CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
DAY 3: 2009. 2:00 A.M.
After what felt like several hours of sleeping upright in a less-than-comfortable position, I woke up when I felt the weight of someone sitting on my lap. I peeled my eyes open, secretly hoping I hadn’t dreamed the soft hair tickling my cheeks. Sure enough, Holly was seated on top of me, her mouth dangerously close to mine, one knee placed next to each of my hips.
“Hey,” she whispered. “You know, I think we should just be friends.”
My brain was too fogged with sleep to absorb the shock of this situation. I rested my hands on her lower back, feeling the exposed strip of skin above her jeans. “This is friendship? Sure, I’m in.”
My vision finally cleared enough to look into her light blue eyes and watch the mischievous smile spread across her face. “Repeat after me … Sweetheart…”
Her fingertips landed on the sides of my neck and I closed my eyes again, letting out an involuntary sigh. “Sweetheart…”
“Baby…”
“Baby,” I repeated.
“Honey…”
“Honey.” My hands slid higher until I reached her hair and tangled my fingers in it. “Is this a new game all the kids are playing?”
“Is this room really soundproof?” she asked, leaning in closer.
“Okay, I’m totally down with this game.” I opened my eyes again, wanting to see if she was still real. “And yeah, it’s…”
A conversation I’d had with 007 Holly came tumbling back to me right then. We had been right here on this exact couch, her feet in my lap, her eyes fighting to stay open while a movie had played on the TV.
“The surround sound is really loud,” 007 Holly had said. “Don’t the neighbors complain about the noise? It is an apartment building…”
“This room was made for media,” I had said. “It’s soundproof.”
007 Holly had lifted her head and raised an eyebrow, probably wondering if I’d taken advantage of the soundproofed space with anyone else.
The Holly currently seated on my lap also arched a blond eyebrow. “I figured out something this morning before you left my house. Things you say and certain places and objects are triggering the visions. I walked in here and I remembered the soundproofing conversation and then I thought maybe we could experiment. Since we dated, I figured you must have called me something—some corny term of endearment—but nothing triggered any memory.”
I shifted her hair to one side and rubbed the back of her neck. “I’m sorry, did you say something? I’ve lost the ability to concentrate on anything besides your current position on top of me.”
She rolled her eyes. “Grow up.”
“Unlikely.”
She laughed. “Okay, fine. I’m not really here, you’re dreaming.”
“That sounds about right.” I dropped my hands to my sides and allowed myself to get real about this odd wake-up call. “What are you doing here, Holly? I thought you were going to stay home with your mom?”
She ignored my question and her nose touched my cheek and then the side of my face, causing a shiver to run down my spine. “You must have shaved yesterday. Whatever you use to shave, I remember the smell. Aftershave or shaving cream?”
“Shaving cream.” Her eyes met mine again, causing all the horrible panic of yesterday to come rushing back to me. Those memories, that stupid World B and 007 Holly’s life would eventually ruin this Holly’s mind. The process had already started.
“Oh no…” Holly rested her hands on my cheeks. “Not that face. You just turned about five shades lighter. I thought maybe if I made my entrance distracting enough, we could avoid the guilty, hopeless Jackson Meyer sad face.”
I tried to smile, but I’m sure it looked forced. “So that’s why we’re sharing a couch cushion when there are four perfectly available cushions for you to occupy?”
“Exactly.” She pulled back, looking me up and down. “You still have the face.”
I took a deep breath and tried to shift her sideways to sit beside me but she held her spot firmly. “Look, Hol, there’s something I have to tell you.”
Her finger touched my lips, cutting me off. “I already know. Courtney told me a little while ago while you were sound asleep.”
“You already know?” A tidal wave of grief washed over me. I moved her finger from my mouth but held on to it tight. “Everything?”
