“Who? I don’t know who you are!” I shouted.
Her eyes drifted away.
“No . . . no, wait! Don’t leave.”
“Come find me. I need you to find me.”
I sat straight up in my bed. My hand clutched over my pounding heart as I tried to catch my breath.
“What in the hell?” I gasped while throwing the sheet off my sweat-soaked body. Leaning over, I rested my head in my hands as I tried to calm my heart rate down.
I heard the sound of the porch screen open and glanced over to the window I had opened before I went to bed.
Who in the hell would be heading outside this late at night?
Grabbing a T-shirt, I pulled it over my head and headed out of my room and downstairs. When I walked outside, I saw Jeff sitting on the porch. “What are you doing out here?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he replied as he looked up at me. “You?”
“Dream woke me up.”
“Same one?”
I sat down next to him and rolled my neck around to loosen the tension. “Yep. Same one.”
“What’s it about?”
“A girl calling out for me to help her. The thing that’s confusing me is she keeps calling me Drew. No one but my family calls me Drew.”
“Huh. Someone from your past maybe?”
I shook my head. “Nah, there’s only one other person besides family who knows my real name, but she only ever called me Gunner. Her name was Jessie. We were really good friends before we got the bright idea to sleep together to be each other’s firsts.”
“Oh hell. Did that change the friendship?”
“We dated for a bit afterward, then figured out we were better friends than lovers. Didn’t take long to figure that out.”
“So do you think this is the girl you’re wishing you could find?” Jeff asked.
With a tight chuckle, I shook my head. “Hell if I know. I feel like Josh—lost, just not sleeping around to bury the feeling.”
“Yeah,” he whispered softly.
“So what’s really going on, Jeff? Is there someone you like?”
After staring down at the ground for a bit, he nodded. “Yeah, there i
s.”
“Why aren’t you going after her then?”
He let out a huff. “Christ, there are so many reasons I wouldn’t know where to start. She’s younger than me; I’ve made her life miserable for the last I don’t know how many years. If we dated and it didn’t work out, I’m afraid she’d hate me forever. Hell, I could keep going on.”
“Does she go to UT?”
“No.”
“Does she know you like her?”