Dreamer

by L. E. DeLano

  “Sixty-two!” I look at him in disbelief. “Nobody can catch sixty-two pieces of popcorn in their mouth in a row.”

  “He can.” Olivia jabs a thumb in Ben’s direction as she reaches for a handful.

  I raise my eyebrows skeptically. “You’re taking his word on that?”

  “I saw it.” She shrugs. “Seriously impressive. God knows there wasn’t anything else to do while they traipsed around that alien planet, fighting off the giant pink baboons.”

  I stop my hand before it can reach for the popcorn again. “Wait—what? Pink baboons?”

  “Primatus,” Ben says around a mouthful of popcorn. “Bad flick with vampire space baboons. Saw it last night.”

  “Oh?” I look from Ben to Olivia, who suddenly seems to be very interested in her manicure. “Liv didn’t mention that’s where she was last night.”

  “You said you didn’t mind if I bagged out of my shift,” she defends.

  “I thought you were doing homework. And I thought we were going to see that movie.”

  “We are. We totally are,” she reassures me. “I just—I thought I’d prescreen with Ben so I could highlight the best parts for you. And it’s not like the museum is crazy busy on a Friday night.”

  “Or any night,” Ben agrees. “Although today’s Cub Scout troop was a real hoot.”

  “Oh, you did not just say that.” Olivia points a finger at him in warning. “Don’t be bringing your cowboy talk into our nice, genteel northeastern museum.”

  “Thought you liked my cowboy talk,” he says, and for a moment, I appear to have faded into the paneled woodwork of the wall behind me. They finally realize they floated off in their own little bubble—they’ve been doing that a lot lately—and Ben steps back from the counter. Olivia rubs her hands together nervously.

  “I gotta get this grease off my fingers,” she says. “We’re supposed to be cataloging old magazines today. Wouldn’t want to ruin them.”

  She makes a beeline for the restrooms around the corner, and Ben watches her go. I watch Ben watching her go.

  “So.” I’m fighting to keep the grin off my face. I have been watching this thing between them germinate for nearly three months now, and I’m loving it.

  “So,” Ben answers, and he’s looking everywhere but me. Finally, I give an exasperated sigh.

  “It’s okay, you know. I’m not mad about the movie. Well, maybe a little because I wanted to see that flick, but I get it if you two wanted to go together. Alone, I mean.”

  “It was just a movie,” he says, moving to the end of the counter and making a great show of restacking the brochures and pamphlets we have there. “No big deal.”

  “And you stopped by today just like you do every Saturday because it’s no big deal?” I can’t help the smile now. But he’s still not looking at me.

  “I’ve always liked museums. And my dad’s on the board here.…”

  I can’t help it. I throw my hands up and an exasperated whoosh of air leaves my lungs.

  “Honest to God, Ben! Just say it! You like her! It’s okay!”

  He freezes in place, caught, and he knows it. He glances nervously toward the hallway, as if Olivia’s going to suddenly appear with a giant net and a spear to finish him off.

  “Am I being too flirty or something?”

  “No, you’re being an idiot. I know you like her because I know you. And how you are. When you like someone.”

  Now it’s my turn to not meet his eyes. It’s been months since we broke up, and we’re still friends, but we haven’t hung out like we used to until lately—and always with Olivia. I can see he’s trading on his friendship with me to get to her and I am 100 percent fine with that.

  “I should just back off,” he says. “This is weird, isn’t it? It’s just weird.”

  “No!” I shout it a bit too loudly, so I lean out to look around the corner, too. Then I stand up to come around the counter. I grab him by the shoulders.

  “Ben. She likes you. She really likes you.”

  “I like her, too, but it’s just weird. I mean, she’s your best friend and I’m your ex and also your friend and it’s just … I don’t know. We sort of talked about it last night and it’s a thing.”

  “A thing?”

  “It’s a thing we have to get around, I mean. You know … a thing.”

  My eyes widen in disbelief. “Are you saying I’m the elephant in the room?”

  He shrugs. “If the saggy, gray skin fits…”

  “You’re telling me that the only thing keeping you two from moving forward is me? Like you both think I’d have a problem with it?”

  He rubs his neck and looks at me uncertainly. “You don’t? Seriously?”

  “I may take to my bed with a fit of the vapors,” I say, smacking him on the chest. “You are such an idiot.”

  He glances at the hallway again. “You think we make a good couple?”

  “I know you make a good couple,” I say. Then I glance at the decorative mirror on the wall in the foyer. “Just about everywhere.”

  His eyes widen with realization. “Really?”

  “Really. I told you I’ve met Liv in other realities. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “And you couldn’t tell me this before?”

  “I didn’t want to force it on you. I am keenly aware that our choices make up the sum of our lives. You both deserved to choose each other.”

  “Thanks, St. Clair.” He reaches out to chuck me on the arm.

  “Don’t mention it. But you’re moving slow as molasses uphill in wintertime. Which is a great phrase I learned from you, by the way. Describes you perfectly.”

  “So I should ask her to go out with me?” he asks. “I mean, eventually?”