“Yes. And you’re still looking at me like I’m an egg about to crack. I thought I had a year before that happens?” She shifted and I thought that was finally the end of my little lap-dance fantasy, but instead she seemed to slide her hips closer until she was completely pressed against me. I sucked in a breath, wishing that I wasn’t the only shirtless one in the room. A smile spread across Holly’s face. “That’s better. Anyway, I went to Mike’s gym yesterday. I walked through the whole place and there were memories hitting me left and right and then after I got home, I realized something very important.”
“What’s that?”
“How I feel when I see those things are really coming from me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, before I couldn’t help wondering if what I felt around you was just implanted into me from another version of me, but it’s not. The connection I get when I’m around you comes from my reaction to how you were with the other me. Like if someone had told me stories of the love you lost and how important that person was to you, I’d like you more because of that. Combine that with what I’ve seen myself…” She touched her lips to my cheek, causing me to sigh again. “So you can stop worrying about me giving up my right to choose or whatever the hell it was that kept you up at night.”
I reached up and held her face in my hands. “I can’t believe Courtney told you everything.”
“I think she wants you to be able to live—however long that is—and not carry this huge weight around.” Holly closed her eyes and drew in a deep, shaking breath, showing something other than amusement for the first time since waking me up. “I’m glad I know. I’m glad she told me, but I don’t want to spend all my time thinking about it.”
“What do you want to spend your time doing, then?” I asked.
“Hanging out with my friends—Adam, Jana, and David. Assuming David doesn’t hate me after the breakup we apparently just had. I want to have Lifetime movie marathons with my mom every Saturday like we did yesterday. Maybe go visit my grandparents in Indiana. And…” She dipped her head, barely touching her mouth to mine before pulling back again. “And I want to be with you. I want to let myself fall in love with you. Again.”
I closed my eyes, feeling warm and happy but incredibly sad all at the same time. I drew Holly’s mouth to mine again, letting myself get lost in kissing her. It was much hotter and more intense than the other night when we had lain in her bed, allowing our legs to entwine but keeping a conservative distance between the rest of us. I felt the freedom she was granting me now and I took it without hesitation.
Holly paused between kisses, resting her forehead against mine, both of us struggling to catch our breath. “Now you look happy.”
I laughed. “Again, consider where you’re sitting.” I smoothed her hair back behind her ears.
“It’s really nice here, actually.” She moved my hands to the bottom of her sweatshirt. I took the hint, slowly lifting it over her head, leaving her in just a skintight tank top.
She sank back on her heels and my thumbs unraveled from her belt loops and traveled the length of her, grazing over her stomach and ribs and then pausing under her breasts. “So, I’m assuming you remember us making out on this couch?”
“Uh-huh.” She laughed. “I remember your stopping and making up some excuse about getting a drink and the look you gave me before pulling your hands out from under my dress was almost painful. Was that your first stab at self-control?”
“I believe it was.” I wrapped my arms around her waist and hid my face against her stomach. “Holly?”
“Hmm…?”
“I love you.”
I had to say it but I couldn’t bear the awkward pause or silence that might have fallen, so I quickly lifted my head again and started kissing her, then eventually succeeded in shifting her off my lap and stretching us both out across the couch.
A while later, after the tank top had joined Holly’s sweatshirt on the floor, after my hands succeeded in covering at least eighty-five percent of her body, I stopped abruptly, my fingers frozen on the waistband of her jeans. I didn’t miss the tiny flinch she tried to conceal. She opened her eyes and looked at me questioningly.
“I should check on Courtney. She was in lot of pain earlier.” I started to crawl over Holly and stick a foot onto the white carpet but she laid her hands on my back and held me in place.
“Courtney’s asleep,” Holly said, eyeing me carefully. “Your dad gave her pain medication and sleeping pills, she’s completely out. What’s wrong, Jackson?”
I blew air out of my cheeks and relaxed into the couch again, resting my head beside hers. “I don’t know … it’s just…”
“Carter,” she whispered.
