“Maybe it’s all the sadness eating I’ve done since you left.”
He is absolutely still for a moment. “You wouldn’t only gain weight there, Quinn.”
I laugh. “I know what you’re getting at but…you can’t possibly believe I’m pregnant. Aside from the impossibility of it, we just wouldn’t know this early. I wouldn’t have gained weight anywhere yet. It’s only been a week.”
His frown deepens. “We’ve already established that nothing about this is normal. We’ve also established that it at least seems as if you got pregnant right away in the past, no matter what kind of contraception we used. And if you’re not technically human, there’s no reason to think a pregnancy would progress at a normal rate anyhow.”
I feel the tiniest whisper of worry and banish it. “That palm reader is making you paranoid.”
“Maybe,” he says. “But you could take a test, just to be sure.”
I grab his hand and press it to my sternum. “Stop,” I whisper. “It’s not possible, and we’re in Paris. Together. Please don’t ruin this for me right now.”
I see the effort it takes him not to argue. He forces a nod. “Then I suppose I ought to let you enjoy a part of Paris that isn’t this bed?” he asks, rising. “I’m telling you right now, it’s the best part. And please don’t argue with me or you’ll destroy my self-esteem.”
I take in the naked backside I’ve missed so damn much for the last week. “It’s been an okay part so far,” I tease.
He turns back toward me, arching a brow. “I know you didn’t just refer to sex with me as okay.”
“It was totally…pleasant,” I counter, digging my nails into my palm to keep from laughing. “Just, you know, brief.”
He kneels on the bed, his gaze dangerous. “Three hours was brief?” he growls. “Then by all means, tell me what you’d consider not brief.”
I smile at him as he hovers over me, supporting his weight on his forearms. “Three hours and fifteen minutes ought to cover it.”
* * *
Eventually we do make it out of the room, into the sweltering heat of Paris in August. “So what do you want to see?” he asks.
There’s so much I want to see that I don’t even know where to begin. I start throwing out names, ticking them off on my fingers as I go. “The Louvre, the Orsay, the Palais Royale, Notre Dame, Sacre-Coeur, the Jardins du Luxembourg, the…”
He laughs. “Sorry, I should have been more specific. What would you like to see today?”
I bite down on a smile. “You tell me. I’ve only been here on our honeymoon, so all I remember is the room.”
“Which is precisely as it should be,” he replies solemnly. “But I’ll humor you since it’s your first day.”
He leads me to the path above the right bank of the Seine, where we end up walking mile after mile, solely because there’s never a point when I’m ready to stop looking. As soon as the Eiffel Tower fades from view, we are looking at Les Invalides and the Alexander III Bridge, leading to the Champs-Élysées, but I’m not ready to stop.
All day he indulges me and my excitement never dims. We eat dinner at a bistro in Ste Germaine des Pres Nick’s heard of. I’m so tired I’d probably collapse if we were home, but here I just want more and more and more.
We sit outside in a light breeze, under the hum of stars and streetlights, and I’m so happy I’m not even sure what to do with it all. I feel like a bottle of champagne that’s been shaken hard and needs to explode.
“We should walk along the Seine when we leave,” I suggest, though my muscles are burning from all the walking we did today. Fifteen miles, easily.
Nick shakes his head. “I’m putting my foot down. I don’t know how you’re still going when you’ve been awake for two days straight, but I’m telling you, any moment now the fatigue is going to hit and you’ll be comatose.”
“Never,” I swear. “I’m staying awake the whole time we’re here.”
He laughs at me quietly. “I give it an hour.”
In the end it takes less than that. By the time our meal is over, I’m leaning on him like a drunk just to walk to the Uber. I struggle to stay awake in the car but it’s futile. My head jerks up as I try to regain consciousness.
His laugh is low and affectionate. “Go to sleep, baby,” he whispers. “I’ll make sure you get home safe.” His mouth presses to the top of my head as he settles me back against his shoulder. “Superheroes need their rest just like everyone else.”
