The Dream

Harmony dreamed of trees. Tall pines. Silver mist. A narrow path beneath her bare feet that should have been cold but wasn’t. Somewhere above her, branches shifted in a wind she could feel but not hear. She stood in the middle of the forest in the same oversized T-shirt she had worn to bed in London, staring at a place she had never been. Montana, her mind supplied. Because of course it was Montana.

She had spent the last hour before sleep rereading Adrian’s email and trying not to answer it. It made sense that her brain would take his quiet voice, his woodsy cologne, his mountain stories, and build a forest around them.

Then he was there. Not arriving. Not walking toward her. Just there. Adrian stood a few feet away in dark jeans and a gray shirt, his hair tousled, his blue eyes fixed on her with a tenderness that went straight through every reasonable thought she had tried to keep in place. Harmony stared at him.

“This is not fair,” she whispered.

His mouth softened. “No.”

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I know.”

The answer sounded too real. The dream air moved between them, cool and clean. Harmony should have laughed. She should have said something clever and ridiculous and very much like herself. Instead, she stepped closer. Adrian did too.

When his hand touched her cheek, her skin lit with a shock of sensation so sharp and vivid she gasped. His thumb moved once beneath her eye, careful, almost reverent.

“I miss you,” he said.

Harmony’s heart answered before her mind could stop it. She rose onto her toes. He bent to meet her. The kiss was soft at first. Then deeper. Warmer. Impossible. Too real for sleep, too intimate for memory. Her hands found his shirt. His arm closed around her waist, lifting her into the kiss as though the ridiculous difference in their height had never been a problem.

Harmony jolted awake.

She sat up in the dark, one hand pressed to her mouth. London hummed beyond the window. Her apartment was still. Her sheets were tangled around her legs. No forest. No Adrian. No pine-scented air.

But her lips tingled. Her skin remembered the weight of his hand.

“Oh my gosh,” she whispered.

Her phone rested on the nightstand. She looked at it. Then looked away. Absolutely not. She was not emailing a man because she had one intense dream after one intense night. That was how people ended up making terrible decisions and calling them destiny.

Harmony lay back down. Five minutes later, she picked up the phone. She opened his email.

Read it again.

But if you start dreaming of me…

She locked the screen and shoved the phone under her pillow.

“This is not happening,” she told the ceiling.

But it was.

The dreams came every night after that. Always the forest. Always Adrian.

At first, they were fragments. His hand closing around hers. His voice saying her name. A glimpse of him between trees before she woke with her pulse racing and the sense that she had almost reached him. Then the dreams grew longer. They walked beneath the pines. They sat beside a stream, her knees drawn to her chest, his shoulder warm against hers.

Sometimes they talked. Not dream nonsense. Not the strange, broken conversations that vanished after waking. Real conversations. Startlingly ordinary ones. He told her he missed black coffee from a small café in New York. She told him the coffee near her office was strong enough to qualify as a workplace hazard. He asked if London was good to her. She told him yes. Then, after a pause, she admitted it was beautiful and overwhelming and lonely in moments she hadn’t expected.

He looked at her in the dream with those clear blue eyes and said, “I’m glad it’s beautiful. I’m sorry it’s lonely.”

Harmony woke with tears on her face and wanted to be furious with him for being so decent inside her own subconscious.

By day, she was thriving. That was the confusing part. Her job was everything she had wanted. The London office occupied two bright floors of a converted building with exposed brick, glass meeting rooms, and people who spoke quickly enough to make every meeting feel important. Harmony loved it immediately.

She loved the pace. The challenge. The way her new team handed her real work instead of ceremonial introductions. She loved hearing her own title in a British accent. She loved walking to lunch with coworkers who asked what she thought and then actually listened to the answer.

She was good at the job. Not perfect. Not yet. But good.

Every morning, she dressed carefully, walked into the office, and felt the thrill of having arrived. She took notes, led calls, corrected campaign language, earned cautious approval from a creative director who clearly did not give it easily.

London opened itself to her in pieces. Corner bakeries. Rain-slick sidewalks. Crowded trains. Small grocery stores with unfamiliar brands. A park bench where she ate lunch one afternoon and felt absurdly proud of herself for knowing which line to take home.

Her life was beginning. She could feel it. Then a quiet moment would come. An elevator ride alone. A pause before a meeting. The small apartment after work, when the door clicked shut and no one knew whether she had made it home.

And there he was.

Adrian.

The memory of his laugh. His hand at her back. His steady way of looking at her. His email waiting unanswered in her inbox.

One night, she told herself. One night did not explain this. One night did not explain the ache. One night did not explain why she reached for her phone after every dream and nearly wrote back before forcing herself to stop. She did not know him. Not really.

She knew his coffee order. The sound of his laugh. The warmth of his body. The way he seemed amused by her without ever making her feel small. She knew he had family land in Montana and worked in brand partnerships and carried strength quietly. She knew how he looked at her when he wanted her. She knew how carefully he had waited until she crossed the space between them. That was not enough to miss someone this much. Except she did.

By the second week, the forest changed. Not much. Just enough.

Sometimes, after Adrian faded or turned away, Harmony would hear movement behind her. Branches shifting. Leaves whispering beneath something heavy. She would turn, and a wolf would stand between the trees. Large. Dark. Still. Not threatening. Watching.

She would wake with her heart racing and laughed at herself until the sound broke apart in the quiet.

“A wolf,” she said into her pillow. “Very subtle, brain.”

But the wolf came again. Never close enough to touch. Never angry. It stayed at the edge of the forest, its eyes fixed on her with an intelligence that felt almost human.

The night before the end of her third week in London, she dreamed Adrian stood beside her while the wolf watched from the trees.

Harmony looked from one to the other.

“What does it mean?” she asked.

Adrian’s face filled with pain.

“I wish I could tell you.”

“Then tell me.”

His hand reached for hers, but before their fingers touched, the forest dissolved.

Harmony woke alone.

This time, she did not laugh.