My jaw tightened at the sound of his name. “I don’t want you to think about that … you know, with me.”
“I don’t think I will.”
The sound of the doorknob’s turning jolted us both and we immediately raised our heads. I grabbed the blanket from the back of the couch and tossed it over us. Holly wiggled around underneath me until we looked more cozy and less in the middle of something NC-17.
Never in a million years could I have been prepared to see Stewart and Adam stumble through the door, laughing, hands all over each other.
“Holy shit,” Holly whispered into my ear.
I clapped a hand over her mouth, wanting to give them a second to realize we were in here. Apparently neither of them had their agent brains turned on. Holly’s eyes went really wide when Stewart gently pushed Adam’s back against the wall and then leaned in to kiss him. And he totally kissed her back.
“It’s the reproduction room all over again,” I muttered before coughing loudly, finally jolting them apart.
Adam’s face was beet red, but it seemed more likely to be from his seeing Holly’s top lying on the floor than us catching him because he quickly covered his eyes with one hand. Stewart snorted and yanked his hand back down. “God, don’t be a baby. There’s no underwear on the floor, not even pants. Junior has issues closing the deal.”
Holly raised her head, eyes darting between me and Stewart. “Wait … what?”
I managed to extricate myself from the couch without uncovering Holly and I grabbed both Adam and Stewart and shoved them toward the door. I left Holly alone to put her clothes back on and went into my room, where Courtney was sound asleep in my bed. I glanced at the couch and saw Mason stretched out on his back, his mouth hanging open and a book barely still clutched in his hand. When I opened my dresser drawer to retrieve a T-shirt, I noticed Dad yawning and stretching in the recliner on the other side of the bed.
“You let Mason sleep in here?” I asked.
“I’m armed,” he reminded me, pulling the lever to lower the feet of the recliner. “Courtney told me what happened with Emily. Actually, she told Holly at the same time. Holly’s okay? You talked to her, right?”
Wouldn’t exactly call it talking …
I glanced out into the hallway then quietly shut the door before sitting on the floor near Dad’s feet. I scratched the back of my head, trying to find the right words. “Can we have a father-son talk? The kind that involves girls and sex?”
Dad’s eyebrows lifted. “I was honestly hoping we were done with those years ago but apparently not.”
I took that as a yes. “I think Holly’s pretty serious about not being treated like an egg ready to crack, as she explained it, but after what Carter did, I just feel like an a*shole for even wanting to be that close to her and then I feel like an a*shole for treating her differently because of that.”
Sympathy filled his expression. “You have to stop comparing that to your being with Holly. Carter wanted to hurt her. You love her. It’s different.”
“I know that,” I said. “It’s just…”
“Someone like Holly,” he continued. “I think she wants to feel normal again. To be in control of what happens to her. You’ll never try to take that from her. So you don’t need to feel guilty.”
I stood up and rested my hand on the doorknob. “We do get to shoot Mason if he attempts to add this particular item to Courtney’s bucket list, right?”
“Absolutely.” He returned to reclining, his eyes trained on Mason as if he might sleepwalk into Courtney’s bed any second. “Life was much easier when you two were five.”
“Or even thirteen,” I agreed.
Dad laughed. “You were easy at thirteen.” He nodded toward Courtney. “This one was a pain in the ass. Every friend’s crisis was her crisis. We weren’t saving enough wildlife. God forbid we put an egg carton in the garbage and not the recycling bin.”
I smiled at the sleeping Courtney. “I used to put soda cans in the Dumpster outside when she wasn’t around. Just to maintain some power over my own garbage.”
Dad looked at me and his face turned serious. “That’s the important stuff, Jackson. Relationships aren’t about idealistic love and happily ever after. It’s those things that bug the shit out of us about each other and yet eventually we find ourselves wishing we could go back and do it all over again.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “That’s the last thing you told me in our official sex talk when I was twelve, the part about relationships not being based on idealistic love. I think I took it to mean something entirely different at the time.”
