Timestorm (37 page)

Shock filled her expression. “I told you about them? I never tell—”

“I know. But the circumstances were extreme. I know we’re not close in this version of 2009 and it’s weird to hear stuff like this from me.” The memory of Blake, looking so intense and determined, invaded my thoughts, hitting me hard. “But I promised someone I’d do this…”

“Promised who?”

I stared right at her, letting out a breath before saying, “Blake.” I removed the ring from my pocket, the one that had been the source of so much confusion for me. “I had this forever and I didn’t know it was for you—the J and H engraved in it—I thought it meant Jackson and Holly. But all along, I’ve had it so that I could give it to you. So you’d have a piece of your parents.”

Kendrick’s mouth fell open, her eyes immediately tearing up as she took the ring from my finger. “My mother’s ring. How did you get this?”

I laughed a little. “It’s a really long and complicated story. But that night, when you told me about your family, I remembered your saying that you wished you had your mother’s ring.”

She quickly swatted away the tears from her cheeks. “Thank you.”

The envelope with the letter from Blake addressed to her was in my other hand. I held it out for her to take and she did, looking up at me again with wide eyes, like it was a priceless, breakable antique.

I left her alone to read the note and to grieve or remember or whatever it was Blake thought she might need to do upon seeing this ring and I went for a walk around the hospital, giving Holly enough time to finish her test and dress in her normal clothes again.

“I’m completely unharmed,” she said with a shrug as we headed into the elevator. “Hard to believe, huh? Given the crazy brain explosion
you
had.”

“You’re more resilient than me.” I took her hand and smiled. “Where do you want to go today?”

“Take me somewhere you went with the other me, the younger one. I want to try out my new trick again. See if I remember.”

I replayed moments with 007 Holly in my head before landing on a memory that we could easily recapture.

*   *   *

We stood in the exhibit area just past the lobby of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Holly spun around slowly as if trying to catch a glimpse of 007 Holly’s memory, while I watched her. She stopped suddenly and closed her eyes.

“Were you wearing a hat?”

I laughed, still amazed and horrified by this phenomenon. “Yeah, a Mets hat.”

Holly flashed me a smile. “Okay, where to next?”

“You don’t want to look around?”

She shook her head and grabbed my hand, heading toward the exit even though we had just paid our admission to get in. Not that I cared in the least. I followed the same route through Central Park that I had walked with 007 Holly.

When we reached the playground where 007 Holly had scared me to death by climbing on the swing set, I waited for her to jump up there and do the same thing, but she just stood in the grass, looking from the ground to the swing set.

“I don’t get it,” she said finally. “How is remembering this going to make me insane and suicidal?”

It was a rhetorical question so I didn’t answer. I’d seen it with my own eyes so there was no doubt to be had. Instead, I tried to remember exactly what I’d felt lying in the grass with 007 Holly. That moment where I turned the entire world off and let myself be happy. That’s exactly what I needed to do right now. Not allow the crushing pain of leaving Dad and knowing what it would do to him, losing me and Courtney at the same time. This was different than the grieving I had needed to do when I returned to Courtney’s hospital room in a half-jump to be with her in those last hopeless moments.

I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t hopeless. Until this morning, when Adam and Chief Marshall put their giant brains together, life was hopeless. What would happen after we left tomorrow morning was a solution. I had to keep telling myself that over and over.

“I’m starving. Wanna get something to eat?” Holly asked, breaking me out of my trance.

I pulled myself together, flashing her a smile. “Yeah, sure.”

*   *   *

By the time we made it back to my place, it was nearly eight at night and Dad and Courtney were sound asleep in the TV room, a movie blaring in the surround sound. I wondered for a second if Dad had already been drugged but then I shook the thought from my head because I needed to focus on the solution and incapacitating Dad was an inevitable part of the solution.

I didn’t want to see anyone else tonight. Just Holly. I pulled her by the hand into my room and locked the door behind us. Not that I’d planned what we’d do in my room with the door locked, but I knew what everyone else would assume and they’d most likely leave us alone.

