Any Given Lifetime

by Leta Blake

  “Hey, Joshua, I think he needs to be tickled awake, what do you think?”

  Joshua heard Sam screech, and then Lee said, “I love you. Bye, babe,” and the connection went dead.

  Joshua grinned, heading back toward Stouder Lumber.

  As he finally settled at his desk, he brought his hand up to his cheek and touched where he could still feel the barest phantom touch from Neil in his dream. He wiped it away and cleared his throat, determined to focus on the present.

  Chapter Seven

  August 2027—Atlanta, Georgia

  Neil didn’t like it when his mother cried. She was a special woman, and he’d always owe her for having raised someone as difficult as him and not just giving up, tossing him to the foster-care system or putting him in an oven and roasting him alive. He knew how rough it had been for her.

  More than that, though, he loved her. She was funny, smart, and tender.

  He patted her back awkwardly and said, “Mom, it’s just across town.”

  He stopped short of saying that she could visit whenever she liked. If he had anything to do with it, he’d be far too busy designing and helping to run a massive experimental nanite study while simultaneously earning his medical and engineering degree at Emory University. Maybe she could stop by and bring him something to eat? Even that seemed like an interruption.

  “And you’re sure that you can’t live at home?” she asked. “You’re only fifteen, Neil. You’re still so young.”

  Neil frowned. Only fifteen. If only he felt fifteen, then everything would be different. Instead, he’d felt thirty from the time he was born and had the memories to go along with it. He didn’t have linear access, though. His experience of his prior life was a mix of instinctual knowledge and sudden, sometimes overwhelmingly specific, memories. He knew enough of his prior incarnation to know that he would have disdained the very idea of an individual soul that passes from life to life. And yet, here he was, a prisoner in a fifteen-year-old body. He sometimes told the Neil-From-Before, the one who still wanted to dispute that this was even possible, to suck it.

  “Yeah, well, deny it all you want, but I’ve never been young, Mom.”

  He’d tried calling her Alice once because he’d never had the awe of her that most kids seemed to carry for their mothers. He’d read in some schmaltzy book in his pediatrician’s office when he was six years old that to every child the word for God is ‘mother,’ but for him the word for God had always been ‘fuck you, why did you do this to me, you son of a bitch.’ Assuming God existed at all, and he still had serious doubts on that score. The word for the woman who loved him despite the fact that he was probably the furthest thing from the child she’d dreamed about was just Alice, as far as he was concerned, and that sufficed.

  Alice seemed comfortable, the most respectful choice, really, because it set them on par as equals. And while Neil didn’t really see her as being on his intellectual level, it was a good thank you for loving him, protecting him from Jim during those scary young years, and for dealing with his crap.

  Alice, though, had been furious. He’d winced when she slammed her hand on the kitchen table and said, “What did you just call me?”

  “Uh, your name?”

  “Uh-uh, buster,” she’d said to him, pointing a finger at him in a way that was nearly threatening. It was something Neil was not accustomed to from her, and he shrank back.

  “I gave birth to you, do you hear me? I don’t care how smart you are, how much you remember about a previous lifetime, or if you freak out your peers and teachers by correcting everybody about everything. Nor do I care that you don’t look a damn thing like me, or like Marshall for that matter. I don’t care if you’ll always be more advanced than I am in every way, but I spent thirty-six hours enduring labor to push you out of my vagina, and you will call me Mom. Do you understand me?”

  Neil had nodded slowly and said nothing for a few minutes. He’d waited until she started eating her dinner again before he said, around a mouthful of warm mashed potatoes, “Well, I’m not more advanced in every way. You’ve got the cooking thing down.”

  It had been a huge concession for him, and he’d known that she knew it. It had been an apology of sorts, and she’d clearly known that, too. Her lips had quirked up and she said, “And you can’t heat a pot of beans to save your life.”

  Neil had smirked.

  She had shaken her head. “If you paid attention to cooking the way you pay attention to your experiments, you’d be just fine.”

