Kayla couldn’t stop looking at Steve. He’d already had two weeks to get used to the young faces around him, but for Kayla, this particular young face she’d never seen before, even in a picture, was brand new for her. It wasn’t just his left eye, it was his entire face. The fine lines that begin in everyone as age overtakes them hadn’t yet begun to whisper into a single inch of Steve’s skin. His hair was so much brighter a blonde than the warm, dark golden color she knew. His lips were the same; they looked the same, and they felt the same when they kissed hers. But even his bone structure seemed different to her. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what exactly it was that differed from the Steve he was in 2009 or even that she’d met in 1986, but the differences were there. Of course, the biggest difference was in Steve’s eyes, the presence of two of them that really saw. And most importantly, the contentment she saw within them.
“You’re staring, Sweetness,” Steve whispered.
Kayla shrugged. “I can’t help it. I’m overwhelmed.”
“My eyes?” he asked. Kayla didn’t answer at first. “It’s ok, you can say it,” he said softly.
Kayla shook her head. “It’s wrong. Sh-shallow.”
“Baby, I know how different it is, it’s ok. I’ve already spent a couple hours staring at myself, too.”
“You’re just so young. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of you from this time. When I saw you standing there I knew it was you, I’d recognize you no matter what, but it was so – I don’t know, impossible. Like a dream image, I think. So impossible that it was you that I just couldn’t believe it. I can’t believe it.
“Not as ugly just yet.”
Kayla shook her head and slid her fingertips gingerly around his eye, then down his cheek. She did the same with the rest of his face. “You look beautiful. You have always been the most handsome man I’ve ever seen, doesn’t matter how many eyes or how many lines around them.” He would have joked that she was lying, but he knew that he really was beautiful to her, and hearing her say it felt so good that he couldn’t laugh it off. Instead he bent down to kiss her again. The recognition Steve felt in her lips that he’d waited so long for moved him.
Kayla tore her eyes away from him long enough to take another good look around. “1979 … it’s 1979?”
Steve nodded. “And I’m not kidding, here, baby, you have to whisper. Your folks can’t know that we’re like this at night, ‘cause I worked hard to keep us together.”
Kayla went to the window and ran her hand from the top of her pony-tail down to the ends. “My hair is really long.”
Steve huffed out a chuckle. “Yeah, longest I’ve ever seen on you. You do it kind of like Farrah Faucett, only you’re so much prettier.” Kayla smiled. Then his previous statement came to her with a delayed reaction.
“Wait, that we’re like this at night? Like what, what are we doing at night?”
Steve’s stomach lurched slightly. “Well, not too much, but enough.” He plowed his hand through his hair as Kayla’s eyebrow raised. “Kissing, mostly.”
“Mostly.”
“Minor groping.”
Kayla’s mouth wanted to form a smile, but it was still stuck in the incredulity of being here in the first place. Nothing seemed real yet. It was like she was in a dream. “Groping … me … ?”
“Well, I wasn’t groping Bo, baby.”
“Bo? He’s here, too?” She craned her neck around to the right toward the hallway. “But I thought—” Kayla shook her head, tried to focus, and started again. “Steve, how are you here? I graduated high school in ’78. You’re not even in the country, right? Aren’t you with Bo in the merchant marines?”
Steve gathered her into an embrace and loved the feeling of his wife’s head upon his chest. “Bo and I aren’t in the merchant marines anymore, we’re in Salem now, I got us out last week.” A shudder ran through Kayla that Steve felt.
“Last week? Steve, how long have you been waiting for me?”
He took a breath. “Come here, sit down, baby, we need to start from the beginning. But we have to keep our voices down, I don’t want your pop to come in here and think I’ve taken advantage of you.”
He wanted to get under the covers with her and feel her body against his and take lots and lots of advantage. But for now they had a lot to go over. They sat in front of each other cross-legged on Steve’s bed looking very much like a couple of teenagers at a sleepover. Before he began, he held her face in his hands and kissed her again. Deeply with love and relief, and her lips anticipated him with the kind of love and commitment that only a lifelong lover could provide.
