Falling Awake

elaborate breakfast she had planned to serve Ellis. The upside was there had been no time to have the conversation she was dreading.
    She was halfway out the door, escape in sight, when Ellis stopped her in her tracks.
    “When do you want to talk about last night?” he asked without any inflection.
    All her tango dancing dreams flashed before her eyes. Gloom settled on her, weighing her down. She turned slowly, keysclutched in her fingers. He was going to tell her that he considered her a really good friend and a terrific dream analyst and, by the way, it was probably better not to mix business and pleasure.
    “I’ve got classes all morning,” she said, cringing inwardly when she heard the brittle-bright note in her voice. “And you said you wanted to get started reading Belvedere’s research papers.”
    He set the tea down on the counter, got to his feet and walked toward her.
    “I thought women liked to talk about relationships,” he said.
    What was the point of delay? Putting it off wouldn’t change anything. She’d had her one night with the man of her dreams. A lot of women never even got that.
    She steeled herself. “Okay, let’s get this over with. Is this where you tell me that you’d like to be friends?”
    “This isn’t about our friendship. It’s about last night.”
    “Do you think of me as a really swell pal?”
    “I don’t sleep with my pals.”
    “Do I remind you of a sympathetic aunt?”
    “I don’t have any aunts, sympathetic or otherwise. Isabel, I’m trying to talk about last night .”
    “You’re sure you didn’t wake up this morning and decide that maybe we should go back to a business relationship? Maybe have a couple of drinks together occasionally so you can tell me your dreams?”
    “Am I missing something here?”

    She held up a hand. “One last question. Do you think of me as your own personal advice columnist or fortune-teller?”
    He did not answer that, at least not verbally. Instead, he took two strides forward, seized her shoulders and pulled her hard against his chest.
    His mouth ravaged hers in a no-holds-barred kiss that stole her breath. The sensation was so intense she suddenly understood why a girl might faint at the prospect of a fate worse than death. But she was a tango dancer. Tango dancers did not faint. They danced. They seduced.
    She managed to get one arm around his neck and returned the kiss with equal fervor.
    When he released her a moment later, she was breathing again, but really, really fast.
    “For the record,” he said, “I do not see you as a pal, sympathetic aunt, advice columnist or fortune-teller. I see you as a lover. Is that clear now?”
    “Clear.” She swallowed and hastily adjusted her skewed glasses. “In that case, we can talk about last night. If you really want to, that is.”
    Ellis smiled slowly. “On second thought, it can wait. You just answered a lot of my questions. Go to class. I’ll see you later.”
    “Okay.” She grabbed her purse, whirled and ran for the car.
    He wasn’t the only one who had just had some questions answered. Whatever else was going on here, Ellis definitely did not see her the way every other man in her life had seen her.

    s hortly after ten that morning, Ellis’s phone rang. He glanced at the code, winced and answered the call without any enthusiasm.
    “What do you want, Lawson?”
    “Wondered what the hell you were up to,” Lawson growled. “Haven’t heard from you in a while.”
    “Nice to know I’m missed.” He put aside the unpublished paper that Martin Belvedere had no doubt hoped to see immortalized in one of the respectable journals of sleep and dream research and sank back into the chair.
    “Makes me nervous when you don’t check in while you’re on an assignment. You know I like to be kept informed.”
    “You haven’t heard from me because I haven’t got anything to report,” Ellis said patiently. “Anything new on your end?”
    Sphinx, curled on the sofa on the other side of the coffee table, stirred, stretched and regarded him with an unblinking stare.
    “No, damnit. I’ve had Beth’s elves combing all the online dream research sites, looking for buried links to some other agency that might be using a phony public front to take in data. But so far, no luck.”
    Ellis could hear the annoying ping, ping, ping of Lawson’s dumb desk toy on the other end of the line.
    “Speaking of Beth,” he said. “Did she turn up anything on the local hit-and-run