The Time Traveler's Boyfriend (4 page)

“What happens when the time is up?” I’m not even sure if I’m humoring him anymore. Does this thing really work? Seriously?

“The wormhole will shrink and suck him back to his previous time,” Adam says. He smiles at my horrified expression. “It won’t
hurt
him or anything.”

I watch as Adam carefully lays little Albert down on the step. Albert looks mildly nervous as the clock around his neck ticks loudly.
Adam points out the time on the clock is accurate: seven fifteen p.m. I inch backwards, suddenly a little worried. “Have you done this before?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Adam says. “With, like, objects. This is my first live trial. But I already know it’s going to work.”

“How do you know that?”

Adam gives me a funny look. “Because you saw Albert outside the building three days ago.”

That makes some sort of crazy sense. Although I still back up a few feet before Adam clicks on a button on the computer screen that says
enter wormhole.

The entire room gets very cold all of a sudden. Frigid, like every molecule of warmth has been sucked into the wormhole. There’s a flash of almost blinding light that comes from my step, and there’s a loud whooshing sound, almost like a giant toilet being flushed. I’m suddenly really scared for Albert, that he’s being flushed down some kind of cosmic toilet. I mean, I know he’s just a rabbit, but I’d still feel really bad about it.

And then, when the light disappears and the room gets quiet again, Albert is gone.

“Where is he?” I ask, hugging my arms to my chest. It’s still freezing in here and I’m covered in goose bumps.

“You mean,
when
is he?” Adam corrects me.

“Oh, my God, shut up!” I say. I know he thinks he’s being cute, but seriously, this is freaky. Either he just sent a rabbit into the past or he liquidated a rabbit. Either way, it’s very freaky. “When will he come back?”

Adam glances at his watch. “Oh, around now.”

I’m still seeing flashes of green dancing before my eyes from when Albert disappeared. I blink a few times and rub my eyes. I wish Adam had told me to look away. Not that I would have been able to.

Just as the spots are fading a bit, another flash of light comes from the step. I quickly shield my eyes, shivering as the temperature of the room drops at least another twenty degrees. I finally drop my hand and, sitting on the steps like he never left, is Albert. I just stare at him in disbelief.

“Check out the clock,” Adam says as he wheels over to the rabbit. He picks him up and I can’t help but notice that Albert leaves behind two muddy footprints and a blade of grass. “Look!
It’s ten minutes fast!”

I stare down at the timepiece around Albert’s neck. Sure enough, it says seven twenty-five p.m.

Holy shit. My boyfriend just invented a freaking time machine.

CHAPTER FIVE

Adam cracks open an expensive bottle of Chardonnay that he’s been saving for a special occasion. You don’t get much more special than this, I think. He’s invented something that will change the course of history. Adam is going to be famous, even more so than his rabbit’s namesake. Everyone in the world will know the name Adam Schaffer.

Adam still has the rabbit on his lap as I pour the wine into glasses at his dining table. “I should really do some tests on him,” he says, sounding a little worried. “Make sure he’s okay.”

“Come on, he’s fine,” I say, handing Adam a glass of wine. I guess it’s possible he has some horrible internal damage, but he looks pretty good. For a rabbit. I’m not sure what rabbits are supposed to be doing, but whatever it is, he’s doing it. I’m pretty sure.

“He looks good,” Adam admits. He takes a sip of wine, then a second, then tilts back his head and drains the whole glass. He puts down the empty cup on the dining table and rubs his eyes behind his glasses. “I can’t believe … after all this time … it
worked
…”

I sit down across from him. “So what are you going to do? I mean, who do you tell about something like this?”

Adam looks down at the rabbit and strokes his fur. In the entire year I’ve known him, he’s always had circles under his eyes. He always looks a little bit exhausted. And right now, he looks
really
exhausted and his hair is sticking up at odd angles, even more so than usual. I wonder if he spent the whole night awake, working on the machine. “Nobody,” he finally says.

Nobody?
What?

“What are you talking about, Adam?” I say. “An invention like this—”

“Is incredibly dangerous,” he interrupts me. “You think the atomic bomb was dangerous? This is about a hundred times worse. Imagine being able to go back in time and alter history. Do you realize how awful that could be?”

“Awful?” I shake my head. “It could be wonderful. I
mean, you could go back in time and … and kill Hitler before he rose to power.” I never understood before why every single time travel theoretical seems to involve killing Hitler. And now here I am, doing it myself. Oh, well.

“Right, that would be great,” Adam says. “Except someone could also use the time machine to go back in time and
help
Hitler. Make him win.”