It’s the last thing I remember of our entire magical day.
* * *
Nick and I stand next to a pay phone, outside a convenience store/gas station that is the only landmark for miles. The dry spring has stripped the ground down to nothing but beige earth. Only the occasional weed is there to provide it a hint of color.
“You want me to stay?” Nick asks, pulling my hands into his. I want to say yes. I swallow the desire down.
An 18-wheeler lumbers into the parking lot, blowing dust into our faces, deafening us both with the squeal of brakes.
“Go ahead,” I say, nodding at the market. “Get the food. It’s just a matter of time before someone asks why we’re not in school, and I don’t want to lose our head start.”
Nick laughs and runs his hand along my arm. “I don’t understand why you’re so worried. Our cell phones are off. She’s not going to stop us if she can’t find us.”
That’s where he’s wrong. She has a thousand ways to stop us, ways Nick can’t begin to imagine. I know I need to explain this, and now that we’re pregnant I finally can. But it also means admitting everything else: about my role in Ryan’s death. The ways I changed not just my timeline but his as well. This time tomorrow we’ll be married, if everything works out. If I wait until after it’s done, he might not forgive me. But he might not forgive me if I tell him beforehand either. I can hardly blame him either way, given that I’m unable to forgive myself.
“Maybe I’m paranoid,” I say, forcing a smile. “Humor me.”
That dimple flashes and it makes my smile a real one. “Red Gatorade?” he asks. Since the moment the pregnancy symptoms hit, I’ve wanted nothing else. I nod and he holds my face in his hands, gently brushing my mouth with his own. “I’m buying you some carrots too. This kid must need something other than sports drinks.”
Despair hits again as I watch him walk away. I’m too young to be a mother. I need help, and the one person I want to turn to has been at war with me since Ryan’s death. I’m pretty sure she won’t even speak to me once she knows everything.
I drop quarters into the pay phone and dial. My heart is beating faster than it should.
“Where are you?” she shouts immediately. She sounds less angry than she does desperate. It makes me feel even worse.
“I’m okay,” I soothe. “Really. You don’t need to worry. We’re just going away for the weekend. We’ll be back.” It’s partly a lie, but I can’t tell her everything. If she knew, she’d just check to see which states allow you to get married under the age of eighteen without parental consent. And there’s only one. She’ll find us.
“I know you’re pregnant,” she says, and my stomach drops to the dusty cement at my feet. I lay my head against the phone booth’s clear wall. How could she possibly know? I’ve been so careful. I didn’t even look up anything related to pregnancy on my phone. “I’ve met the twins you’ll have. They’ve visited me.”
Twins. I sway against the phone booth like I’ve been hit. Twins who were able to visit her. I know what it means, if all of her Rule of Threes lore is actually true.
“They’ve been coming back for years,” she continues. Her voice catches and she has to stop for a moment and pull herself together. “I didn’t want to tell you because I wanted your life to be normal. I didn’t want you to know what’s ahead, but we no longer have that luxury.”
Nick and I are having twins who time travel. It’s impossible. Unheard of.
I struggle to find my voice. “No one
knows for sure if the Rule of Threes is real. It’s a legend.”
“When the twins first visited, they didn’t know me. Which meant I’d died when they were born. And I was fine with that. But Quinn…” She heaves a deep sigh. “After Ryan, after you let your spark fade…they came back. And now they don’t know you.”
The air leaves my chest without ceremony. It’s just gone, and I stand here, holding the phone, unable to even form a response. Through the store window I see Nick in the checkout line. He smiles, holding up the red Gatorade.
If she is right, in five months I’ll be dead. Will his smile ever light up the same way again? I’m leaving him to raise two daughters alone. I pull my hoodie up to cover my face and begin to weep. I’m going to ruin Nick’s life.
“All you have to do is jump again!” she cries. “If you just get stronger, everything will be fine.”