  “Monogram it on a tea towel. Brand it on your forehead. Just do it.” I reach over and grab the stack of pamphlets again. “And stop touching the brochures with your greasy popcorn fingers.”

  “Seriously?” Olivia rounds the corner, shaking her head. “How many did he wreck?”

  “Just the top ones,” I say, tossing them in the garbage can. “Go wash your hands before you damage something valuable,” I tell him, pointing in the direction of the bathrooms.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He gives me a sarcastic salute.

  “You do know how to use modern plumbing, right?” Olivia teases. “I know it’s fairly new to your country.”

  “No agua necessary,” he says, reaching out and wiping his greasy fingers on my face.

  “Yech!” I jump back, and Olivia makes a clucking noise with her tongue as Ben laughs and lopes off around the corner.

  Olivia and I both wait for him to go, and finally she folds her arms and gives me a look.

  “Thanks for putting in a word for me.”

  “You caught that, huh?” I slide into the seat next to her, still rubbing my greasy face. “How much did you hear?”

  “From molasses. Uphill in the wintertime.”

  “It’s just frustrating to watch you two circling each other.”

  “Don’t sweat it. I’m gonna ask him out tonight.”

  I give her an admiring look. “Go, Liv!”

  “Why should I have to sit around and wait? You’re okay with it, right?”

  “I’m more than okay. As long as you realize that if you two ever break up, I’m keeping you.”

  “If we ever break up, you’re helping me bury the body.”

  I grab a handful of popcorn with a smile. “This is fixing to be one hell of a friendship.”

  A Coffee Date

  between author L. E. Delano and her editor, Holly West

  Getting to Know You (A Little More)

  Holly West (HW): What book is on your nightstand now?

  L. E. DeLano (LD): The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. And oh man, is this a good book. So rich and vibrant and amazing.

  HW: What’s your favorite word?

  LD: Wonder. I want to live my life in a perpetual state of it. I want to seek it and find it in every
thing.

  HW: If you could travel in time, where would you go and what would you do?

  LD: I’d just want to live a day in the life with some tribal Celt or Neolithic indigenous person. I was at Stonehenge for the first time this year—paid extra to have the private tour and stand among the stones—and oh, the timelessness of it. I wanted to know about the men who hammered away at that stone and the women who fed them and the lessons they taught their children. I want their stories!

  HW: Do you have any strange or funny habits? Did you when you were a kid?

  LD: My children could write a tome on this, I’m sure. My weirdest one is probably that I talk to myself and always have. A lot. Even in public. It’s just the way I reason through things.

  HW: Jessa goes to lots of amazing alternate universes and sees a lot of different versions of herself. If you could fall through a mirror into a different version of your life, what would you want to experience?

  LD: I’d probably be the me who took a fellow castmate up on her offer to share her apartment in New York, so I could follow my dream and do theater. Then again, if I’d done that, I may not be sitting here talking about my books today. But it would be fun to know what “might have been.”

  The Swoon Reads Experience (Continues!)

  HW: What’s your favorite thing about being a Swoon Reads author so far?

  LD: The sense of community, for sure! The readers, the editors, my fellow Swoon authors—there’s just so much love and support. It really is wonderful.

  HW: How has the Swoon Reads community impacted your experiences as an author?

  LD: I have had the best experience, hands down. I know I wasn’t just chosen on some arbitrary whim, I was read and hashed over and selected because enough people saw something worth reading.

  HW: Did Traveler being published change your life?

  LD: Most definitely. Now and forever, I am a published author. And I put out a book I can be really proud of. No more dreaming about it, wishing for it, talking about “someday”—I did it. There is no way I can put that feeling into words.

  HW: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors on the site?

  LD: Put up your best work, then when the dust settles, realize that your best work is an evolving thing. Feedback is a valuable tool, and not just yours—read the comments on all the books. Readers know what they like and they aren’t hesitant to let you know that.

  The Writing Life

  HW: What were some of your main inspirations for Dreamer?

  LD: The original idea for the series was inspired by a childhood encounter with Through the Looking-Glass, but Dreamer has a theme song. “With a Little Help from My Friends” by the Beatles. I wanted this book to be about Jessa really coming into her own, and in her case, learning to trust herself—and her selves.

  HW: Second books are notoriously difficult. What was the hardest part about writing Dreamer?

  LD: Everything. Honest to God, everything. We’d done such major editing on Traveler that Dreamer was nothing like I’d originally imagined it to be. I had to write it almost from scratch, in terms of where I’d planned to take the plot. I went down a lot of wrong streets before I found my way with it.

  HW: What’s your process? Are you an outliner or do you just start at the beginning and make it up as you go?

  LD: I’m a “pantser” for the most part. I start out with a rough outline and just get writing. Somewhere around midpoint, I stop and write the ending, then I work backward to make everything fit.

  HW: What do you want readers to remember about your books?

  LD: Adventure! Of course, I want them to remember the romance, but a good romance should be an adventure, don’t you think?

  ONE MISTAKEN IDENTITY LEADS TO OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD TROUBLE.

  An ordinary teenage girl is kidnapped by an alien bodyguard and forced to pretend to be a princess to stop an intergalactic war.

