones.
“What the hell is happening to us?” he asks, his teeth chattering.
“I don’t know.”
When I woke up this morning, cold and confused on my bedroom floor, I found Riley lying next to me, unconscious. His skin was like ice, so I carried him to my bed and wrapped myself around him until the color returned to his cheeks and he opened his eyes.
It took him a full minute to understand where he was. Once he did, he immediately started telling me about his dream. A dream where he and I were Vikings, where a man named Erik the Red summoned a witch to predict the future, and where the two of us froze to death in a blizzard.
The more Riley told me, the more I felt like I was losing my mind. Not because I didn’t believe him but because I already knew everything he was going to say. Because I’d had the same dream. Theexactsame dream. Down to the smallest detail.
Two identical dreams.
“Maybe we both saw the same movie and it got stuck in our brains?” I suggest.
Riley scoffs. “I’ve never seen a movie about gay Vikings. Have you?”
I shake my head.
“You don’t have some medical condition, do you?” I ask. “I mean, nothing like this has happened to you before, right?”
“I was literally about to ask you the same thing.”
“So the fainting and the dreams? They’re new?”
“Yeah,” Riley says. “They didn’t start until...”
“Until when?”
Riley won’t meet my eyes. “Until I met you.”
A shiver steals down my spine, but I force myself to ignore it.
“Maybe the dreams are—shit, what’s the word? Coach used it all the time. When you’re sick but it’s all in your head?”
“Psychosomatic?” Riley suggests.
“Yeah, psychosomatic. We’ve both been under a lot of stress. Maybe the fainting and the nightmares are just our bodies’ way of coping.”
“That doesn’t explain how we could have the same dream.”
No, it doesn’t. “So what do you think is happening?” I ask.
Riley opens his mouth, then seems to think better of it. I watch him wrestle with his thoughts before surrendering with a defeated sigh. “Maybe... maybe they’renotdreams.”
“What do you mean?”
“Okay, don’t laugh. But what happened last night, it didn’t feel like a dream. It felt more like—a memory. Like I was remembering something that happened.”
“How could it be something that happened?”
Riley shakes his head. “I don’t know. But that dream I had about us in Pompeii felt the same way. It was like I was remembering something. Orrelivingsomething.”