“So you die instead? I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“If you refuse to jump,” she says, “I will make the choice for you.”
My stomach is bottoming out. I already know exactly what she’s going to do. “No.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “But if you’d never met Nick, none of this would have happened.”
I reach desperately for the only threat in my power. “If you do this, I’ll never forgive you.”
“Of course you will,” she says gently. “You’re not even going to remember it happened.”
* * *
My eyes blink open. For a moment I’m still seventeen. Pregnant and grief-stricken, waiting for Nick while the trucks blow past. Talking to a woman who seemed to be close to me—my mother, perhaps? Except she wasn’t. She didn’t sound like my mother, and even the way I felt about her was different. But who the hell could she have been?
Nick—an older version of him, an even hotter version of him—stirs beside me. His hand curves around my hip, keeping me close, protecting me, even in his sleep. The early morning light is just beginning to filter through the sheer curtains, the start of another day in Paris, but it won’t be like yesterday. I know what he wants. Every time he’s cupped my breasts, he’s grown still, as if trying to restrain his thoughts. I guess he’s indulged my desire to not know the truth long enough.
He wakes, pulling my back to his chest.
“We can do it,” I tell him.
“I kind of assumed we would,” he says, laughing a little as his hand slides down my bare hip.
I turn to look at him over my shoulder. “I was talking about taking a pregnancy test.”
“Not where I thought you were going with that, but still a good idea,” he says. He climbs out of bed and goes to his suitcase, from which he produces a box. “I bought them yesterday. I figured you’d give in eventually.”
I take the box to the bathroom, half terrified and half…something else. I guess there’s a part of me that wants it. That wishes I could dream and plan for a baby just like anyone else. It’s a selfish desire, one I try to ignore as I tear open the package. My best-case scenario is that I will give birth to a child, or children, who Nick will have to raise on his own. The worst case scenario is…much worse.
“How’s it going?” he calls.
“I’m still urinating. The test doesn’t work that fast, even for tempore sphincter or whatever the hell shifter was in Latin.”
I hear a low laugh. “I’m fairly certain the word isn’t sphincter.”
I finish and lay the stick on the counter before I exit the bathroom. “I’m too nervous to look,” I tell him.
He nods, setting his shoulders. “I’m looking for two lines, I assume?” he asks.
I raise a brow. It’s not that I don’t realize he’s slept with people before me, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy the reminder. “Know a lot about pregnancy tests, do you?”
He gives me a half-smile. “Obstetrics rotation.”
Of course. And how fucking ridiculous that I have room in my head for jealousy right now. “Yes. Two lines.”
He walks in. I can’t see his face as he looks at the test, but he stiffens, and I know right then what it says. He turns around, his face drawn, and hands it to me.
Two lines.
I sit on the mattress, too shocked to stand. We are silent, the two of us, dumbfounded. My mother calls at that very moment, and I let it go to voicemail. “It’s just not possible,” I whisper. “I’ve been on the pill without incident since I was 21. Seven years. And now we have sex once and …”
Nick’s mouth is a hard, set line as he thinks things I know he won’t share. “It was a lot more than once.”
“Fine, we have sex 700 times over the course of twenty-four hours, and I’m pregnant? It’s just not possible.”
He sits beside me. “There’s something that defies the laws of nature in almost everything about the two of us,” he says heavily. “I guess this is no exception.”
I swallow down the lump in my throat. “Am I…am I even going to live long enough?”
He takes my hand and squeezes it hard. “Yes. Because I’m going to find Sarah and solve this. But it means Cecelia was right, so I might as well tell you the other thing she said.”
I take a deep breath. “That we’re having twins?” I ask quietly.
His jaw drops. “How did you know?”
I was really hoping he’d tell me I was wrong. But this means my dream happened, and is happening again. “I dreamed about it last night—we were teenagers, and someone, maybe my mom, told me our twins had visited her.”
