Jane had offered her the guest bathroom without hesitation, and Evelyn had taken it. She wasn't ready to go back to her own place, not yet, not until the police called with something concrete. So she'd accepted the spare towel and the bath salts and the promise that Jane was right down the hall if she needed anything.
The water was hot enough to sting at first. She let it.
She sank in slowly, and the tension in her shoulders loosened by degrees. Jane had lit a candle on the windowsill without being asked, and the room settled into something quiet and dim, sealed off from the rest of the evening. Evelyn closed her eyes and just breathed.
Her mind, predictably, found him anyway.
She hadn't planned to think about the professor. But the memory had its own gravity, the infirmary, his hands, the particular quality of his attention. He'd touched her like he was being careful, and she couldn't decide if that made it better or worse. She let herself sit with it in the way she hadn't been able to all day, the warmth of the water making honesty easier.
Do you think of me when you're alone like this?
The fantasy that followed was quiet and unhurried, built from memory and want in equal measure. She didn't push it. When it finally eased, she lay still in the cooling water with her eyes closed and her breath evening out.
Then Jane's voice cut through the door.
"Eve!"
The sound hit wrong. Evelyn surfaced gasping, water sheeting off her face, fingers scrabbling at the edge of the tub. She'd slipped under somehow, she didn't know when, didn't know how long. The candle was still burning. The water had gone lukewarm.
Jane pushed the door open, saw her, and bit back a laugh before her expression shifted. She crossed the bathroom in a few steps and crouched beside the tub, cupping Evelyn's face in both hands. "Hey. What happened? Are you okay?"
Evelyn opened her mouth and found she didn't have much voice. She shook her head.
"That dream," she managed. "I had it again. Someone was trying to—" Her throat closed. Her eyes stung.
Jane didn't say anything, just wrapped her arms around her right there over the edge of the tub and held on, one hand moving in slow circles against her back. "You're here," she said quietly. "You're at my place, you're safe, no one got in. It was a dream."
"It didn't feel like one."
"I know." Jane kept her voice even. "But you've been running on nothing since yesterday. Your brain is doing things." She pulled back and studied her face, and for a second something moved behind her eyes, a flicker of something she didn't say. Then she stood and reached for the towel on the rack. "Come on. Get out before you go under again. I'm feeding you."
"I'm not hungry."
"That's not a real argument." She held the towel open.
Evelyn got out.
Jane settled her onto the guest bed with a blanket pulled around her and sat at the foot of it, switching to a steady stream of entirely unrelated topics. Soccer registrations. A sale at the bookshop on Clover Street. Something her coworker had said in a meeting that still didn't make sense. It was transparent and obvious and Evelyn almost smiled at it, the deliberate randomness of it, Jane keeping the air full so there was no room for anything darker to settle back in.
She was mid-sentence about the coworker when Evelyn's head turned toward the window.
The howling rose out of the dark, close enough that she felt it before she quite processed it, low and resonant, threading through the walls.
Her hand found Jane's arm.
"What is that?"
Jane paused. "What?"
"That sound. The howling. You don't hear it?"
Jane tilted her head, listening. "I mean, there are woods behind the building. It's probably just—"
"Jane." Evelyn's grip tightened. "I've lived near those woods for two years. I've never heard anything like that."
A beat of quiet stretched between them. Outside, the sound rose again, closer than before.
Here's the blended and rewritten scene:
The howling didn't come again.
They waited for it, both of them quiet, Jane's hand still on Evelyn's arm. But the woods outside gave nothing back, just the ordinary sounds of wind through branches and the distant hum of the street. After a minute, Jane exhaled and reached over to pull the blanket tighter around Evelyn's shoulders.
"See? Probably just a dog."
"That was not a dog."
"A very large, dramatic dog."
Evelyn looked at her. Jane kept her face straight for about three seconds before it cracked, and somehow that was enough. The laugh that came out of Evelyn was a little wet and a little hysterical and entirely genuine, and Jane leaned into it, launching into an increasingly ridiculous impression of what a very large dramatic dog might be thinking about at that hour. By the time she was done, Evelyn had her face buried in the pillow and her shoulders were shaking for an entirely different reason.
The weight of the evening didn't disappear, but it shifted. Made room.
Evelyn ended up with her head in Jane's lap, staring at the ceiling while Jane's fingers moved through her hair in slow, absent passes. The quiet that settled between them was the comfortable kind. "So tell me now what happened in there?" Jane asked softly curious as to why she had that reaction again.
"I was taking a bath and i had this thought about the professor." She blushed at her cheeks. Jane smiled as well. "So you have been naughty in the bath thinking about professor, Huh?" she said lightening it up.
"Not really it is just his thought came to my mind and i just didn't resist it that is it but then later the scene changed and i felt like someone was trying to force themselves on me." she gulped in after saying those words and Jane's hand tighthend around her hand. "It was too real Jane it was not like a dream i swear i felt him right here." she pointed at her inner thigh. "He was so close if you hadn't calle dmy name i don't know what would have happened." She gasped.
Jane's hand didn't stop moving. "So let me make sure I have this right. You had a dream about the professor, then it shifted into something horrible, and then you woke up but all that felt real."
"Yeah." Evelyn let out a slow breath. "That's about it."
"Your brain is doing a lot."
"I know."
Jane's lips pressed together, working to stay neutral. She lasted a moment. "Okay, I'm sorry, but I have to ask. A steamy dream about the professor specifically?"
Evelyn put the pillow over her face.
"I'm not judging," Jane said immediately. "I have absolutely no romantic life to speak of. I'm going to need you to describe this in detail. Consider it charity."
The pillow came down just far enough for Evelyn to give her a look. "It wasn't like that."
"It wasn't?"
"It wasn't— okay, it was a little like that, but that's not the point."
Jane rubbed her shoulder in a way that was deeply unhelpful and entirely affectionate. "Sure, sure. The point. Right." She schooled her expression. "Go on."
Evelyn sat up slightly, pulling the blanket around herself. "This isn't the first time it's happened. A few days ago, after a bath, I had something similar. Not exactly the same, but the intensity of it was the same. The feeling of being watched, being followed. It was vivid in a way that normal dreams aren't."
Jane's amusement faded into something more attentive. "You didn't mention that."
"I thought it was a one-off. I dismissed it." Evelyn picked at the edge of the blanket. "But then the professor mentioned the plant. The one I touched in the forest. He said it could cause side effects, vivid dreams, altered perception. I assumed it had worked its way out of my system by now." She paused. "But if anything it seems to be getting worse."
Jane was quiet for a moment. "Did he know? About the dreams specifically?"
"No. I didn't tell him that part. He just listed the possible effects and I put it together myself." A faint warmth crept up the back of her neck. "He didn't know what he was describing."
"Mm." Jane reached for her phone. "What's the plant again?"
"Raven bud,."
Jane typed it in again this time with a new searching prompt, scrolled, and her expression shifted into something more focused. She read in silence for a moment, and Evelyn watched her eyes move across the screen and slow down.
"Okay," Jane said. "So. Medicinal plant, toxic on contact with skin." She kept reading. "When absorbed, even in trace amounts, it affects the mind." She stopped. Read the next part again. "It says it brings out the user's deepest desires." She looked up. "Evelyn."
"I know.".