  “Thanks…Mom,” Neil had said and cleared his throat.

  He’d never called her Alice again outside the confines of his own head. He figured Joshua would be proud of him—not only for making a choice to do something that was no sweat off his back and which clearly meant a lot to her, but also for actually loving the woman. Alice was, all in all, a good mother, and Neil enjoyed being around her, which was saying a lot.

  Now, though, at the not-so-tender age of not-so-fifteen, Neil was leaving home, and Alice seemed to be having a hard time handling it. In some ways, he didn’t understand why. It wasn’t like he made life easy for her. From the time he was quite small, he’d been instrumental in ostracizing her from any kind of community. It hadn’t been on purpose. Being him just seemed to do it.

  He was different this time around. Even in his prior life, he’d been difficult to know and like, but now it was like all of his impatience, irritability, focus, and social awkwardness had been distilled by lost time and rage. He was no one’s idea of a fun person to be around.

  But Alice was still young and beautiful, in Neil’s admittedly biased opinion, and he saw his moving out to be a good thing for her. Maybe she could date again. Find someone to build a life with. Hell, it wasn’t even too late to have another child—maybe the next one would be normal, and be the kind of kid that Alice deserved. He wanted that for her.

  At the same time, Neil knew he’d been Alice’s whole life from the moment he was born. She’d worked to give him the best education she could until he’d gotten his first scholarship to university classes at the age of twelve. And she’d done it all alone.

  Her parents weren’t dead, but they might as well have been as far as Alice was concerned. She’d told him the year before, on a rainy, drab Christmas Eve when she’d had a little celebratory wine as they opened presents—renewed subscriptions to medical and engineering journals for him, and a microscope for her (okay, it was for him; he was a terrible son)—about how her folks had been addicts. Her earliest memories were drenched in the scent of marijuana, but it had progressed from there to much harder drugs over time.

  “And then, when I was nineteen, I met Marshall Green,” Alice had said, toying with a ribbon from the wrapping. “He was handsome, and he promised to take care of me. I moved in with him as fast as I could. And I was pregnant with you before he left for his first tour in Afghanistan.” Alice had sipped her drink and sighed. “He was a good man, your father.”

  Neil had rolled his lips in and bitten back the reply that Gerald Russell, the man who’d died in a car wreck in Boston nearly forty-five years ago, was his father. Neil had only seen photos of Marshall and a few video clips, but he fully remembered Gerald’s sharp nose, quick wit, and long fingers that shuffled cards and drilled him with questions about the rules of gin rummy. But he was glad to carry Marshall’s last name now, instead of that asshole Jim’s. That was another thing Alice had done for them both after they’d left—erased Jim’s name from their legal documents.

  After a few quiet moments, Alice had sighed and said, “Parents. Can’t live with ’em, can’t be born without ’em.”

  Neil had nodded. “Some aren’t too bad, though.” He’d wanted her to know how he felt. It could’ve been worse: At least she loved him and let him do what he wanted with his life. And he loved her, too.

  Alice had shrugged. “You probably had it better last time around.”

  It was the first time she’d ever mentioned Neil’s family fro
m his prior life. He’d thought about telling her before—about the wealth, the house, the travel, and the boats. The loneliness, the pressure, and the loss. The fear he’d felt when his parents had died, and he’d been left alone with all that money and all that responsibility. But he hadn’t. It’d seemed like something she didn’t need to hear. But there were so many things that he remembered that he’d never shared with anyone. Part of him longed for her to know.

  Watching Alice twist the ribbon around her finger again, he’d decided it was time. If she thought they were better than her, then that, at least, was something he could set straight. She was the parent who’d loved him unconditionally.

  “Why don’t you ever ask about them?” he’d asked.

  “About your parents from your life before?”

  “Yeah.” He had licked his lips quickly, surprised by the zip of nerves.

  “It makes me feel guilty,” she had said, swallowing another mouthful of wine. “I mean—if she was great, better than me, why would I want to hear that? And if she wasn’t…then why would you want to tell me? It’s better left in the past, isn’t it?”