She kicked off her flip-flops, her white summer dress swishing as she drifted around the room, picking up my things and studying them. “How many days do you think we’ve spent together? Like … if you added them all up from all the versions of me.”

I sat down on the end of my bed, watching her move. “Hundreds.”

She turned to me and lifted an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Maybe it only
feels
like hundreds. Probably over three hundred.” I dug through my mind, adding and calculating as much as possible. “Well, I met the first version of you on March 15, 2009, and I didn’t leave to meet another version of you until October 30, 2009, so that’s seven and a half months. Then I spent about six weeks with the seventeen-year-old you, then a few days with the original version of you. And I’ve known this version of you fifty or sixty days, I think.”

“What do you think would have happened with that first Holly if she hadn’t been shot and you hadn’t jumped to 2007?” She had set down the trophy she’d been studying and turned fully toward me.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. That day changed me. Both good and bad.”

“But if it hadn’t happened,” she pressed. “If it hadn’t changed you?”

This was something I’d never thought about much before. I don’t think my mind could ever get past the need to undo Holly’s getting shot.

I let out a deep breath. “I think we were either on the verge of breaking up or becoming something more.”

She laughed. “Isn’t everyone?”

That got me to laugh. “I’ve completely lost sight of what everyone is doing or anything that’s considered normal. I’ve kissed three versions of you in separate timelines. That’s a far cry from normal.”

“But seven months of knowing the first me? That’s a long time.” Holly returned to viewing the items on my trophy shelf. “You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to. If you do, I swear I won’t judge you or be mad or anything.”

I scratched the back of my head, wary of ruining this evening. “Okay, what?”

She kept her back to me. “I know you were a commitment phobe during that stage of your life and you and that version of me didn’t really establish your relationship or call it anything, but did you … were you with anyone else while you were dating that Holly?”

I almost smiled with relief. “No.”

“But you didn’t tell her that? You didn’t actually come right out and say that she was the only one you were with at the time?”

“No,” I admitted. That had been a bit of sore spot between Adam and me because I think he knew the answer to that question and he also knew that Holly had worried at times and he wanted me to tell her and I couldn’t bring myself to say those words. It was too personal, like laying my heart on the table for her to take. It scared the hell out of me. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just be together and not worry about all those details. And now, it was so hard to believe that was the kind of drama that had occupied my life. I’d take that life back in a heartbeat.

“But do you think
she
did?” Holly asked, slowly turning to face me again.

My eyes met hers. “I don’t know. I honestly have no idea. The Holly that I knew then took her time. She wouldn’t have met some random guy in a bar and made out with him but there was someone before me, so I suppose…”

“David?” Holly finished for me.

I nodded. “Even if she did cheat or whatever we’d call it since we didn’t say we were exclusive, it wouldn’t have been because she didn’t want to be with me, it would have been because she was probably so scared of holding on too tight. I think right before she … you and I got together, she was confused, and probably screwed up a lot of things to figure out what she really wanted. I think what I went through after 009 Holly got shot and I couldn’t get back to her, she experienced in a much more subtle form when she broke up with David. That realization that you want more, that you’re willing to risk your heart for it, is something she hadn’t known with David because he was safe.”

Holly moved on to the items on my desk. “So really, your only problem was that your timing was off. She grew up before you did.”

“I guess that’s a good way of looking at it.”

“In my version of junior year,” Holly said, “the version in my head—not the one we’ve landed in—I never had that moment with David. I don’t think about him like that. It’s weird, isn’t it?”

I laughed again. “I thought the same thing when I met him in 2007. I just didn’t see the chemistry. Of course, I didn’t
want
to see it, but I think that actually made me even more in tune with his every move.”

She moved closer to me and nerves flickered in her expression for a second and then faded. But it was long enough to cause butterflies to start flapping around inside my stomach.

“I read about your first time with original Holly,” she said, her voice dropping almost to a whisper. “It was in the pages that Emily wrote down.”

