Timebound

by Rysa Walker

I pulled his face toward mine and stared hard into his eyes. “Whoever Kiernan knew in that version of the timeline, Trey, it wasn’t me. Neither Saul Rand nor Simon will be deciding who has me. I make that choice. I decide the person I love, the person I want. No one else.”

  I pulled my body closer to his and slipped my fingers inside his shirt, running my hand against his chest. “And I love you, Trey. I want you.” I hesitated, looking for the right words. “I’ve never… with anyone… but I want you…”

  Then his mouth was on mine, hard and hungry. His hands moved up the side of my body and I arched reflexively toward him. For several minutes, there was nothing else in the world, just the two of us, his body against mine—and then he broke away and sat up, staring down at the carpet.

  “What’s wrong?” I tried to pull him back toward me, but he shook his head.

  I gave him a weak little smile. “Daphne’s not here. No chaperone, see?”

  He didn’t respond. I was now thoroughly embarrassed and kicking myself for not letting him make the all-important first move. Biting my lower lip to keep it from shaking, I pulled away to the far end of the sofa and hugged my knees, staring at a different spot on the carpet.

  After a moment, I felt his hand running gently down the side of my leg. I didn’t look up.

  “Kate. Kate? Look at me. Please.” A tear was making its way down my cheek, the cheek he couldn’t see. I closed my eyes tight, hoping my other eye wouldn’t turn traitor as well. He got off the couch and knelt on the floor in front of me, brushing the tear away with the pad of his thumb. “Would you just look at me, please?”

  I glanced up and he continued. “You have to know beyond any doubt how badly I want you.” He chuckled softly. “I mean, really Kate, could it be any more obvious?”

  I didn’t answer, even though I knew he was right.

  “At this very minute,” he said, staring into my eyes, “there is nothing on this earth that I want more than you. But we both know that tomorrow or the next day, my memory of this night will be gone. You might remember, but I won’t. And when we make love for the first time, Kate, that’s a memory I want to keep.”

  Trey didn’t leave until nearly midnight. I don’t know if he ever managed to write the Huxley essay. Probably not. He skipped most of his classes the next day, arriving on the doorstep just after noon with lunch from O’Malley’s—lots of onion rings and three obscenely large sandwiches. He hadn’t shaved and he didn’t look like he had slept any more than I had.

  “Ditching school again, Mr. Coleman?” I asked with a soft smile.

  “My girlfriend is about to change this entire timeline. I can’t imagine any scenario in which it actually matters that I left after my first class.”

  He had a point.

  “What about your parents? Estella?”

  “I told them that your grandmother took a turn for the worse yesterday, and that I needed to be with you. Neither of which is a lie,” he added. “I expect the flowers my dad asked me to order will be here shortly.”

  We sat down to eat with Connor, who, despite his great love for corned beef on rye, didn’t seem to have much appetite. The three of us reviewed the game plan as we finished lunch. “Try your best to follow her,” Connor said, “but you also need to keep plan B as an option, in case Katherine disappears into the crowd. Because she probably will.”

  Connor was right. The fair attracted an average of 120,000 visitors per day between the time it opened in May and the time it closed at the end of October. That’s about three times as many people as Disney World handles each day, and the Exposition was held on a much smaller plot of land. The odds of me being able to keep her in sight were pretty slim.

  “I’ll try to keep up with her,” I said. “If I can’t, she’ll be with the mayor’s group at the Ferris wheel at ten fifteen, and after lunch she’ll be downtown at the place where they held all the big meetings during the Expo—the one that’s the Art Institute now.”

  “Right,” Connor said. “They called it the Auxiliary Building. But that’s going to mean navigating Chicago’s public transit. I know you’ve read CHRONOS notes on the era, but I’d feel a lot better if you stayed close to a stable point. If worse comes to worst, you can come back here and then take another stab at it.”