  “She wasn’t better than you,” Neil had said. “And she wasn’t worse, either. She was just different.”

  Alice had shrugged.

  “And she had to put up with a lot less, too. I didn’t have all of these pesky memories last time around. I was an actual child then, not a freak.”

  “Neil,” she had started, but he put his hand up.

  “Don’t, Mom. It’s fine.” He’d stood, went to her chair, and knelt in front of her. “I just want you to know. She wasn’t better than you. If she’d had to deal with me, the way I am now, she’d have probably murdered me in my sleep.”

  “You don’t know a mother’s love,” Alice had said softly.

  “I know your love,” Neil had said. “And even though everything about being stuck here in this body wanting something I don’t think I’ll ever have sucks. You don’t. You don’t suck, Mom, and I love you.”

  “Ah, Neil.” She’d laughed, tears shining in her eyes. “Ever honest. And I love you, too.”

  Now, nine months later, standing beside Alice in the parking lot in front of his dorm, Neil brushed a tear from Alice’s cheek and said, “Mom, you know I hate it when you cry.”

  “They’re happy tears,” she lied, and Neil groaned.

  “Right.”

  “Let me have my feelings, Neil.”

  “All right.” She’d always let him have his feelings. All of his anger and rage, all of his love for Joshua. He’d itched with helplessness his whole life, and she never told him he was wrong for it. “But don’t feel them too long.”

  Alice laughed through her tears. “You don’t get to tell me how long I get to wallow in my empty nest.”

  Neil loved Alice’s laugh and big smile, and despite his best comedic efforts, they were far too infrequent in his opinion. He tucked her long brown hair behind her ear, kissed her wet cheek, and said, “Okay, Mom. I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes. You have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Alice nodded, threw her arms around Neil, and squeezed him so tightly that it hurt to breathe.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” he said awkwardly, patting her back. “This will be good for you.”

  She huffed a laugh, pulled back, and looked up at him before forcing a bright smile. “Okay, kiddo. Just remember, you can always come home. No matter what.”

  Neil felt a strange tug in his chest, and a small lump came to his throat. He coughed and kissed her forehead and backed away as she got into her car. He didn’t watch her drive off, hustling back to his new dorm room to get his papers ready for the meeting. But when he walked back through the parking lot on his way to the professor’s office, he suddenly wished he’d hugged her one more time before she’d gone. And then he shrugged it away.

  He’d see her again soon enough.

  Chapter Eight

  October 2030—Atlanta, Georgia

  The first time Neil had sex after having been forced to endure childhood and adolescence all over again, he was eighteen years old, and it was with his roommate.

  It came as a pretty big surprise to Neil, too. He was under no illusions about his physical attractiveness. He was bony and looked young for his age. It’d been the same in his first life, too, when he’d been nearly twenty-five before he’d grown into himself. Neil remembered that when he was Neil Russell, sometime after his twenty-fifth birthday, he’d had no trouble getting laid, but before that it’d been a parade of disturbing blowjobs with closeted jocks and bullies. At least he’d skipped that particular brand of misery this time around, even if he’d been so horny that if it was possible to go blind from masturbating, as his first mother had informed him decades ago, he absolutely would have.

  His third year at Emory had started out well enough. Neil was rarely around, and his newly assigned roommate, Derek, was a huge improvement over the prior year’s asshole. At least Derek was gay, which took away the burden of having to worry about whether his sexuality would be a problem that might result in injuries.

  Neil had never told his first two roommates because he’d never felt entirely safe to disclose that information. They were both raging heterosexuals, and jocks to boot, so he’d always been a little concerned that they’d find his homosexuality threatening and kill him in his sleep during some steroid-fueled panic attack.

  It wasn’t like being up front with anyone about his sexual preferences mattered much those first years. He was an underage, scrawny genius; no one wanted to fuck him anyway, and he’d been far too absorbed in his actual work to risk his life to get laid. His hand had never failed him yet.