I covered my face with my hands and groaned. “God, that child has to be the most morally corrupted kid on the planet. Not that it’s her fault or that it’s affected her negatively but man, eight-year-olds do
not
need to read about some eighteen-year-old losing her virginity.”

“Did you ever read that entry?”

I shook my head. “I tried to read as little of that diary as possible. It felt like an invasion of privacy and I’m kinda pissed at that version of me for being an idiot.”

Holly gave me a tiny smile. “Why did you have such a hard time going through with it after you found out it was her first time?”

I reached for Holly’s hand and held it in mine. “It seemed too big, too important for me to be involved. I just wanted it to be fun. But then I got it. I got that she wasn’t asking me for a ring or anything. She just had to tell me before I figured it out and then it would have been even more weird.”

“The thing is…” She leaned into me, resting a hand on the back of my neck and pulling our foreheads together. The heat, the tension built between us. “I want to be able to write a diary entry like that one. That’s what I want to envision when I think of being close to someone like that. I’m not saying it has to be today, but I am saying that you looking at me like I’m a wounded, fragile girl who you can’t dare go crazy with isn’t going to bring on the steamy journal entries and … I almost avoided telling you this because it’s really hard to say out loud, but I kind of think we’re past the point where we hold back important information and expect that we’ll have the opportunity to say it later on.”

I swallowed back the lump in my throat, knowing exactly what my face must look like. Sure enough, Holly pulled away and sighed. “See? There you go again. The sad Jackson face. It’s so heavy, it’s like you’re suffocating me with all that guilt and grief and regret.”

“I’m sorry.” I reached for her, but she backed farther away. After a two-second hesitation, I made a decision to ditch the concerns from last night and take my dad’s advice, and most of all, leave Holly knowing what it felt like to do this with someone who loves her as much as I do.

My heart was already racing, anticipating what would come of this revelation, and maybe I wanted it for me as much as I wanted it for Holly. I left her hanging in the middle of the room, while I walked over to my iPod and speakers and started looking for a song to play.

“Jackson,” Holly said, sounding slightly frustrated. “You can’t play the same song and pretend I’m the other version of me and that’ll fix everything.”

I hit
PLAY
and then turned around, grabbing Holly’s hand and pulling her against me before she could object again. “I’m not playing the same song and I’m not pretending you’re someone else. This is the version of you I want to be with, okay?”

Her eyes met mine, her arms circling around my neck. “Okay.”

Until the moment I started kissing Holly, right after her arms tightened around me, I hadn’t even realized how much of my self-control I’d used up in all these days of keeping my distance from her and drawing these invisible barriers between us. Knowing they were gone sent every concern I’d had over the past sixty days flying from my head, my mind focused on one thing and only one.

Holly was right there with me, pulling at the bottom of my shirt, tugging it over my head before crushing her mouth against mine again. I reached for the tie around the waist of her dress and pulled it quickly apart before sliding down the zipper. One of my hands was tangled in her hair and the other carefully slipped inside the opening at the back of her dress when Holly lifted her head suddenly and closed her eyes, her own hands pausing in their movement. “Good song … but I’m trying not to read too much into it.”

Good.

I slid my hands to the back of her neck, and whispered, “Don’t think too much. Not now.”

After a few minutes of insanely good kissing, we ended up stretched out on my bed, both of us in our underwear and both of us completely breathless and absorbed in the moment.

“Condoms,” Holly whispered into my ear, her leg wrapped around me, my fingers running up and down that bare leg. “Do you have any?”

I lifted my head and looked right at her. “I have no idea.”

This wasn’t usually a detail I skipped over. In fact, I’d been a pro at condom preparedness. Dad had stressed it from age twelve, years before I ever needed that lecture. I reached over Holly and opened the bedside drawer. Nothing but a couple books and a flashlight. I rolled over and brought her with me, yanking open the other drawer on the other side of the bed. I stared into it and let out a short laugh, causing Holly to look at the contents from over my shoulder. There were at least thirty condoms lying in the bottom of the drawer, a couple issues of
Popular Science
half covering the supply.