  He was right—we could roll the dice more than once. If I lost sight of Katherine entirely and simply couldn’t find her, I could always return to the stable point and give it another try. A second jump would, however, mean multiple versions of myself walking around the fair, which would complicate things. I had a bad gut feeling about taking too long to accomplish this anyway, and both Connor and Trey felt the same. Katherine’s house was relatively well protected by an alarm service, but we were totally unarmed. As much as I hate guns, it wasn’t too comforting that Simon and whatever other minions of Saul’s had weapons and we didn’t. And, as Trey’s dad had noted, Cyrists now had friends in very high places.

  Connor and I had spent the better part of the morning going over Katherine’s diary entries for the October 28th jump, gathering what details we could about her hotel and her itinerary on that trip. By the time Trey arrived, we’d had to admit defeat on one count—Katherine had failed to mention the hotel specifically, other than noting that it was near the fair. She had stayed at the Palmer House on the first jump for those dates, but that information wasn’t much help since it was the slightly later version of Katherine who was targeted. There were several other bits of info that would have been really nice to know, and I mentally kicked myself for not having asked these obvious questions when Katherine was around to answer.

  As I picked at my pastrami, it occurred to me that I could just make a jump back to the previous day and ask Katherine, but Connor quickly nixed that plan. “Can you honestly tell me you won’t warn her?” he asked. “That you won’t do something to ensure she doesn’t walk out that door when Simon grabs you?”

  I considered lying, but I finally went with the truth. “No, Connor—but so what? Why shouldn’t I warn her? Or warn myself not to go outside? It’s not like this is such a wonderful version of the timeline that it couldn’t do with a bit of alteration, and I’m willing to risk having some out-of-sync memories.”

  Connor shook his head angrily. “Why in hell do you think she sent me upstairs, Kate? Our first priority has to be protecting you. No matter what. As much as it tore me apart to see Katherine vanish, at least I knew it was reversible—well, I knew it was reversible once you walked in the door, at any rate,” he continued, his voice softening. “That’s my point. Say we stop what happened yesterday—they’ll almost certainly just attack the house at that point. If we change something and Katherine survives, but you don’t—well, there are no mulligans without you, Kate. Then Katherine dies, Rand wins, and we just get to sit back and see what he does with the world.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what a mulligan was, but Trey was nodding. “Okay—that explains why she gave Simon the medallion even though she clearly saw me driving up. There was still a risk that he would pull your CHRONOS key before I could reach him. She was buying Connor some extra time to extend the barrier.”

  “And buying you some extra time to grab a weapon, although I don’t know if she realized that,” Connor added. “I just hope that slimy bastard is in a world of pain today.”

  The floral arrangement from Trey’s dad arrived later in the afternoon. It was beautiful—white lilies, lavender roses, and purple alstroemeria, with clusters of tiny white baby’s breath. I hoped Katherine would eventually see it, and I was glad that there would, at least within this house, be some reminders of my relationship with Trey. Even though every little memento would hurt like hell, that still seemed better than what he was facing—no memories at all.

  The flowers were followed within minutes by the delivery of a large hatbox. It contained a rather elaborate green bonnet, which I’d quite liked the idea of traveling without. So with the last of my costume in hand, we set a firm departure time of 6 P.M. a
nd the three of us began final preparations for my jump.

  An emerald-green parasol lay on the bed, next to the black handbag that Katherine had carried on her last CHRONOS trip. The bag was about forty years out of fashion for a trip to 1893, but it would have to do, as it contained several hidden pockets that would come in handy. I couldn’t carry luggage, since I would emerge within the fairgrounds and there were no hotels on the premises. So the purse was stuffed with my spending money (all pre-1893, a coin collector’s dream), one of the diaries, a vintage map of the Exposition, a hairbrush, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a tiny first-aid kit, a flask of water, and four energy bars.

  Connor’s inner Katherine had balked at several items in the bag, noting correctly that they were not historically appropriate, but this wasn’t a typical research mission and I might not be able to stand in line for hours to get food or drink. I cut several paper bags from Whole Foods into rectangles so that I could wrap the energy bars in plain brown paper—they’d probably get hard, but at least I wouldn’t starve. And I wasn’t traveling without a toothbrush if I might have to stay overnight, even if that toothbrush was made of sparkly pink plastic.

