Read Before I Wake for Free Online Page A

woken her up. I opened the bathroom door. “Yeah. Sorry, Lo.”
    My roommate shrugged her round shoulders. “I’d rather make sure you’re fine than sleep through it.”
    I tried to smile, but it hurt. “You just can’t stand to miss anything—even if it’s gross.”
    Lola grinned. “That too. Seriously, you okay? You look like shit.”
    At five feet, Lola MacIntyre made me feel like a giant. She had curly black hair, dusky skin, and boobs that defied gravity—pretty impressive given the size of them. She also watched Forrest Gump with me whenever I asked, which made her my best girlfriend ever.
    Right now she was wearing boxer shorts and a tank top with a picture of The Dukes of Hazzard on it—the show, not that sacrilegious movie.
    “I’m okay, really.”
    She frowned up at me, looking very young under the bright vanity lights. “What happened to your lip?”
    “I think I bit it in my sleep.”
    “Oh. Did you eat something funky?”
    I wish. “Bad dream.”
    Sharp eyebrows jerked upward. “That’s weird for you.”
    “Yeah, well…” She was right, and two strange dreams so close together were even weirder.
    “You wanna stay up for a while? I can put a movie in.”
    I was tempted to let Forrest run all this anxiety out of my head, but Lola had to work in the morning, and I wasn’t going to have her fussing over me like a mother hen.

    “Thanks, but I think I’m just going to brush my teeth and head back to bed. Rain check?”
    She smiled. “You know it. If you change your mind, come get me, okay?”
    I nodded. I wasn’t going to change my mind, I knew that. As much as the dream had bothered me, I didn’t want to share it, and I didn’t want to let it keep me from trying to go back to sleep.
    It was, after all, just a dream. They happened, even to me. Despite my heritage, sometimes the mind just had to work stuff out.
    During those times, my dreams were just dreams, and I let them happen, guiding myself through it and doing all that needed to be done to work it through. Maybe I had unknowingly done this. There was a reason why they called it the subconscious.
    But those weird, spidery eyes stuck with me. I had seen them somewhere before.
    I gave Lola a hug, brushed my teeth—and my tongue—with cinnamon toothpaste, and went back to bed. My lower lip was sore, but at least I wasn’t twitching with the aftershocks of orgasm anymore.
    That had never happened to me before, and the fact that it had happened with such a disturbing dream was well, disturbing.
    Dreams had always been an escape for me—a world of promise and adventure. Now, I had been violated inside that world.
    I thought back to when I was little. My mother used to hold me in her lap, wrapped in a fuzzy blanket, and rock me while she sang what I referred to as “dee-dee-dee” songs. The melodies were usually always different, but the lyrics remained the same—just “dee-dee-dee” over and over again. Sometimes, when I find it hard to fall asleep, I sing similar songs in my head.
    My mother would also tuck me into bed every night—after singing to me—and tell me to have wonderful dreams. Even though I was usually on the brink of passing out by the time she put me in my bed, I remember her telling me she wanted to hear all about my dream-adventures in the morning. Of course, she was often there in my dreams, she and Morpheus.
    Where was my so-called father when I was being raped in his Realm? So much for him being the Lord of Dreams. The walls I built shouldn’t have stopped him, should they? Didn’t he know everything that happened in his kingdom?
    Screw Morpheus; I should have slapped that creep silly. If I had known more about myself and what I could do, I would have known how to react.
    But I hadn’t—and that bothered me more than the dream itself.
    “I’m coming, Dawnie. I’m coming, and you can’t stop me.”
    I rolled over onto my side as my stomach lurched. I had to stop thinking about it. I had to let it go.