  RUCKUS AND PETTUS led Delaney off the ship and down a long hallway that attached to the castle. They moved quickly, giving her only enough time to catch glimpses of the place as they wound their way through the vast halls.

  The smell was strange, foreign, a bit like mothballs and evergreen, and she trailed after Ruckus quietly, checking out the guards they passed from the corners of her eyes. And they passed many.

  At each entry and exit point, there were always at least two guards. They stood tall, shoulders back, sort of like the ones she’d seen guarding the queen of England in all the pictures. Except they didn’t have poofy hats, and she found she sort of wished they did. It would certainly ease some of the tension.

  Their uniforms were similar to Ruckus’s in that they wore charcoal military pants tucked into boots. The buttoned-up jackets were different, however, skintight and the color of moss, with heavy gold accents strewn about. She’d expected to see more of the silver weapon Pettus had used back in the alley against the Tars, but if they had any weapons on them, they were well hidden.

  Everyone dropped their chins to their chests in a bow when she passed, but the move was mechanical, like toy soldiers, and it creeped her out.

  They finally stopped at a set of tall golden doors, and Ruckus reached for the handle.

  “Wait here,” he told her and Pettus, opening it just enough for him to slip through without exposing the inside of the room.

  “He needs to brief them,” Pettus explained quietly. “It’s best that he does that alone first.”

  Right, because it was doubtful they’d react well to the news a human had been brought in their daughter’s stead.

  Delaney kept silent, partly because she was unable to think of anything to say, and partly because she was afraid that if she did, she’d lose it. The more details she paid attention to in this castle, the more it sunk in that she was no longer on Earth. The walls were a material that’d been made to appear like wood but wasn’t. She could see the metallic sheen of it from where she stood a few feet away.

  Everything was done in earthy and metallic tones; even the lighting had a gold sheen to it.

  The sudden opening of the door had her jumping, and she bit her bottom lip in embarrassment when she was met with Ruckus. His facial expression was tight, and he merely nodded at her and angled his head over his shoulder.

  Taking a deep breath, she braced herself and then stepped beneath the archway.

  The room was an office, with a fireplace to the right of the double doors and a small, round black table to the far right, big enough to seat five. At the center, positioned between two large bay windows that overlooked the sprawling yard, was a desk three times the size of any she’d seen before. Her gaze immediately landed on a tall man seated behind it; he had the same inky hair as Olena. A woman stood closely by his side, hands clasped before her.

  There were no computers that she was used to, but a glass screen sat propped at an angle in front of where the man was sitting. She couldn’t make out what he was watching, and there was no sound, but movement on the other side of the glass clued her in that it was a video of sorts.

  Ruckus came up to her then, lightly touching her elbow as he held his other hand out toward the pair. “May I introduce the Basileus Magnus Ond, and the Basilissa Tilda Ond.”

  Delaney wasn’t sure what to do, so she tried a bow, grateful for Ruckus’s steadying grip on her arm when she almost wobbled. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could stand there, pretending everything was fine, and hoped this conversation would end quickly.

  She hoped they’d put her directly on a ship headed back home.

  “Ander Ruckus tells us your name is Delaney.” The Basileus’s voice was sharp, though she got the feeling he was attempting—poorly—not to intimidate her.

  “Delaney Grace, sir.” Was it appropriate to call him sir? He didn’t correct her.

  Both he and the Basilissa took a moment to openly inspect her. There wasn’t much to look at, of course, seeing as how she appeared exactly as their daughter did on the outside, but she held still and wait
ed for them to finish.

  “The Sutter did this?” The Basilissa, Tilda, pursed her lips in either disgust or confusion. Delaney couldn’t tell which.

  “It was his device,” Ruckus said carefully, “but it was stolen by the Lissa, who used it without Sutter Gibus’s knowledge.”

  “And Trystan doesn’t seem to know?”

  “If he did,” the Basileus said with a grunt, “he would have declared war by now. No, she must have fooled him.”

  His stare was making her even more uncomfortable, and Delaney barely resisted the urge to clear her throat pointedly. Instead she held her head high and tried to make her voice as calm and respectful as possible.

  “I’d just like to go home,” she told them.

  “This is not an ideal situation,” the Basileus said then, “and I assure you we will be taking steps to right the wrong my daughter has done us all. However”—he folded his hands across the surface of his desk slowly—“it has also come to my attention that we have no real knowledge of where she is. As you know, Earth is a big planet. Therefore—”

  She felt the blood draining from her face before he’d even finished his sentence.

  “We simply cannot allow you to leave.”

  About the Author

  L. E. DeLano is a blogger and autism advocate under her alternate moniker, Ellie DeLano. She comes equipped with a “useless” theater degree that has opened doors for her in numerous ways. Though mostly raised in New Mexico, she now calls Pennsylvania home. When she’s not writing, which is almost never, she’s binge-watching Netflix and trying her best not to be an unwitting pawn in her cats’ quests for world domination. She is the author of Traveler and its sequel, Dreamer.

  Visit her online at ledelano.com, or sign up for email updates here.

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