Forever Layla: A Time Travel Romance

by Melissa Turner Lee

  I swallowed. “It’s…um…nice.”

  Images started playing through my head. It was in slow motion with fans blowing her blond hair about and her lips painted red, like in a “hair metal” video. The wheezing started, and she was soon beside me, digging into my shirt pocket, handing me my inhaler.

  I accepted it and took a couple of puffs.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s the ocean air down here or something.” I swallowed hard after the lie. If I couldn’t breathe just thinking of her in it, they’d probably have to call 911 when she actually put it on.

  “We need to find a Laundromat so I can wash these. And find a drugstore. I have to buy some makeup and toiletries.”

  “Right.”

  We drove around until we found a drugstore. She picked out what she needed and a pair of flip flops, and I paid. She took the receipts and added them up in the truck as I drove to the Laundromat the cashier had told us about.

  “I’m going to pay you back for all of this. I promise. I don’t like to mooch off people.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Michael and the guys love mooching off me. That’s why I let them think I’m broke. I make a nice cut with the band, and my parents give me an allowance. I hardly spend any of it. Besides, I was raised to help a lady in distress.”

  We got to the Laundromat and made change in the machine. Layla threw all the laundry into a couple of washers with some soap we bought there.

  She turned to face me. “Thank you. And I meant what I said. I will pay you back when my ride comes.”

  I looked into her dark eyes. “Stop worrying about it. Three bags of clothes from the thrift store cost me a whole $20.” Then I thought aloud, “What do you plan to do if your ride doesn’t come back?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked down at her lap

  “I could help you get a ticket back to California.”

  She looked away. “That wouldn’t work.”

  “Why not? I don’t understand. He doesn’t have to drive you back. You could get there yourself. I mean, it is the obvious solution.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got nowhere to go if he doesn’t come back for me. I can’t explain. But he has to come back or I’m stuck.”

  “Look, we leave Sunday. I can’t leave you here alone. If he doesn’t come back, and you can’t go back to California alone…think about coming to Chesnee with us.”

  She shook her head, refusing to consider it. “He will come back. He has to. I can’t think any other way right now.”

  We sat in silence, listening to the hum and slosh of the washer. I tried to think of some way to earn her trust when it occurred to me what I’d seen my dad do. When little kids who came to his dental office were too scared to talk to him, he’d turn it into a game of pretend.

  “Okay, I have an idea. You are obviously hiding something because of a misguided sense of obligation to some jerk. You seem to want to tell me what’s going on, but all you say is you can’t tell me.”

  “It’s not misguided, and I can’t tell you.”

  “But you’d like to tell me the truth if you could, right?”

  She looked up at me with dejected dark chocolate pearls and nodded.

  “Okay, so tell me two stories. In them tell me all about why you can’t go home to California. How you know what I drink and about my notebooks, AND… why you don’t want to be called Layla?”

  “But I can’t—”

  “Hear me out first. One story will be a lie, all made up, and one will be true. You never have to tell me which one is which. But this way, you don’t have to be completely dishonest either.”

  She didn’t say anything as she looked to the side and pondered the idea.

  “Tell me. I know you want to.”

  She turned to face me, licked her lips, and then bit the bottom one. “Okay…What if I told you I was from the future? What if in the future, you are going to be famous?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Be serious. At least make the lie a little believable.”

  “I am.”

  “And how did you get here from the future and why would I be famous? The soundboard guy isn’t usually who all the girls have posters of on their bedroom walls.”

  “No, but a guy who discovers time travel would be famous.”

  I turned to face her, my eyes wide. “What?”

  “You have visions, and you write them down in these.” She scooted around me to pick up my notebook I had placed on the seat beside me. “You always carry one. You have a stack of them full of all your visions. One you had when you were sixteen was for time travel. You wrote it all out in your notebook, and it has haunted you ever since. Every equation. The waves that push time forward and back, and the molecular structure that would have to be reordered to make it work. You saw it all. And in the back of your mind, all the time, at any given moment, you are trying to figure out how to make it a reality.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but no words would come out.

  “What if I’ve grown up hearing all about you and your time travel idea and the woman who inspired you—Layla? What if your love for Layla is what drove you to accomplish your dream? What if your dream inspired another dreamer with an even bigger and better dream all because of you and Layla? What if in a future where love is thought of as an old-fashioned fairytale, as extinct as the dinosaurs, where people don’t dare to wish for it any longer, a little girl heard stories of your love for Layla and wished with all her heart to be Layla. And then one day, a man with a time machine dropped her off to meet you. Only you called me Layla, and I realized I’d been abandoned by my tour guide. What if I’m terrified that I’m going to ruin everything and get in the way of you meeting the real Layla? And what if I’m even more frightened at the idea I might actually be Layla…the woman who breaks your heart and puts the distant look in your eyes?”

  My mouth hung open as I tried to form words.

  She smiled and then laughed. “Or maybe the guys in the band aren’t as broke as they pretend to be either. Maybe they’ve peeked in your notebooks behind your back and decided to freak you out and play an elaborate joke on you. One you’d never believe they could pull off. Maybe I’m a hired actress to mess with you during spring break, and the guys are back at the motel laughing?”