He looked puzzled. “Huh?”
“I didn’t really do the girlfriend thing much. I thought that’s what you meant, like people my age who did that were just pretending or playing a modified version of husband and wife. That’s what it always seemed like to me. I didn’t get it.”
“Until you did.”
“Right.” I nodded. “Until I did.”
He leaned back and closed his eyes again. “Me, too … me, too.”
When I walked into the kitchen, Holly was already there, dressed and talking to Adam and Stewart like nothing had happened.
“Give yourself a minute, Junior?” Stewart said.
I shoved her toward the dishwasher. “Shut up.” That was when I got whiff of her. I leaned in closer, just to be sure. “You guys are drunk.”
Holly stood behind Adam, nodding, and mouthed, “Trashed.”
Adam was oblivious to this exchange and he clapped his hands together looking genuinely excited. “I want to see the secret room.”
I exchanged glances with Stewart, who shrugged like she didn’t care either way. I started to walk toward Dad’s bedroom and felt the three of them following closely behind.
“Where’s Emily?” I asked.
“In the lab with Kendrick,” Stewart answered. “Dr. Melvin wanted to run some tests. He’s worried about her immune system and something about natural antibodies being different.”
“She has your nose, too. I didn’t notice that on the little version of her.” Holly’s hand drifted down my arm until her fingers landed in my palm.
I don’t think anyone was more fascinated watching my fingerprints open the trapdoor and reveal the secret room between floors than Adam Silverman. The room with the electromagnetic field that prevented time travel in or out of it.
Despite his drunken state, Adam was the first to venture down the rope ladder, bounding into the room with uncharacteristic energy. “Dude, this is kick-ass.”
“I think Adam should have been raised in a fallout shelter in the fifties,” Holly said.
While Adam explored and Stewart followed behind him, putting everything he had lifted up back in its place, I grabbed Holly and pulled her into the center of the room, wrapping my arms around her from behind.
“So you and Stewart had a little fling, huh?” she said, more teasing than angry.
I pressed my face into Holly’s shoulder and groaned. “Do you really want the details? I’ll tell you everything but honestly, I’d rather just forget it. That’s what I was trying to do that night. Forget you.”
She turned her head to look at my face. “Did it work?”
“No, not even close.” I smiled and leaned down to kiss her. She was taking this very well. “Look up.”
She tilted her head, resting it back against my shoulder. “Your dad wrote this stuff?”
“And Eileen.” I buried my face in her neck, kissing the space behind her ear.
“Why?”
I lifted my eyes to the low ceiling again. “I don’t know. I guess it’s romantic. We can ask him if you want?”
She scanned the quotes for a few minutes, and then asked, “What would you write?”
“I’d stick with Shakespeare.” I chanced a glance in Stewart and Adam’s direction. They were occupied with something on the floor, under the small kitchen rug. “Maybe something like, Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”
Holly shifted over about a foot to read some of the other quotes, pulling me along with her. “I’d pick something like, Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
I pressed my cheek against hers and laughed. “Morbid, Hol, very morbid.”
“I like Hemingway better than Shakespeare,” Holly said. “We had a poster at my old gym in Indiana, right behind the uneven bars. Whenever I’d swing around the high bar, it was my focal point, a Hemingway quote … Never confuse movement with action.”
There was something so tranquil about standing in this spot with Holly, reading words my dad and Eileen shared with each other and shutting the rest of the world out. “Supposedly, Hemingway’s most beloved piece of writing was a story he told in six words.”
“Hmm…” Holly relaxed against my shoulder. “Do you know the story?”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Stewart look over at us and then move closer. “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn,” she said before I could answer. “I think me and Junior took the same American Lit class at NYU.”
“Professor Paulson?” I asked.
Before Stewart got a chance to respond, we were distracted by the bottom half of Courtney’s body emerging down the rope ladder. She was followed by Dad, then Mason, then Chief Marshall, and finally, Agent Collins.
