Page 42 of The Diamond in the Rough

Okay, I hadn’t honestly thought about himkissingme.Touchingme, yes, but not kissing me. And now I couldn’t stop thinking about him kissing me.

I definitely wanted him to kiss me again.

I rolled out of bed and began to pace, now completely unable to sleep.

I shouldn’t have done it. I’d known that when I did it, but I did it anyway.

It wasn’t fair to him—he didn’t know that I was a dreamwalker. He definitely hadn’t been aware that I wasmein the dream, rather than some figment of his own subconscious.

I stopped pacing.

Did that mean that Raj Parikh actually wanted to kiss me in the real world?

I looked down at my shaking hands.

And now that I knew that—and he didn’t know that I knew—I really wasn’t going to be able to look him in the eye. I wasn’t going to be able to be in the room with him. At least not without my face catching on fire.

What have I done?

8

She really hated this job.Nonstop asshole customers making stupid demands about their stupid breakfast sandwiches.

“Can I get that with swiss instead of American?” “Do you have turkey bacon?” “Is there a way I can get the sausage, egg, and cheese, but vegan?”

They weren’t a full restaurant, for fuck’s sake. Their sandwiches came to them frozen and premade.

And yet, she had to keep explaining to people that they had no way of changing the ingredients in their sandwiches. If someone wanted vegan, they had to get a dry fucking bagel and like it.

I grimaced,pulling my hand back from the brown paper baggie.

“Let me do that,” Beck said, her tone a little annoyed. She took the baggie and disappeared, headed for the kitchen and—presumably—the plates in there that she could pour the bagels out on. She was moving quickly, the fringe on the bottom of her mid-thigh-length tunic swishingagainst the black of her leggings over knee-high tooled leather boots.

I bit my lip and straightened, moving away from the table with tubs cream cheese and stacks of paper napkins for the whole staff plus Elliot and Fiona—and which would hold the bagels again, presumably, when Beck came back. Fiona McCallister was an occult librarian at the Library of Virginia—she was also a faun, almost as tall as me with bright red hair, twisty horns, freckles, and huge blue eyes with a faun’s tell-tale horizontal pupils. Fiona knew more about the history of the occult than almost anyone in the state—except maybe for Mason Manning, although Mason would be the first person to say that he might go deeper on some things, but Fiona could find youanything, in the library or out of it.

“Is it getting stronger, Rayn?” Ward asked, his brow furrowed in concern as he watched Beck disappear through the doorway to the kitchen.

“Not exactly,” I replied. “Just more sensitive.” Despite my best attempts to keep rebuilding my mental brick walls, they were crumbly and unsteady. I could still push the memories out after about the same amount of time and with the same effort, I was just more likely to fall into one from a slight brush of fingers or—as in this case—a careless reach for a bag of bagels to be helpful.

The problem in this instance was actually more likely that I was more aware of the smaller memories, since the woman who’d left her thoughts on the bag couldn’t have touched it for too much longer than the memory I’d just experienced. A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t even have noticed.

Now, less than a minute was enough to leave an impression that could sneak up on my unsuspecting fingers. And send Beck—or someone else—to the kitchen on my behalf.

I really didn’t want to have to wear my gloves literally any time I wasn’t at my desk or in my apartment. Especially as it got warmer. Summer was the worst time to wear gloves—they got soaked with sweat within minutes, and squishy gloves are definitely not fun to wear. Your hands get all wrinkled and prune-like, and you leave little sweat-streaks everywhere.

Ugh.

“How’d you do it?” Fiona asked her big goat-eyes studying me. “Can you undo it?”

I grimaced. “Apparently not,” I replied. “I tried just… reversing the mental process, but while it helpssome, it doesn’t reset it, and I have to be actively thinking about it, which I’m not used to.”

“Sounds kind of like what Archie did to you,” Mason remarked, looking over at Ward. “Although mental, rather than visual.”

I looked at him. Ward made a face. “That was a very not-fun several days,” he replied darkly. “I felt like I was in some sort of fucked-up cartoon.”

“At least you weren’t shutting down every ten minutes,” Beck remarked, coming back with a big plate filled with bagels.

I felt my cheeks heat.