Or can I?
Nick is here, in D.C., newly back from London. I can’t ask him to hold me, to reassure me, but it might be enough just to see him. He’s religious about his morning swim, so I know where he’ll be. It’s not without risks—if he meets me now as a barefoot, disheveled girl wearing too few clothes, it will change things when we meet later on. He won’t think of me as someone intriguing who knows way more than she should. I might instead become the creepy girl who lurked outside the Georgetown pool the summer before, looking like she was coming off a bender at Coachella.
But I need to see him, so it’s a risk I’ll have to take.
I break into a run, down the long hill to Georgetown. Past the cathedral, past the stores, until I’m sprinting through the very neighborhood where we house hunted a few weeks ago. It’s light outside when I finally arrive on campus, winded and sweating. I stake out my spot in the parking lot beside the gym, and collapse on the curb, debating with myself about what I’ll do when I see him. Could I tell him? Would it change things?
For the next fifteen minutes, I wait. My heart leaps each time I see a car swing into the lot, and plummets when, again and again, that car is not Nick’s. He should be here by now, and the idea that today might be the day he skipped makes me long to weep, which I’m on the cusp of doing at the precise moment his car pulls into the lot.
He stops about twenty yards away from where I sit. I watch as he steps out, and it’s just so him: his preoccupation, the slight frown on his face, the morning stubble, the way he slings his bag over his shoulder. It’s so perfectly, absolutely him that I can’t stay where I am.
I don’t know what I can possibly say to make him remember me, make him believe a sweaty, half-naked girl is someone he’d ever want to move in with, but there must be something. I jump to my feet. He’ll know he’s mine the same way, as I watch him get out of his car, I know I’m his. He has to.
I step off the curb and have taken two steps into the lot when the passenger door of the Jeep opens and a woman climbs out, dressed to run, pulling her hair back into a perky ponytail as they chat on opposite sides of the car.
Meg.
The shock of it forces me backward, knocks the air from my chest.
You don’t arrive at the gym with a friend at 6:00 a.m. They’re together. They were together last night. They slept together, woke up next to each other. In this timeline, she is the last person he kissed and she’s the person he will sleep with next. It’s her he wants right now, not me. My stomach churns at the thought.
She walks around to his side as she puts her headphones in, placing her hands on his shoulders and going on to her toes to kiss him goodbye. He doesn’t linger on it the way he does with me, but it hardly matters. I’m watching the father of my children kiss someone else after spending the night with her. As he heads toward the gym—never looking my direction once—I sink to the curb and allow myself all the sadness and desperation I am feeling, face buried into my grass-stained palms.
I just want to be home. God, I wish I was home. It’s a mantra that plays on repeat in my head. The desire to press my head to Nick’s chest is so strong it’s almost real. I can feel the way his arms would wrap around me, smell the soap and chlorine on his skin. I imagine his relief when I land, the way we’d cling to each other and thank God it turned out okay.
Air rushes around me, and then there is absolute darkness.
I land on a hard floor, falling to hands and knees at the suddenness of it. For a moment I’m too scared to open my eyes, but when I hear Nick shouting my name and the thunderous clamor of his feet flying up the stairs, I finally look around me. Home. Relief surges through my blood like a drug. It’s nighttime here, but I’m home with him and nothing else matters.
He reaches the hallway, wild-eyed, and drops to the ground, pulling me to his lap and rocking me like I’m a child. “Thank fucking God,” he says. His voice is rough. “Thank God.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I tell him, weeping hard enough that I’m barely coherent. “I didn’t mean to. It just happened and I couldn’t get home…”
His arms tighten around me. “I know.” He buries his face in my hair. “You scared the shit out of me. Are you okay?”
I nod. I can feel the panic in him still, like a stain he can’t wash away. “I need to clean up,” I whisper after a minute. “I was barefoot all night. My feet are a mess.”
He gently lifts my foot and stiffens. “You’ve got some cuts.”
His voice is flat, purposefully emotionless. He picks me up like a child and starts to carry me toward the bathroom.
“I can walk,” I argue, but he ignores me. His profile is so rigid it looks cast in steel as he sets me on the counter and inspects my feet.
“We’ll get them cleaned off first,” he says, running the water in the tub. “Stay here.”
I watch him stalk off, suddenly unsettled. What the hell is happening here? He was relieved when I came back—beyond relieved—but now it feels like he doesn’t even want me around.
I limp to the tub and rinse my feet, watching as the water goes from muddy to clear, and then I push down the plug and step inside, sighing as the water begins to fill around me. He returns with a first aid kit and Gatorade, which I chug as if I’ve been wandering the desert.
“You’re dehydrated,” he says with a harsh exhale, not meeting my eye.
I’m not sure if I want to snap at him or burst into tears. I’ve just been through one of the worst nights of my life and he’s acting like I did something wrong.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I tell him. “It just happened.”
“I know,” he says, jaw clenched tight. “I saw all the shattered glass where you dropped your drink.” Maybe his disapproval isn’t aimed at me, but I feel it anyway. And I can’t entirely blame him—inadvertently, I risked my life and our children’s lives as well.