  Then Derek came along. He wasn’t just ‘out’; he was ridiculously gay. He moisturized and had gobs of hair gunk sitting all over their communal sink. He didn’t flap around much, but he said things like, “That’s my bitch,” and he spoke openly to anyone who would listen to him about his endless hunt for sex on the various apps available. And since Derek often mistook Neil’s silence for ‘listening,’ Neil heard about Derek’s craving for cock a lot.

  Neil thought Derek was a good-looking guy. A little skinny, maybe, but he had cheekbone-length dyed black hair that fell down over his dark eyes, and that contrasted nicely with his pale skin. Neil only admitted to himself after the first time they fucked that he’d ever noticed any of these things about Derek’s physical attractiveness. At first, they’d just lived together, and that was that, and that was fine with Neil.

  But one night, after hours and hours in the lab, working out some kinks for the next stage of the upcoming nanite trial, Neil came home to find Derek sitting on the sofa in nothing but a pair of loose yoga pants, his cock out, jerking off to some porn on the wall-sized screen that Derek’s parents had provided.

  Neil shut the door behind him, surprised that Derek didn’t stop what he was doing or act at all ashamed. Instead, Derek motioned at him.

  “C’mere. You top, right?”

  Neil nodded. Yeah, he preferred to top. He remembered that from his prior life—the clench of a guy’s ass around his cock, the grunts a guy made as he’d thrust inside. Neil was hard before he could even turn the lock on the door and drop his bag to the floor.

  There was no preamble. Derek had condoms, and he wanted to be fucked. Neil wasn’t about to argue with that. As Neil’s cock sank into Derek’s tight, gripping ass for the first time, his eyes rolled back, and he groaned in pleasure; his nipples ached, his balls drew up, and he got four thrusts in before he was filling the condom with his jizz. It didn’t matter, though. It had been so long for him, and it was so good. For once his youth was on his side. He quickly got another condom in place, while Derek wriggled his ass in open invitation, and then Neil fucked him hard enough that Derek scrambled at the carpet, cried out, and threw himself back onto Neil’s slamming cock in happy abandon.

  They went at it over and over for four delirious hours. Neil’s balls ached, and his legs shook when h
e tried to stand up afterward. Derek smiled, limp and drooling, as he lay facedown on the carpet beside the sofa, his ass still up and his hole clenching at air.

  Neil was covered in sex and wanted to wash it off, get some water and food, and then rest—alone, in his own bed. He hoped Derek wasn’t the cuddling type. Neil tried to convince his legs to do their job long enough to make it to the shower, but he collapsed against the sofa before making it three steps. His dick was still twitching and his balls twanged hard as he panted there, gaining strength for another push toward the bathroom.

  Oh God, he suddenly realized—he hoped Derek didn’t expect anything real from this. He groaned as the thought dawned on him and reality finally overrode his lust-addled mind. He’d fucked his roommate; things could get awkward now.

  “Jesus, you’re hung,” Derek murmured. It was the first thing he’d said aside from ‘more,’ ‘harder,’ ‘please,’ and ‘fuck’ since he’d asked if Neil topped. “I feel like you turned me inside out, man.”

  Neil swallowed and rubbed a hand over his eyes. He’d already done his duty and looked at Derek’s ass to make sure it was okay. It’d been a little red, but otherwise anything Derek was feeling was just a stretch, and he’d be fine.

  “Listen,” Neil said. “We’re…roommates. This was—”

  Derek rolled over to his back, grinning blissfully. “Don’t tell me we’re not doing this again, because we so are. But if you don’t wanna be my boyfriend, that’s fine. Just fuck me through the floor like this and we’ll call it win/win, okay?”

  Neil was uncertain. He’d experienced this kind of thing before. Back in his first life, there’d been a fellow graduate student, and he’d fallen for Neil after promising that he just wanted sex. But that was a different time. Another life. Derek was different, from a new generation, and he seemed completely fine with casual sex. Neil had heard it going on through the thin wall separating their bedrooms often enough to know just how fine Derek was with that.