  At a few minutes after five, I went into the bathroom to change into my undergarments. Trey waited outside so that he could help me lace the corset. I felt a bit awkward when I walked back into the bedroom, even though far more of my body was exposed by the shorts and tank tops I usually wore than by the yards of white silk and lace in which I was now enveloped.

  He raised an appreciative eyebrow and smiled as he took me by the shoulders, then turned me around to begin pulling the laces together. He didn’t cinch it as tightly as Katherine had, but I thought it was tight enough that the dress would fit. When he was done with the laces, he lifted my hair and pushed it over one shoulder, pressing his lips against the nape of my neck and adding several more very gentle kisses down my back until he reached the lace edge of the camisole. His breath was warm against my skin and I locked my knees to keep from melting into a gooey puddle on the floor.

  “Promise me,” Trey said, very softly, as he turned me around to face him, “that one day, I will have the pleasure of unlacing this contraption. I can see why you’re not too happy with it, but there is something to be said for opening a gift very slowly.”

  I smiled up at him with a hopeful look. “You could just unlace it now?”

  “No can do, pretty girl,” he said, shaking his head. He sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled me onto his lap. “You have a job to finish. First, you’re going to stay away from tall, dark strangers at the fair, especially ones who time travel.” I blushed a bit at the veiled reference to Kiernan, but nodded. “I’d also prefer that you stay away from the guy who ran that World’s Fair Hotel.”

  “No worries there,” I said. “I’m going to have enough on my hands trying to prevent one murder, without taking on a serial killer. If I have to stay overnight, I’ll follow Katherine’s lead and catch a cab to the Palmer House.”

  “Okay—next, you’re going to save Katherine and come right back here. And finally, you’re going to find me. That shouldn’t be too hard, even if I’m not at Briar Hill.”

  I held back the tears that were burning my eyes. “It won’t matter, Trey. You won’t know me.”

  “Correct,” he said, and then flashed me a big grin.

  “Then why are you smiling?”

  “Because I know somethin’ you don’ know.”

  “And what is that?” My lips twitched, both at the Princess Bride reference and at the fact that I’d walked straight into his joke. “I already know you’re not left-handed.”

  “It comes to this,” he continued, the smile fading but never quite leaving his eyes. “I’ve been thinking pretty hard about the weeks since we met and I’m almost certain that I fell in love with you the moment you opened your eyes, right there on the floor in trig class. So does it really matter? You do what you have to do in 1893—I’m not even going to think about the possibility of you failing, because you won’t fail—and then you find me.”

  “And exactly what am I supposed to say when I find you, Trey Coleman?”

  He laughed. “Don’t say anything. Or say, ‘Wrong class,’ like you did the first time. It won’t make a bit of difference what you say. Smile at me, flip me onto my back with one of your wicked ninja moves, and then kiss me—even if I forget every single thing about you, I’m a guy, Kate. Believe me, I’m not going to push you away.”

  “Maybe not… but you’ll think I’m crazy.”

  He shrugged and kissed my nose. “Thought you were crazy that first day, too, but I’m still here, right?”

  I couldn’t argue with that, and even if I’d had a viable argument, I couldn’t bear the thought of taking the little glimmer of hope from his eyes.

  The spare CHRONOS medallion was shining, bright and blue, on the nightstand. I tucked it into the lined, hidden pocket near the bottom of my petticoat, and then Trey helped me into the dark green dress and the annoying boots. We even managed to get my hair into an orderly, if not ornate, chignon and I arranged the bonnet on top.

  It looked a bit ridiculous to me.

  Trey, of course, said that I looked perfect—although something in his eyes told me he was still envisioning me in the white corset and petticoats that he knew were underneath. He fastened the bracelet that Katherine had given me around my wrist. The charm matched the dress perfectly—the ivory lace and green silk echoing the hues of the pearls and jade that formed the hourglass.