“Nine is a bit of a crowd for this space, don’t you think?” I said, releasing Holly and moving beside Courtney. “How are you feeling?”
She turned to me and smiled. “Much better.”
I put an arm around her and we both watched in silence as Dad moved around the room, almost trancelike, his fingers gently brushing over items. Chief Marshall and Collins were in deep discussion about the electromagnetic field when Dad slowly pulled out a record and placed it on the record player, lifting the needle to start the music. It was the same Frank Sinatra album that Kendrick and I had listened to before the big jump to Misfit Island.
“I knew there was something weird about this floor tile!” Adam looked up at all of us, triumphantly holding up a perfect square piece of tile and revealing a hole in the floor.
Of course the eight of us all rushed around Adam, trying to see what was inside the space. What we found was a stack of eight spiral notebooks filled with pages and pages of writing.
“Those were not there before I left 2009 to go to the future,” Stewart said. “I searched that hole myself.”
“I’ll take those,” Marshall said, holding his hands out to Adam. “Looks like we’ve got a lot of reading to do.”
As everyone started to head upstairs again, the promise of something that resembled a lifeline in those notebooks, I grabbed Adam by the back of his shirt, allowing the others to vanish out of sight before asking, “Did you know those were down here? Did Emily tell you?”
“She hinted at it.”
“What do you think is in there?” I asked.
“I don’t know, maybe nothing.”
I rubbed my eyes and stifled a yawn. “This is exactly what I was afraid of. Tiny shreds of hope that either require actions that have impossible odds or consequences that are greater than the benefits.”
“But we have to keep trying, right?” Adam said, sounding surprised by my lack of enthusiasm. “We can’t give up and let this virus invade the world.”
I sighed and sat down on the bed. “Maybe not, but right now I just can’t do this anymore. I’m tired of fighting these battles that just get bigger and bigger and we keep coming full circle right back here and every time I return, the world is a little bit worse than the last time.”
Adam’s eyes were wide as if he couldn’t believe my defeatist attitude. He glanced up the rope ladder and back to me. “It’s gonna happen to me, too, Jackson. What happened to Holly.”
I inhaled a sharp breath. “When?”
“Remember, I started having visions even before Holly,” he said. “I don’t want to be locked up and helpless in solving this problem.”
My heart increased in speed, adrenaline killing my calm buzz. “When is it going to happen?” I asked again. “And how do know? Did Emily tell you?”
“Yeah, she told me. I cornered her in the hospital a few hours ago and she told me everything. I’ve got six months.” The color drained from his face and he sat down beside me. “It’s worse than Holly, Jackson, way worse.”
I laughed under my breath, but there was no humor in it. “What’s worse than hanging yourself after dozens of previous brutal suicide attempts.”
He stared at me, hard and fierce. “Killing five other people before succeeding in suicide.”
I’m sure there was nothing but horror and panic filling my expression. “Six months?”
He nodded. “I don’t want to be a murderer. Not ever. I swear to God I’ll tell you the second I feel like I’m slipping but you have to keep this between you and me, please?”
“I promise, I won’t tell anyone. I trust you. I’ve always trusted you.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t.” He stood up and shook his head. “But I don’t want to turn into a monster. We need to f*cking fix this merging timeline. There’s got to be a way.”
No matter how much Adam seemed to doubt his ability to hold on to good judgment, I didn’t doubt it one bit. In another timeline, Adam had been dying but he still made it a priority to give me a message about not screwing up the world with time travel and that he knew Eyewall was bad. In his last moments, he cared about everyone but himself.
I stood up and clapped a hand on his back. “I won’t let you do anything you’ll regret.”
He let out a breath of relief. “Thanks.”
“Besides making out with Stewart,” I added, getting a shit-eating grin in return from Adam. “Seriously, what’s up with that?”
He shrugged. “No idea. But I sure as hell enjoyed it.”