“I’ve been waiting for you for eleven days. This is day 12, actually, because I jumped into the middle of the night on my ship, the Alva Maerk on February 2nd. When we wake up it’ll be the 13th.” Kayla wasn’t sure she heard him right, and Steve registered the shock on her face. He stopped to let her take that in.
“How is that possible?”
“I don’t know, but I’m telling you, I woke up on the Alva with Bo in the bunk above me, Britta’s picture on my wall, and a green cats eye to match the one that’s been staring back at me for most of my life.”
“That must have been amazing for you,” she smiled. “You look … I don’t know, at peace? Not like at the pioneer village; you were so upset then.”
“It’s different now.” Steve ran his own fingertips over his brow ridge where the leather strap would have been. “it’s so many years ago. This is my real face.”
“Oh, Steve, every face is your real face.”
Steve let out a soft breath and held his wife’s hand, then he continued. He told her how he manipulated Bo into inviting him back to Salem for leave thanks to this jump being at the end of their three-month contract, and that until then he was the one following Bo around trying to remember what to do rather than the other way around.
“He must have loved that,” Kayla chuckled.
“He had no idea, baby, he thought he was still followin’ my lead.”
“How did you do that?”
“Luck, baby, ‘cause the slang alone got me into trouble a lot.”
Steve told her of the phone calls he tried to make and how he couldn’t believe it when he finally heard her voice but then realized she wasn’t in there. “I tried finding you right away, the minute I could. But then when I finally got to a phone in Marseille and you weren’t you yet, I couldn’t believe it. I was goin’ crazy thinkin’ you were goin’ crazy wondering where I was. Turns out you didn’t have a care in the world, baby.”
“You talked to me? From Europe?”
“I tried three times, reached you once. I pretended to be the phone company with a problem, and you were more than happy to help me out.”
“You’re kidding.”
“What, you’re surprised? Kayla Brady has never turned away anyone who asked her for help a day in her life.
“Johnson,” she corrected. “If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind at all,” Steve said. He kissed her ring finger and then her lips. She felt so good. “You didn’t know that when I called, though,” he said softly. “I was shocked. But real happy to hear your voice. Couldn’t believe you weren’t there yet, and I knew I had to get home to you. Kayla realized just what he went through to do that when he told her how he’d arranged by the skin of his teeth the long trip home from Barcelona.
Then came the part about Bo. That Steve had set it up so that Bo’s problems with the KGB would never happen and that tomorrow he was going back to high school. Kayla couldn’t believe that, it was simply amazing to her.
“Advanced knowledge, baby,” Steve said. “It’s powerful.”
Kayla nodded appreciatively with tears in her eyes. “That wasn’t for you or me. That was for Bo. You changed it all for him. To protect him.”
“I couldn’t let them do that again.” Then Steve smirked. “He couldn’t believe his luck when I said I was done with Britta. He tried to push me, made real sure he wasn’t ‘steppin’ on my toes’ first, but then gave up and said he was gonna move in on her instead. I was like, oh hell no. He fought me on it, though, wanted to look her up if I wasn’t gonna get with her.”
“How did you convince him?”
“Just scared the sh*t out of him with the truth. Told him she was into illegal stuff and that unless he wanted to rot in some Eastern European prison somewhere that he’d better leave her alone. Made him promise, and he did.
“Thank you for taking care of my brother,” she said as a tear ran down her face in happiness for him.
“I love him, too, Kayla.” Steve said. She nodded and she blinked a tear away. “So, then I convinced him to go back to high school, and that really seemed to seal the deal for me and your folks.”
That brought Steve to the Brady dinners, and Kayla felt such warmth in how much Steve’s face lit up talking about it. He told her how different this first meeting was with them than the first time. Of course, he didn’t come off anything like a good guy the first time, so what did he expect? This time he appeared to them as a much different kind of man, and so her parents were nothing but welcoming and warm, which let him watch her like a hawk from the moment he got there waiting for her to arrive. He started telling her about his fish market job, but there was so much to tell, and he was worried they were pushing their luck talking so much within such earshot of everyone that he was starting to feel overwhelmed.
Kayla saw that Steve was feeling anxious and pulled the hand holding hers to her cheek and closed her eyes against it. She felt his heart race in his pulse and knew she had to calm him down. “Shh … slow down.”