He leans forward, hands braced on his thighs. “They visited her? How is that possible?”
The answer dawns on his face as I softly deliver it. “They time travel, Nick.”
“Fuck,” he says, staring straight ahead, his eyes empty. He rises and begins to pace with his hands on his head. “Jesus. I just…how are we going to keep them safe?”
He’s thinking of Rose, as am I. Rose the wild teen with the absent mother and a father who had no way to keep her in one place. She, at least, had a grandmother to guide her. If I live long enough to give birth, who will my daughters have to turn to? “Nick, the other thing you need to know is that when they visited, they didn’t know me. Which means either the brain tumor or the Rule of Threes is…”
“No,” he says harshly. “Just because you saw something from another life doesn’t mean it’s going to happen in this one too.”
I lean forward, pressing my fingers to my temples. “What I don’t understand is how Sarah figures into this. In the dream last night, it was my mother or someone I was close to trying to stop us. But in London, and here, it’s Sarah.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. But if only three of you can survive, maybe she’s just trying to make sure she’s one of the three.”
I bury my head in my hands. We’ve done this twice before, and the odds are stacked against us even more this time around. “We shouldn’t have done this,” I whisper. “We gave in and we shouldn’t—”
“I’m going to find her,” he says. “And this time I will stop her. If we don’t find her, we hide until they’re born.”
I don’t have the heart to tell him this, but I’m pretty sure we tried that strategy before too.
* * *
We both lie down, not saying much. Because what is there to say? All I can think about is how badly I want this life I’m not going to have. I want to meet this product of the two of us. I want to hold them and raise them and I’m never going to get the chance.
My mother calls again. It’s the middle of the night back home and I know I should answer but I just…can’t. Not just because of this news I can’t share with her, but because of what never occurred to me until just now: if she and Sarah and I all can time travel, and I’m having twins who can do it too, it’s a death sentence for two of us.
“We never ate,” Nick says. “I’m going to go downstairs and get you some food.”
“I’m not hungry.”
He pushes my hair away from my face. “It�
��s not just you anymore, remember?”
He puts his shirt on, all those abdominal muscles flexing as he does it. I watch appreciatively, wishing I hadn’t taken the test, wishing I’d just had one more day of enjoying this trip with him before we found out. I want to get us back where we were last night.
“You’re looking pretty good there, Dad. Why don’t you take that shirt off and come back to bed?”
A light flashes in his eyes, a half-second where he is considering the offer, and then he frowns. And continues to dress. “You need food.”
I groan. “Argh. So you’re going to be overprotective and turn me down for sex too. This is getting better and better.”
He laughs, pressing a kiss to my forehead. “Believe me, once you’ve eaten I’ll accept any offer you want to make.”
He leaves and is back within minutes, carrying bread, cheese, jam, and juice. “It’s all I could find at the moment,” he says. “Eat this and then we’ll go get a real meal.”
It’s more than enough food for four. My smile is wistful. I want this version of Nick, the overprotective expectant father. I want us to relish this, but how can we, under the circumstances?
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. My mother again. We both glance at her name on the screen but make no move toward it. “There must be something going on,” I say, biting my lip. “It’s not like her to call back-to-back like that.”
“She’s probably wondering if she can talk you into marrying Jeff again.”
I close my eyes, wondering if Nick would be better off if I had. I’ve done nothing but cause him pain.
* * *
Eventually we make our way out of the room, but Paris is no longer the same. We head to the Louvre, taking the path along the Seine, and all I see are children. Babies in strollers, toddlers playing in the grass. Nick sees them too. Every time a little girl passes, his worried eyes follow her.
He’d be the best possible dad under different circumstances. Under these, I’m not sure. “You’ve got to promise me you won’t be like Rose’s father,” I say, squeezing his hand. “If I can stay pregnant long enough to have these babies, you can’t be weighed down by everything after I’m gone. You need to put them first.”
Intersect: The Parallel Duet, Book 2 Page 17