Fine. It’s pretty clear that if a time machine came into existence, Hitler’s life would either get better or worse, but definitely not stay the same. And I can see his point, I guess. A time machine could be really dangerous in the wrong hands. But that still leaves one really important question. “So why the hell did you make it?” I ask him.

Adam just looks at me for a minute, and I think he knows the exact reason why he invented it, but he doesn’t want to tell me. Instead, he grabs the bottle of wine and pours himself another glass. He doesn’t drink it right away though. He swishes it around, staring at the translucent liquid. “Claudia,” he murmurs.

He puts down the glass and starts pulling on his earlobe, which I’ve noticed he always does when he’s nervous. And right now, he’s getting
me
nervous. Whatever he’s going to say to me, it’s big. And it’s not a marriage proposal either.

“I need you to go through the wormhole,” he says to me in a low voice. “And I need you to stop me from getting hit by that car.”

When we were dating about a month, Adam told me the story of how he was injured. He was innocently riding his bike on his way to work when he was twenty-two years old, and a taxi slammed into him, breaking his back and severing his spinal cord. He successfully sued the taxi company and received a considerable settlement, enough to finance his expensive brownstone and his inventing hobby.

I finally get it. Adam doesn’t want to revolutionize the world, become famous, or even kill Hitler. He built a time machine so he’d be able to walk again.

And all I know is I don’t want to do this. I love him, but I don’t want to do this. I really, really don’t. And he can look at me and pretty much know it.

He drops his face into his hands. “I’m sorry, Claudia,” he says. “I hate myself for asking you. If there were any other way …”

“Why can’t
you
go?” I say. As I reach for my glass of wine and notice my hand won’t stop shaking. A drop of wine splashes over the edge and rolls down the back of my hand.

“I wish I could,” he says. “I’ve put metal through the machine and it doesn’t do so great. My wheelchair … probably wouldn’t make it. And then I’d be screwed.”

“Great,” I say. “You’ve got a machine that apparently destroys metal and you have absolutely no issue with putting your girlfriend through it. Wonderful.”

Adam lifts his brown eyes to meet mine. He has so many lines around them for someone his age—it makes me ache sometimes. “Think about it, Claudia,” he says. “If I’d never broken my back, my life would have been so much easier.”

So here’s the crazy thing: Adam never struck me as particularly bitter about being in a wheelchair. Yes, he’s had it rough. But at the same time, he’s never once expressed any sort of sentiment that made me think he truly wished he could walk again. He actually seemed pretty okay with it. In fact, that accident is what made him enough money to be able to live the kind of lifestyle he wanted. But obviously I had him all wrong.

“And if I never get hurt,” Adam goes on. “I’ll never meet
her
.”

I know who he means, of course. Her. The Bitch.

Well, he’s managed to tempt me, that’s for sure. After all, if Adam never meets The Bitch, then he won’t be so anxious about commitment, and maybe we actually have a chance to spend the rest of our lives together. And all I have to do is risk my life being zapped through a wormhole in space. No big deal.

I wish I were a risk-taker but I’m really not. I’m terrified of taking risks. I’ve never gone bungee jumping or even skiing. I don’t gamble when I go to casinos. I even get a little nervous about those scratch-off lottery tickets. And of all the things I could risk, I’d say my
life
is way up there.

When I don’t say anything, Adam looks away. “I shouldn’t have asked,” he says. “I’m sorry. Forget I said anything.”

“Okay, let’s just forget about it,” I say.

But how could I forget? Adam just offered me an opportunity to fix everything wrong with his life. And I said no.

***

The rest of the evening is pretty subdued.

I mean, my boyfriend just showed me a time machine, zapped a rabbit back in time three days, then asked me to go back in time and keep him from getting hit by a car … and I said no. So, since all those topics are kind of off limits right now, I don’t know what we can possibly talk about. The weather? The latest contestants on
American Idol
? It all seems a bit weak.

Adam asks me if I’ll spend the night, and I say yes because I’ve got to say yes to something tonight. He hits the shower while I lie in bed in an oversized T-shirt I borrowed (i.e. stole) from him, and I play a mindless game on my phone. Adam’s a night
showerer, while I’m a morning showerer, which works well for our relationship because we’re never both trying to hit the showers at the same time. It’s also good because he’s definitely not fast in the shower—it’s hard to be when you can’t stand up. He’s got a bench in there that he transfers onto, and a second nozzle he uses that’s within easy reach.