  The washers stopped, and she jumped up to move the clothes to a rolling buggy and then to the dryer.

  I sat back, thinking of both stories. One was more believable than the other, and it wasn’t the one most would think.

  The guys could never pull off such an elaborate joke. First off, they weren’t that organized. They might have an idea and joke about it. But they couldn’t even make it through a writing session together with one original song. When they tried, we always ended up at The Bantam Chef for milkshakes and several rounds of Street Fighter. Second, the guys could hardly scrape together enough money to split an order of fries. And there was the other part. I’d never told anyone about my vision of time travel. No one—not Michael or the other guys, not even my Mom knew about the visions. That notebook wasn’t kept with the others. But I’d tried not to take that idea too seriously. Time travel wasn’t real. It was the stuff of science fiction. I wasn’t going to study physics but dentistry and join my dad’s dental office when I finished school. The time-travel vision was tucked away in my notebook for someday next to never.

  But the time-travel idea was never really fully tucked away, even if the notebook was. That special notebook held sketches of how the whole thing would work. All the numbers I saw. Pages and pages of numbers and drawings. Waves and algorithms. Some of the formulas that I saw, I had no clue how to work yet. They really were like visions from another source and not like I thought them at all. It was more like they were sent out and my mind caught it.

  I looked back at her wide-eyed and swallowed. What if it were true? In the future, I would build it and it would work and people would know about it. It was decided and she had told me. Was this why our mee
ting had felt so much like the way my visions had made me feel? Was she some version of them—a beacon pointing me to my destiny?

  And she told me I would love a girl named Layla—a beautiful woman who was glamorous and inspiring. I don’t know why she couldn’t see herself as all that. She’d shown up the night before, looking like a Hollywood actress from a different era, and she knew about Philo T. Farnsworth. I looked at her, and at that moment knew what I would do with my life. I would discover time travel and make a time machine. Kids would learn about me in school, and I would love a woman named Layla. And whether she wanted to be or not, I had a feeling she would be Layla or maybe always had been. In my mind, she was forever Layla.

  Chapter 4

  WE DROVE BACK TO THE motel. I didn’t talk. I couldn’t. There was too much going on in my head.

  Layla took the bag of clothes from me. “I’m going to change out of this dress and go lie out by the pool.”

  “I’ll wait outside with the guys until you’re done.”

  She went to the room while I joined the guys who lounged around the pool. The sun was beating down hard overhead already. It would have been too hot if it weren’t for the breeze blowing off the ocean beside us.

  Travis, Joey, and Mark played volleyball in the water with some girls, while Michael had his guitar out, strumming it for a brunette girl sitting by him at one of the tables. He gave her his normal line when I took a seat in a lounge chair nearby to listen to his bull.

  Michael played a few chords of Nirvana’s "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and sang along. The girl started singing too, but way off key.

  “You have a beautiful voice.”

  “Thank you.” She placed her hand over her heart and smiled. The wind blew tendrils of dark hair around her olive face. “I’ve always wanted to be a singer.”

  “You’d be great at it.” Michael did that smirk he practiced in the mirror.

  I coughed. “Bullcrap.” And coughed again. Michael gave me a quick glare that the girl totally missed.

  “Do you play guitar?”

  The tone-deaf girl shook her head. “No. But I’d love to learn.”

  “Come have a seat in my lap, and I’ll teach you. I want you to know, I don’t let just anyone handle my instrument.”

  I rolled my eyes as I watched her fall for it. The truth was, he’d let just about any attractive girl handle his instrument. The same shtick with every girl. He convinced each of them that they were special, but to him they were all the same. It was the one thing I didn’t like about my best friend. He had no conscience when it came to girls. He never thought about their feelings in the whole matter. My mom would kill me if I treated girls like that.

  “Scoot a little closer, so I can let you get a feel for it.”

  I coughed and gagged obnoxiously loud. He gave me the look, and I only smirked. I considered it payback for that morning when he was making his insinuations about Layla and me.

  Tone-deaf girl, still oblivious, giggled and strummed the guitar, making a sound no guitar should ever make.

  “That was really good. Let’s try it again. Scoot back just a little more, so I can reach my arms around you better. Perfect.”

  After a few minutes of the worst sounding noises coming from both the guitar and the girl, I had to say something. I noticed Layla was on her way, so I leaned over and tapped Michael.

  “Dude, I think you need to get the girl out of your lap. Your wife is headed this way.”

  The girl in Michael’s lap jumped up. “Wife?”

  Michael was trying to protest when the girl grabbed his Coke and poured it over him and his guitar and stormed off.

  I laughed so hard, I rolled off the lounge chair onto the pavement. Michael jumped up and kicked me in the leg. I had curled in to protect where he was really aiming.

  “What was that all about?” Layla asked as she joined us. I was still laughing so much it was throwing off my balance. I tried to stand but couldn't, so I crawled to the lounger and pulled myself up. I pushed my glasses back on my nose. Layla took the lounger beside me. She had one of my t-shirts on, as a swimsuit cover up.