I stare at my bent knees, at the water rising beneath them. “What time is it, anyway?” I ask. “Were you waiting long?”
He runs a hand through his hair, not quite looking at me. “It’s about midnight. I came home when you didn’t answer the phone this morning and found your clothes on the floor.” He continues to look away. Those hours were just as hard on him as they were on me and he’s trying not to blame me for what I put him through, but he can’t help doing it anyway. I feel this distance between us like a physical thing, made of air yet impossible to reach through entirely.
I hold out my hand. “Come in with me.”
He swallows. “You need to rest and if I get into that tub you know it’ll lead somewhere.”
“Please,” I say quietly, staring at the water. After another moment’s hesitation I hear his clothes hitting the floor and then he climbs in behind me, sliding his long legs on either side of mine. I lean against his chest while he pours the body wash in his hands, lathering it up before he washes me off. Feet, legs, arms, back.
He buries his face in my hair. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I hate what you must have gone through. I hate that I’m mad about it when I know it wasn’t your fault. But we need to find a way to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Especially not when you’re pregnant. I feel like tonight took a decade off my life.”
My stomach sinks a little. The truth is, it was absolutely my fault. I should never have been trying to time travel in the first place. “It was stupid. I’d been practicing a little. Just going from the kitchen to the upstairs hall, thinking maybe I’d get good enough that we could help Darcy, but—”
“Darcy?” he asks.
I turn back, glancing at him over my shoulder with a raised brow. “Yes, Darcy. Who else would I be trying to help?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I slide away so I can turn toward him, staggered. “Darcy Whitley. Your patient. Seven years old? Brain tumor?”
He looks at me blankly before his eyes open with recognition. “Oh, right. How the hell do you know about that? I only saw
her once, and it had to be a year ago.”
My eyes fill for at least the tenth time since I got home. “Are you saying she’s not your patient? She’s fine?”
He shrugs. “Yeah, I assume so. She just had a little glioma, if I recall correctly. It was no big deal. I referred her to neurosurgery. I’d have heard if there was anything else going on.”
It worked. I take a quick breath as the relief hits, but once it’s gone my throat tightens a little, happy and sad all at once. This, I realize, is what it’s going to be like to time travel. I may do good things, but it means losing people too, losing shared experiences. Darcy no longer knows me, and I’m the only one who will ever remember sitting beside Nick at her birthday party.
“It was a big deal. You won’t remember, because I changed her timeline,” I whisper, hugging my knees. “Today when you went to the hospital, Darcy was a dying patient without much time left because the first doctor they saw blew off her headaches. So I warned her mother tonight. During that visit you barely remember, you saved her life.”
He frowns. I get it, the way it’s impossible to grasp that something has happened when you don’t remember it, but he also has faith in this—and in me. “No,” he says. “You saved her.”
Either way, I’d do it all over again, even if it means the memory of Nick with Meg is stuck in my head forever. It’s stupid that seeing him with her is still bothering me, but the problem is that even if it took place in 2017, it feels like it was minutes ago.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, wrapping his hands around my ankles. “Are you just tired or is it something else?”
My head droops. I could choose to keep pretending things are fine, but not telling him things just doesn’t seem to work out for us. “I saw you,” I say quietly. “I ran from Cleveland Park to campus, thinking if I could just watch you walking into the gym I’d feel better. And then Meg got out of your car.” I press my face to my knees. I don’t want to cry in front of him over this and it’s completely unfair to make him feel guilty over it. I just don’t know what else I can do. “You’d just spent the night with her, obviously. It was sunrise. And I know it was a year ago or more but it feels like it just happened.”
“Jesus,” he says. “I don’t know what you saw, but no matter what it looked like, I was never in love with her. Never even close.”
It helps, a little. “I know. It just felt real. It feels like it just happened.”
He slides toward me and his hands cradle my face. “In my whole life it’s only been you. You’re the only person I’ve ever been in love with, and tonight when I contemplated the idea of life without you, I finally got what Grosbaum must have gone through, because I’d have waited forever just hoping you were coming back.”
He kisses me. A real kiss, one without any blame or terror. His lips are gentle on mine, as if I’m so fragile I might shatter right here in his hands.
I’m the one who needs more, and demands it. I climb over him, placing a knee on either side of his hips so there is no distance between us. With a guttural noise, his hands twist in my hair, and the kiss grows hard and desperate. I slide my hands over the broad shoulders, the perfect chest I missed so much, and then lower.
“Quinn,” he groans, his mouth still against mine, “we really shouldn’t. You should rest.”
I rise, move him against me, watching his weak attempts at restraint falter.
I start to sink on top of him but hold myself aloft instead. “Are you sure we shouldn’t?” I taunt.
“No,” he grunts, arching upward. His head falls against the back of the tub as he bottoms out inside me. “Fuck. That’s so good.”
He watches as I move, his eyes heavy, his mouth ajar, his hands slipping over my chest. With each thrust he drives the memories of Meg a little further from my head.
“Faster,” he pleads quietly, grabbing my hips.