When Adam comes out of the bathroom in boxers and an undershirt, he’s got a towel draped over his wheelchair, under his legs, to keep the cushion dry. The shirt is sticking to his chest a little bit from moisture, and I can make out all the muscles below the fabric. For a geeky scientist, Adam has an incredibly muscular upper body—he explained to me that it’s from years of wheeling himself around full time, and I love the rock-hard
pecs, delts, and biceps. His hair is still dripping wet, so that it’s harder to see the gray. He looks incredibly sexy right now. But somehow, I can’t help but wonder how he looked when he was twenty-two, on that day he went out with his bicycle.

“I’m sorry, Claudia,” he says for what feels like the millionth time tonight.

“You don’t have to apologize,” I say, mostly because every time he says he’s sorry, I feel a little bit worse.

“It was an asshole thing to ask you to do that,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say, trying to force a smile. “You’re a huge asshole.” Not really. He’s actually the nicest guy I’ve ever known.

He transfers into bed next to me and I cuddle up to his chest, while he puts his strong arm around my shoulders and hugs me close to him. I can hear the slow beat of his heart thudding in my ear. It feels so
right
, lying here with him.

“This last year with you has been perfect,” Adam says, as if reading my mind.

“Yeah,” I say, squeezing his chest. “It has.”

“I just …” He sighs. “I wish my life before meeting you had been different.”

I press my face into his firm chest. Gradually, I hear his breathing start to slow and deepen. I’d wonder how he could sleep after a day like today, but I bet a million dollars that he swallowed a sleeping pill. I, on the other hand, am drug-free and I’m not finding sleep nearly as easy.

Eventually, I just give up that sleep is ever going to happen and wander out into the living room. I flick on the lights, although I know the layout of the house so well that I could navigate it practically in my sleep. Even the first time I walked in here, I felt
comfortable
here, like it was a place I was meant to be. Everything about Adam just always felt so right. Up until recently, when everything has felt wrong.

In the corner of the room is a large translucent red jar. It was Adam’s Valentine’s Day present to me, a couple of months before our failed anniversary dinner. We decided to leave it here, since it’s pretty heavy and I’m here most of the time anyway. The jar is filled with gourmet jelly beans—one of my favorite treats. Under the red glass, I can make out dozens of colors representing different flavors of jelly beans.

“But how do you get them out?” I asked him when he presented it to me. The top of the jar was sealed and there was only a little rectangular metal door at the bottom, like the opening for change on an old payphone. I stuck my fingers in the door but found nothing.

“I installed an app on your phone,” he explained.

I took out my phone and he showed me an icon titled “Jelly beans.” I clicked on it and there was a list of dozens of jelly bean flavors. I selected “marshmallow,” and a second later, I heard a clanging noise from the giant jar.

“Okay, now you can check,” he told me.

Sure enough, when I stuck my finger in the rectangular door, a marshmallow-flavored jelly bean was waiting for me. I stared at it in amazement before popping it in my mouth. “How did you do that?”

He shrugged sheepishly and then launched into some detailed explanation that went right over my head. I requested a cherry-flavored jelly bean, followed by a buttered popcorn one. “It must have taken you forever to do this,” I said.

“Nah,” Adam said. “Maybe, like, fifty hours?”

Fifty hours. The guy works full time and still spent fifty hours slaving away to make me a present that was really cool, something he thought I’d love. Most of the guys I’d dated could hardly be bothered to pick up a box of chocolates or something. I imagined him in his lab, daydreaming about my face when I saw what he made for me. It was just about the most romantic thing I could imagine.

“Adam …” I said, my eyes filling with tears.

“Do you like it?” he asked anxiously.

“I love it,” I whispered.

He dug out something concealed behind his thigh. I was a velvet rectangular box. “Because I also got you this.”

The second present was a beautiful white gold necklace with a diamond heart pendant. It looked like it cost thousands of dollars. I nearly fainted when I saw it. “Adam,” I said, holding it up. “This … this is all too much. I love you. You don’t have to …”

“I love you too,” he said quickly. “I just want to make sure you know how much.”

I put on the necklace for him, and we spent the rest of the night eating jelly beans until our stomachs ached. In my whole life, no man has ever made me feel as special and loved as Adam does. And the frustrating part is that I feel like I can never quite reciprocate. Yes, I love him, but I can’t compete with these big romantic gestures. Like, for example, for that Valentine’s Day, I bought Adam a
tie
. Yes, it was a really nice, expensive tie. But it was just a tie. It wasn’t, like, a machine that made ties then sorted them by color or some crazy thing like that. I spent less than an hour picking it out, not fifty hours slaving away in a lab.

Sometimes I’d wrack my brain, trying to think of something I could do for Adam to let him know how deeply I cared about him. But I just couldn’t think of anything as great as the things he did for me.

And now, of course, he’s offering me an opportunity to make a grand romantic gesture for him. The more I think about it, the harder it is to say no.