Nightlife ✓

11 | dream

A / N :

For those who have read TGR, we're reuniting with another geek this chapter! 

Place your bets on who it might be. ;)

(This person also gets a spinoff sometime in the future.)

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YESTERDAY I DREAMED ABOUT QUENTIN.

That was the first time I'd dreamt about a man in a long, long time.

Once in a while—and we're talking in a while, like thrice every year—I'd have a weird sex dream featuring a faceless male figure, or some random college acquaintance that I had no intimate connection with. I'd read somewhere that the human brain can't generate faces, that every face we ever see in our dreams gets plucked from our haziest memories, which helped to explain the random features.

But I didn't have a sex dream about Quentin either.

No, I had brought him home to meet my family.

It was Christmas in my dream, which was months out in reality, and he wore a red sweater that brought out the red on his cheeks, the tips of his nose and ears. I'd driven us in my quaint four-seater to New York City and guided him up the stairs to our family's small apartment.

He was about eight inches taller than Mom, who was shorter than me, and I recalled her screeching for joy, pulling him down into a stooped hug and rattling off rapid-fire Mandarin at him. He responded good-naturedly, the red in his face rising. I'd never heard Quentin speak Mandarin in real life, but I knew he could speak a little bit of it from a previous conversation we'd had in the library. He scratched Mao Mao—our family cat, but he was Kevin's—behind the ear in greeting and my heart gave a weak splutter.

My siblings made conversation with him about Big Data, then Quen played Go with my father. I remember watching him laying down his white counters all over the board and beating Dad twice out of five rounds. And I remember my Dad looking over to me and giving me that stern nod he always used to signify his approval.

The dream flash-forwarded to after we'd had dinner, when Mom and Dad were packing away the leftovers, when I dragged him to the doorway of my old bedroom. There was mistletoe, and he'd draped a strand of my hair behind my ears before leaning down and pressing his lips—

"Then I woke up."

"Darn," Viv rolled her eyes at me. "You've got it so bad. I feel sorry for you."

"Hey," I responded defensively, "I can't control what I dream about."

Viv, Riley, and I slid our bowls of cereal onto an empty dining table and sat down. On Friday mornings, I actually got a full night's sleep. So we could all eat breakfast together before heading to our classes. It was peaceful, sharing a meal by the dining hall's tall windows that overlooked the residential campus. I could see green grass and feel warm sunlight filtering through.

"Viv's kind of right," Riley teased humourously. "Now I'll feel bad for you if things don't turn out well with Quen."

Each time something remotely insignificant happened, I went and spilled the beans to my best friends. They knew about all the times Quen had visited the VIP lounge at Topaz, and that he'd held my hand yesterday. Admittedly, it was for a whopping two seconds, and after he thought he'd upset me, but still.