  Michael pulled off the black Guns-n-Roses shirt, now soaked with Coke and wadded it up and threw it at me. “He ruined my chance with that girl. She could have been my dream girl…the mother of my children. Now I’ll never know.”

  “She was tone deaf, and you were only trying to bag her.”

  “Just because you can’t score with a girl who stays in your room all night long, doesn’t mean you should shut down my chances.”

  Layla poured some suntan lotion into her hands and bent over to start rubbing it into her legs. “Score? Like in a game?” She glanced up at Michael, and he shrugged. “Don’t make fun of David for being a gentleman. The world needs more of those. Where I’m from, the guys don’t even ask girls on dates anymore. They just look for a hookup at the clubs. All casual sex with no meaning.”

  Michael scooted closer in his chair. “Where are you from again? I want to move there.”

  Layla shook her head. “My friends are all into that, and I don’t judge them for it. But they get more hurt and jaded about love as they go. I don’t want that.”

  “Can you give me your friends’ numbers?”

  She rolled her eyes at him and pursed her lips. “Why do you want to be that guy who beds a bunch of women? Later they all regret having been with you. Why not make it your goal to be the guy one girl wants to sleep with many times and is proud to be seen with you? Why not look for one you want to hold close after the sex is over, instead of one you want to kick out of your bed as soon as it’s done?”

  His eyes got big, and he looked both ways. “How did you know I…?” He looked at her up and down. “Have we?”

  Layla’s eyes went wide. “No way. I just know your type.”

  Michael got a look in his eyes like he’d never thought like that before. He started walking away. “I think I’ve got a new line. ‘Hey, baby. You look like the kind of girl I’d want to hold after sex and actually call the next day?’”

  Layla sighed. “You are disgusting, Michael, and you always will be.” She pulled off my t-shirt to reveal the hot pink bikini underneath. “David, could you help rub lotion on my back?”

  I leapt from my seat and then realized I looked too anxious. “Umm, sure.”

  When I was finished rubbing it in, I handed her the bottle and leaned back in my lounger. I pulled out my inhaler and tried to unscramble my thoughts and breathe.

  “So, this is what spring break is all about?” she asked.

  “You never went to the beach for spring break?”

  “Nope. They don’t schedule spring break trips at a girls’ home.”

  I turned to see her. “A girls’ home?”

  “Yep. I’m an orphan. It was a church-run orphanage called Connie Maxwell Children’s home, so they were strict with us. I just started allowing myself to wear a bikini. But they got me ready for life. I don’t expect anyone to just hand me anything. If I own something, it’s because I worked to get. I’m grateful for that because I don’t expect anything from anyone in life now. I know it’s all up to me.”

  “Wow.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “I’ve been on my own since I was eighteen. I got a scholarship, but you have to eat too while in college, right? And where would I go during Christmas? College wasn’t an option for me, because I needed to hit the ground running. I got a job in retail and realized I was good at selling. I investigated what I could do with that talent and got into insurance and have moved up the ladder pretty quickly. They consider it impressive to have made it to the level I’m at without a degree and so young. But I work hard, and I go after what I want. I may not be as educated as some, but I’m not stupid. Some of the ones who were handed an education are the laziest ones in the office.”

  I looked at her and my heart sank. Suddenly I felt more like a little kid than I had when she told me her age. She wasn’t just older than I was, but more
of a grownup than I’d realized. “I’m about to graduate. If I had to move out on my own that day with no one to help me along, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “That’s all I thought about at your age. How was I going to take care of myself when I graduated? I knew a minimum wage job wouldn’t work, and I didn’t want to end up like my—” She stopped and cleared her throat. “…a statistic. You should count your blessings that you don’t have to worry about all that. Taking care of myself is all I’ve ever really known.”

  “Yeah, I guess I should be thankful. I don’t think I’ve ever given it a thought how much my folks take care of me.”

  Layla stretched out on the lounger. “I’m still counting on my ride coming back so I can get back to my life, but until then, I’m here and I might as well enjoy the sun, right? My very first spring break. You guys can teach me how it’s done.”

  I watched her stretch out and had to wonder at how at ease she was with things. Could she really be from the future? Maybe this really was a prank from the guys. Maybe they knew more about my notebooks than I’d realized.

  I stood. “I’m going in to put on my trunks. I’ll be right back.”

  She lowered her sunglasses and smiled. “Take your time.”

  I got to my room and changed into my trunks. The guys and I had gotten a big bottle of amino acids and had been popping them for months while taking turns on the weight bench in Michael’s garage. I glanced at my physique in the mirror and was sorta glad I’d joined the guys. My body wasn’t just skin and bones any longer. I didn’t look like a body builder but I had good definition. I flexed my biceps and nodded at my reflection. I caught myself and stepped away from the mirror. If I didn’t watch it, I’d be practicing sultry gazes in the mirror like Michael and rehearsing stupid pick-up lines.