Page 17 of Tangled at the Root
I don’t look back, but I can feel the monster closing in—I can tell it’s faster than me.
“Run!” Genevieve whisper-shouts with that same hideous glee, her voice reverberating in my skull.
The hallway tilts upward. My legs and lungs strain harder as I scramble to adjust to the new angle. The ground morphs from marble to forest floor, still tilting until I’m literally climbing, fisting at handfuls of grass and dirt and rock to yank myself up faster, my knees and my feet digging into the mushy earth. I try to use the eshé to make myself fly, disappear—something, then to try and wake myself up when none of them work. It doesn’t respond.
I hear that same awful noise closing in behind me, and my skin bursts with gooseflesh. My cheeks are wet with tears. The exertion is making my throat hurt.
Thin, cold, unnaturally long hands wrap tight around both my ankles.
My scream cuts off in my throat as I’m yanked down until I’m underneath the creature. It grabs my throat and lifts me off the ground, leaving me dangling uselessly in the air. I scrabble at its grasp on my neck, hacking and coughing, legs kicking wildly as I struggle to breathe.
Then, somehow, between one second and the next, the beast is gone, and I’m lying face-first on the forest floor, completely naked with an equally naked body pressed on top of mine.
I’ve never touched her like this—never been hugged by her like this, but I recognise her scent and the feel of her skin immediately. My adrenaline spikes, my body growing alternatively hot and cold as Genevieve murmurs sweet nothings, her hands running possessively over my bare skin.
She cups and squeezes my breasts, strokes hungrily over the curve of my belly then greedily palms my hips, like she’s obsessed with the juxtaposition of rough beads against smooth skin. Both hands dip between my thighs, cupping my pussy.
“Fuck, oh God,” I whimper, arching helplessly, pressing into her.
When teeth sink into the side of my throat, they aren’t hers, but the monster’s, sharp and jagged, tearing mercilessly into my flesh while my best friend moans like she’s in ecstasy.
I gasp awake, covered in sweat, tangled in unfamiliar sheets. I don’t think after I reorient myself, rolling onto my stomach and clenching my eyes shut as I slip my hand down between my legs, where I’m soaked, my pussy wet and swollen.
I bite my lower lip hard, refusing to make a sound as I stroke myself to a quick, toe-curling orgasm, my entire body shaking with it. I’m still fired up, after, so I keep going, whining into the pillows and grinding into my hand until I come again, tears in my eyes.
I melt onto the bed, breathing heavily. There used to be times when dreams like this—even simple, innocent dreams about holding her hand in public, or going on swoony dates—would fill me with shame, but it’s been a long time since I’ve felt ashamed of anything when it comes to Genevieve. It’s not the first bizarre, erotically charged dream I’ve had of my former best friend, and it probably won’t be the last.
Still, something about this particular one has me shaken.
Ten years ago, when nightmares of a different time and a different hostel left me drenched in sweat and shaking with remembered trauma, I’d leave my room and my hall, desperate and unmoored, and walk the ten minutes it took to get to hers—use my exhaustion as an excuse to selfishly harness the eshé, soothing any complaints or suspicions her roommate might’ve had as Genevieve sleepily and wordlessly lifted her sheet for me in silent invitation to crawl into her bed.
We’d never risked holding each other—only our hands or knees or feet occasionally brushing—and hadn’t acknowledged or spoken of it come morning.
The desire to find her room right now is so strong my clenched jaw throbs from fighting it. The fact that we’re the only two here, that there’s no roommate to be wary of makes it harder.
If I slipped into her bed right now, I know how it’ll go—how we’d use the cover of darkness and the fogginess of sleep as an excuse to give in; we’d pretend we truly were locked forever from the rest of the world, far from the consequences of the morning, free to touch and kiss and bite and lick—
I’m so keyed up a future regret feels manageable if it means I’d get to have her even once, even like this, desperate and frantic and like a shameful secret.
Think of tomorrow,I remind myself furiously. Without her physical presence to deter me, I succeed, banishing away all the clouds threatening to impair my judgement.
I gently wrap my hand around the beads at the ends of my braids, letting their eshé roll over my fingers, sink into my skin. I think of Maraya Forest, refusing to get lost in the tide of that ever-present loneliness.
The lights come on when I sit up. A protective incantation flies to my lips, before I remember.
“Thank you?” I say tentatively, looking around. The house, of course, doesn’t respond.
I take out one of the many, small bottles of scented oil from my trunk, dipping two drops onto my fingers and stroking behind my ears. The calming scent of the grass from home filters into my nose, and I exhale shakily.
“Thank you …” I say again when the lights automatically go off the moment I’m back in bed.
I stare up at the ceiling, eyebrows furrowed. Are sentient houses usually this responsive to outsiders? According to my mother, they’re supposed to be strictly connected to their owners—usually families who have raised multiple generations of their blood within its walls, their eshé seeping into the property and bringing it to life over a long period of time.
I’m a virtual stranger, yet it seems to be responding to my needs with flawless anticipation. My mother hadn’t known much, though. Besides that, I still don’t believe a lot of sentient houses exist in spite of the laws against them. Before today, I’d thought they were a myth.
With the smell of home wafting around me, sleep soon comes easily, and I don’t have another nightmare.
When I wake up again with the faint surety that it’s morning, I do so with the knowledge that, at some point between my nightmare and right now, I’d died.