“I can’t in this position. My knees…” I begin, and find myself lifted and carried to the bed, with him still inside me. He lies me on my back and pulls my knees over his shoulders, hitting an angle that never fails to drive every other thought from my head. “Oh God,” I moan.
He watches my face, desperate to come, waiting for the telltale arch of my spine. I see the strain in him, in his shoulders, in the tendons of his neck. He slips his fingers between us and I go off like a rocket. He follows, my name a pained whisper falling from his lips.
After a moment he carefully removes himself and flips to the side of me.
He opens one eye. “I told you that would happen.”
I grin. “Are you saying you regret it?”
He pulls me against him, dragging a blanket over us and tucking my head into the crook of his shoulder. “As long as we’re in the same place, I’m never going to regret anything again.”
40
QUINN
The following week, just before my classes begin, Nick and I have our first obstetrics appointment. He’s already in the waiting room when I arrive.
“Decaf latte,” he says, placing a Styrofoam cup in my hand as he leans down to kiss my forehead.
I smile at him. “You’re spoiling me. What happens when the novelty wears off?”
He tips my chin up with his index finger. “The novelty of you is never going to wear off. But you know how to scare the shit out of me if I ever start taking you for granted.”
“I have less stressful ways to remind you that you like me,” I reply, and I get his dirtiest smile in response.
“Once this is done we should go home so you can remind me again,” he replies.
A few minutes later we are called back, and I go through something I only vaguely recall in the past…the cold jelly spread over my stomach, the smooth paddle sliding over it. Nick is watching the screen so avidly you’d think he expects one of the babies to speak to us. He finds what he is looking for and stares at it awestruck.
“You see something?” I ask.
His smile goes wide. “Yeah.”
“I see two somethings,” says the doctor triumphantly. “You’re having twins, Mrs. Reilly.”
I try to pretend I’m surprised, and I don’t correct him on the name. I guess I’ll be Mrs. Reilly soon enough.
41
QUINN
TWO WEEKS LATER
I’ve finished getting ready, though I’m wearing clothes Caroline will undoubtedly find lacking because they don’t cost ten million dollars. “You’re sure you don’t want to come?” I ask Nick for the third time.
Nick kisses my forehead. “Go have fun with your friends,” he replies. “I’ll see you when you get home.”
Between school and the pregnancy and my unending obsession with Nick’s eight-pack and biceps, there hasn’t been time to see Trevor and Caroline since we got back from France. I’m excited to have drinks with them, even if I won’t be drinking, but I wish Nick was coming with us. When we’re apart it feels like something is missing, and the world becomes nothing more than a series of stories and experiences to dissect with him later. “I’m not sure how much fun it will be watching them drink margaritas while I sip water.”
“I thought you were meeting someone Trevor is dating.”
“The senator,” I reply, grinning, “in theory.”
“Trevor is dating a senator? You said he prefers criminals.”
“Let’s not kid ourselves. Senator and criminal aren’t mutually exclusive terms. But no, it’s just some legislative aide. He and Trevor do this roleplay in which he’s a senator who trades political favors for sex. And thus the nickname.”
Nick shakes his head. “That was slightly more than I needed to know about Trevor’s sex life.”
“Admit it. You’d love to play senator with me.”
He gets that smile on his face—slow and dirty, his eyes a little feral. “Senator Reilly has a nice ring to it.” He pulls me in for a kiss. I can feel his cock pressing against my stomach as if it’s knocking on the door to beg entry. I really wish I wasn’t already running late.
He sighs as he pushes away, glancing downward. “Now see what you’ve done?”
I bat my lashes. “Oh, Senator Reilly, I’m so sorry, sir,” I reply, my voice high and breathy as I grab my keys. “If there’s any way I can make it up to you, let me know.”
“Not helpful,” he growls at my retreating back.
* * *
Trevor’s margarita looks like the most delicious thing I’ve ever seen in my life—the dollop of foam on the top, the frosted glass, the neon green that couldn’t possibly come from nature. Pregnancy is a miracle of life, blah blah blah. I’m still allowed to miss margaritas.
“It tastes like piss, I swear,” says Trevor, catching my glance.
I laugh. “Right. That’s why you ordered a second one.”
Just as I expected, they made me change clothes for this, Trevor insisting the jeans I wore were unacceptable because “we are not dock workers,” whatever that means. The outfit is of Caroline’s choosing, a white, Tom Ford wrap dress, cut low and flaring out at the waist. It seems like a lot of effort for what is definitely going to be a short evening, but I’m not complaining. Senator Reilly is going to enjoy this look a great deal when I get home.
“Look at your boobs,” Caroline says, shaking her head. “They’re stupendous. You’ve gone up at least one cup size, if not two. You know I really don’t want kids but wow you’re making me think twice.”
“There are easier ways to get boobs,” says Trevor, rolling his eyes before he turns toward me. “But speaking of kids, when’s Nick going to make an honest woman of you?”
I shrug, feeling the tiniest prickle of worry that I instantly push aside. “We’re not in any rush. There’s enough going on.” The truth is I do want him to ask but he seems to have just forgotten about it. Maybe I shouldn’t have shot him down those first few times he brought it up.
Intersect: The Parallel Duet, Book 2 Page 23