  Connor was sitting in the kitchen when we came downstairs. He had been looking more and more uneasy about the entire jump as the day progressed. Judging from his expression when we walked in, I suspected that he had a full list of last-minute concerns to tick off. He glanced at the outfit and nodded once, however, which seemed to mean that I passed inspection, and then he turned toward Trey.

  “Do you mind if Kate and I talk… privately? For just a moment? I hate to ask, but…”

  Trey shook his head, although he looked a bit concerned. “No problem, Connor. Daphne’s on the patio. We’ll toss the Frisbee for a while.” He leaned over and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and then headed out the back door.

  Connor watched him as he walked out. “He seems in a better mood than last night.”

  “I guess. What’s up?” Connor didn’t answer for a moment. I don’t know if he expected some private confession from me about why Trey’s mood had improved, but I just raised an eyebrow and waited until he finally spoke.

  “You don’t have to do this, Kate. We’ll find another way. You’re taking an awful risk and it just doesn’t seem… right, to let you go.”

  I smiled at him and walked over to the coffeepot. It was still warm, so I poured the remainder into a mug. “If you were going to go all protective on me, Connor, couldn’t you have done it before we buttoned up these horrid shoes? And the hair? And—”

  “I’m serious, Kate.”

  I sat down beside him and squeezed his hand. “I know you are, Connor. But what choice do we have, really? I’m not willing to give up my entire family.”

  He motioned toward the backyard with his head. “And what about Trey? It’s pretty obvious how you feel, Kate—and he’s been head over heels since the first day you dragged him in the door. Are you willing to give him up?”

  Having spent half the day either crying or fighting down tears, I wasn’t a bit surprised to feel them rising to the surface again. “Again, do I have a choice, Connor? And maybe Trey is right. He’s convinced himself that this won’t matter—that I’ll find him and we’ll be together. I’ll just have a few memories that he doesn’t.”

  “I’m not trying to make things harder on you, Kate, it’s just—” He broke off and looked down at the table, his thumbnail tracing a groove in the wood along the edge. “Katherine tell you about my kids?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ve always wished I had known what was coming—even if I couldn’t prevent it, I could
have prepared, said good-bye, you know?” He gave me a rueful smile. “But I didn’t get the option.”

  He sighed and pulled an envelope out of his pocket. “Don’t get mad at Trey—all he did was give him the address—he doesn’t even know this arrived. It was Katherine’s decision not to show it to you—said she didn’t see the point in upsetting you. She was probably right, but… maybe you should know…” He pushed the letter toward me.

  It was typewritten, but I recognized the signature at the bottom instantly.

  Kate,

  I remembered the name Briar Hill from the ID you showed me. I didn’t remember your friend’s last name, but fortunately there was only one Trey and one of the math teachers at Briar Hill located him for me. Trey gave me your address, but made it crystal clear that I’d better not hurt you again.

  I never meant to hurt you at all, Kate. I hope you can understand my reaction. A lot of what you told me seems too incredible to believe, but I am convinced that you’re my daughter or at least the daughter I would have had, if I’d ever known your mother.

  If you decide that this timeline is where you belong, please call me. Do you need help? Do you need money, a place to stay? I want to know you—at the very least, maybe we can be friends?

  Please call. Or write. I don’t know how I’ll explain this to Emily or the boys, but we’ll find a way to make it work.

  By the time I reached the end, tears were pouring down my face in a steady stream. At the bottom, I could see where he’d started to sign Harry, but he’d crossed it out. Instead, he had added the same signature I’d seen at the bottom of every birthday card, postcard, and note he’d ever written to me—Dad.

  Connor looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, Kate. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to show you… I just…”

  I could hear Trey laughing in the backyard, telling Daphne she’d made a good catch. Part of me wanted to view the letter as an omen, a sign that I should reconsider. But I shook my head.