C.E. Murphy - Coyote Dreams

The best part was Morrison kissed me back. There wasn’t even a moment of complete startlement where he drew away before giving in to it. For a few brief, glorious seconds it was just the two of us, surprise flaring through Morrison’s rich colors until our blues tangled together for an instant. Desire and pleasure zinged through me so brightly I blushed. I wondered if astral sex was better than real sex, or just different, and if a girl could manage both at once. Then reality, such as it was, intruded, and I pushed Morrison away. He blinked down at me twice, and the second time, the Rocky Mountain wilderness disappeared from all around me and left me falling through a place between dreams.

There was a sensation of gray cloudiness in the midst of formless nothing, instantaneous and immediate. For a moment I thought I might get away with sneaking through the dreamworld and taking Begochidi unawares, if only I could find my bearings.

My bearings found me first. I tumbled to an upright stop, still breathless and dizzy, though I could no longer tell if that was from falling or kissing. Either way, I had about enough time to look around before a maw of butterflies cropped up out of the dark and swallowed me.

Typically, this was the point at which I would either panic, shriek and try to run, or dig my heels in and hang on to where I was with everything I had. Getting sucked into a vortex of butterflies—or anything else; getting sucked up by vortexes in general just couldn’t be good—was not the best game plan a girl could come up with. Ideally, I’d take a lance and a white charger and gallop my way through the dream realms to throw down a gauntlet at a god’s feet and challenge him to single combat.

But I didn’t have a gauntlet, much less a lance or a white charger, and I hadn’t ridden a horse since I was fifteen, anyway. I had to trust to my silver sword and my array of shields, and I had to find Begochidi one way or another. Letting him scoop me up and bring me to the battlefields seemed as practical an arrival as any.

Butterflies melted all around me, dark dangerous colors bleeding into ordinary walls in a room with no floor. I fell at an alarming rate, jerking upward into wakefulness with a lurch of my heart that made me feel sick. Gary dropped my drum and caught my arm, concern in his eyes. “Jo? Jeez, there you are. You been sleepin’ for a week, Joanie.”

I stared around me at the familiar walls of my apartment, then sank back into my couch with a groan. My left wrist ached like hell, pounding and burning as if a rope had been twisted around it and pulled. I wrapped my fingers around it, encountering smooth heat that I rubbed without looking. The ache went up my arm to throb in my heart. Taking a deep breath lessened the pain enough for me to focus on what Gary’d said.

“A week?” My voice sounded dry, as if I hadn’t drunk anything for…well. Days. “What’s happening? What’s going on? I’ve been having…” I stopped rubbing my wrist and went for my eyes instead, turning over to bury my face in the couch back. The throb came back, less intent as I mumbled, “Awful dreams.” Except the one about kissing Morrison. I felt a tiny grin develop. “Mostly awful.” I rolled back over to stare at Gary, whose bushy eyebrows were drawn down. “I dreamed Morrison had a girlfriend. A cute little redhead. I hated her.”

Gary’s eyebrows went down further, until his eyes disappeared beneath the gray beetles of them. “Mike?” His voice rose, worry still evident in it. My own eyebrows went down far enough to give me a headache. I didn’t know any Mikes. The closest I’d come was what’s his face in my dream. Hey, I’d had a boyfriend in my dream, too. I guess it was fair for Morrison to have a girlfriend, if I got to have a boyfriend. I squinted my eyes shut, trying to remember my guy’s name. Matt. Something like that. Good-looking, sandy-haired. Maybe I needed to conk out for a week more often. His image was already fading, nebulous as a dream.

“She’s awake,” Gary said, presumably to somebody else, since I knew I was awake. “She’s been dreamin’ you got a bit on the side. Got anything you want to confess?”

I heard an inhalation behind the couch, then a rough laugh that had more to do with relief than amusement. “Thank God. All this living a lie was getting too much.”

Gary chuckled while I frowned. I knew the second voice. It was incongruous in my living room, but I knew it, and I knew the scent of the man who sat down on the couch and pulled me into a bear hug. For a few long moments I just knotted my fists in the back of Morrison’s shirt and held on, inhaling Old Spice cologne and wondering why I was trembling. My wrist still ached, all the more now that I was using my hands. “It’s all right now,” he murmured above my head. “Tell you what, I promise to dump the girlfriend now that you’re awake again. You had me worried, Joanie. You had us all worried.”

“I’m okay,” I croaked. “Thirsty. What’re you doing here, boss?” Morrison didn’t call me Joanie. Neither did Gary, for that matter. They had to have been worried.

“’Boss.’” Morrison sat back with a chuckle, looking down at me. “You haven’t called me that in a while.”

“Nah, I guess it’s been ’Cap’ lately.”

Morrison’s eyebrows drew down and he frowned toward Gary. “She’s still not quite awake, Mike. Give her a few minutes.” Gary got to his feet, jerking his chin toward the kitchen. “I’ll get her some water.”

“Thanks.” Morrison nodded at the big old cabbie, who went around the couch while I tried working my brain around the idea of anybody, much less Gary, calling Morrison “Mike.” They called each other by their formal titles, Mr. Muldoon and Captain Morrison, when they had cause to call each other anything at all. It was one of those weird male rivalry things I neither understood nor wanted to understand.

“Mike?” I said, which was intended to convey all that unspoken commentary. Instead, Morrison looked down at me curiously.

“Yeah?”

“No, I mean…why’s Gary calling you Mike?”

A shadow passed over Morrison’s expression, to be replaced a few seconds later by something of a wry grin. “We got some things settled out while you were asleep. Being worried about you trumped our differences. Guess I’ve always been a little jealous of him.”

“Jealous? Of Gary? Morrison, how often do I have to tell you, he’s—”

“Morrison?” Another funny thing happened to Morrison’s expression, hurt tempered with an attempt at humor washing through tightness around his eyes. “Boss, Morrison, what is this? I thought we were past that, Joanie. That was the idea behind you leaving the department and setting up your own shop, wasn’t it? I know it hasn’t been that long, but—”

“Shop?” A sort of thrilled hope leapt in my chest, reversing the ache in my heart back down toward my wrist. “You mean I’ve got my own shop?”

“Joanie, it’s been open for a month. You’ve been working eighteen-hour days. She’s still really muzzy, Muldoon,” Morrison called. “Maybe we should call the doctor again. It’s all right, Joanie. I guess anybody’d be disoriented after sleeping for a week.”

The ache in my wrist took up as a sense of wrongness at the base of my brain, dissoluted by my preference to leave things just the way there were. Unfortunately, my mouth wouldn’t let it go. “Joanie. You’re calling me Joanie. What’s that about?”

Morrison’s smile went crooked and concerned, voice lowering. “I thought we agreed neither of us wanted to go by Jim or Siobhán in public. Muldoon’ll get the doctor here, all right? You haven’t woken up all the way yet. Just give yourself a few minutes.” He ducked his head to bump his nose against mine, so intimate it’d have been unforgivable if it wasn’t also so incredibly bizarre, and then he kissed me.