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More than one of the therapy books Lister had read suggested dreams were the result of unresolved longings; well, that was nothing new. One did advise a way to work out such issues by putting the dream in writing, in a journal, in the form of a letter about the subject of it to an unknown third party. So, he did – he found some garish paper notebooks in storage vacuum seal, electing to trust his private thoughts to the page rather than typing them into the ship’s computer. A notebook was easier to hide, or burn.
After committing every embarrassing, blush-inducing dream detail about Rimmer to nearly half the notebook over a series of hard writing afternoons, Lister tucked it in his drawer of clean underwear, at the bottom under everything. Kryten wouldn’t go that far down when putting fresh laundry in it, and it was a spot the Cat would never want to look. He hid it so well, and so much stole his focus after that, that he forgot about it. He briefly recalled it some months later in prison, uncomfortably reminded by the presence of a new Rimmer but immediately relieved that the notebook would have gone up in flames with that section of Starbug when they crashed aboard the newly rebuilt Red Dwarf.
So he didn’t think anything at first of the Lisa Frank notebook he found under his mattress one afternoon while changing his own bedding. What he and Rimmer had been doing was only a few weeks old, and he was self-conscious about Kryten laundering his post-coital sheets. He flipped through the pages, quickly recognizing his own questionable penmanship, and sat on the lower bunk to read with a growing sense of unease. They were aboard yet another Red Dwarf, months out of prison and relocated by Rimmer, who had transported the four of them there through space and time after the nano-ship broke up.
Bits of naughty phrasing caught his eye – licking my neck and my chin … the feel of his hair under my tongue … fingers holding my bottom – along with far more innocuous but uncomfortably intimate words like the color of his eyes and the shy dip of his chin when he asks if I’ve missed him, like I wouldn’t. Lister felt a cold fissure of worry as he wondered how this notebook had followed him from a destroyed lander. He hadn’t brought it; none of the other survivors had found it, for he was sure any of them would have made a very public presentation of it if they had, complete with dramatic readings.
At the end of his extended entry, he found a blank page … followed by one filled with new writing. Several, in fact, covered in immediately recognizable copperplate, neat and careful and, judging by his initial glimpses of words, as private as his own. A few pages were lined with another person’s dreams, apparently – of bedding Lister in the back of his dimension-hopping ship, of nuzzling his throat backstage at some dark, sweaty pub, and of finding him being held hostage by some big, slobbery beast this once-Ace had to beat with Lister’s help, to earn the right of a first kiss.
Rimmer’s dreams were not as flowery and emotional as Lister’s, but as Lister read, he understood somehow, while in disguise as a nano-Rimmer right before prison with the rest of them, Arn had found this notebook in the wreckage of Starbug – and held on to it, not making it known to Lister until there was a reason. Maybe this explained why he hadn’t seemed surprised the first time Lister kissed him over messy plates of pasta and curry, or why he’d seemed immediately welcoming when they ended up groping on the Wildfire’s cot right after.
Lister stuffed the notebook in one of his drawers and hastily finished the sheet-changing. He thought about what he’d read as he went a short way down the corridor and ordered a tea with milk from a dispenser, and by the time he returned, he’d thought of a reply, his face hot with anticipation. He locked the door, found a pen, and retrieved the notebook to write, after Rimmer’s revealing pages. Some dreams feel like reality he began, pausing to think of the right scenario, like when Arn let me fuck him, as Ace, up against the wall of that warehouse …
When he finished the excessively detailed fantasy, he put the notebook beneath Rimmer’s mattress. He checked every morning for a week, but there was nothing new in copperplate for nine days. There was, however, a change in the bunk a few days after he placed the worn notebook – a new vitality, it seemed, in the way Rimmer pulled him into bed one night and licked him up and down before diving in to his good bits. Days later, when Lister read a scenario involving the two of them, a windswept cliff, and a rainstorm, he didn’t explain when he found Rimmer alone in the drive room that evening, why he locked the two of them in and proceeded to grind him hard against the center console. Rimmer already knew, even if they’d never mentioned the notebook aloud or their teenage-fantasy-level diary entries to each other.