“Baby, there’s so much … there’s so much. We – you – you’re in college. You’re on the spinal unit, but you cut class today, so you gotta go tomorrow, but it’s only the beginning of the unit, you can catch up.”
“Steve?” she smiled gently. “You remember I’m a doctor? I’m not going to have a problem with catching up. I don’t even have to do anything but show up for the tests at this point.”
Steve rolled his eyes. “God, am I forgetting who we really are, Kayla?”
“No, you’ve been all alone for two weeks, it’s the stress.”
“Yeah, and speaking of that, baby, where have you been? Were you stuck back there for the last eleven days?
“Stuck?” She was confused. “What do you mean?”
“After I jumped, what happened after I left? Did my body go back to who I was then?”
Kayla narrowed her eyes. “Steve, it was the same as always, I left right after you did. Ten seconds, tops. It’s always been the same when you go first, I wait a few seconds, then I feel it, too. There’s a pull at my diaphragm, and it’s like the room spins. Sometimes I can hear what’s going on around me, but the room always spins or at least kind of tilts, and I have to close my eyes. Then it’s like I cut to the new place. It’s one second to the next.”
Steve stared at her for a second, then he laughed without any humor. “Naw, baby, uh-uh, you’re forgettin’ or passed out or somethin’, ‘cause you couldn’t have been one second to the next, I was all alone here for eleven days.” He wasn’t raising his voice, but he was on the very edge.
“Steve, it’s ok, calm down.”
“Calm down? My wife is missing for eleven days, and she doesn’t even know it. That’s not ok, Kayla!” Seeing this Steve at this age looking like he maybe just graduated high school, himself, call her his wife had such a strange, anachronistic quality to it, she actually felt it like a dent in the atmosphere.
It’s not that she was unaffected, because she was freaked out, too, but someone had to keep their head right now, and Steve was losing it. “Ok, shh, baby, shh. I’m here now. I’m here.”
“But first you were where?”
“The lighthouse,” Kayla said trying not to sound frustrated.
“For eleven days?!”
“No! Steve, it was just like you, right? You felt the jump effect, and like every other time, you woke up in the next place. Here.”
“The Alva.”
“Right. Like every other time. I felt it, I jumped, and this time I woke up in my room just now.”
“So you jumped right after I did?”
“Yes,” she assured him.
“And you didn’t spend any time … I dunno, floating in a, uh …”
“In a what?”
“… A tunnel of light, or somethin’, I dunno, baby!” He felt like an idiot. Kayla tried so hard not to giggle, but she did, and then he finally did, too, dissipating some of the manifestation of his panic.
“A tunnel of light?” she said with amusement.
Steve went for his patch and cursed when he came up with nothing but eye. Kayla gave him an understanding look. “Been a hard habit to break,” he said more calmly.
She nodded and palmed her pony-tail. “So, now we’re really out of sync. We jump away the same as it’s always been since Cleveland, but the arrivals aren’t following the same pattern.”
“No, Sweetness,” he sighed in resignation, “they’re random, and this one almost did me in. Jesus, they’re all doing me in.”
Kayla nodded. “You’ve had it so rough, Steve.”
“Yeah, ‘cause on the other hand it’s been just a real g*ddamn walk in the park for you,” he said sarcastically.
“I’m not the one who spent a week being tortured,” her voice broke at the image of him suffering in that horrible cell with those pictures in his hands. Steve was silent for a moment.
“You sounded pretty tortured, too, trying to convince Shane and the ISA to go rescue a ghost.”
Kayla felt a rush of something ugly. He was right, she went through a torture of her own on that jump. At the time she wasn’t sure she was going to survive. But it simply did not compare. “You’ve had more than your share, Steve. More than any one person should ever have to handle in ten lifetimes. A really strong man would have let them do him in by now. But my husband is one of a kind. They broke the mold when they made you.”
He knew she meant it. His smile was so sad. “I love you, Kayla.”
Kayla ran her fingers through Steve’s unruly mop of hair. A shorter cut, but the long layers fell in attractively messy pieces about his head, and it struck her just how very much it suited him. If she could imagine a ‘70’s Steve, this would have been it. “I love you, too. I’ll never stop.” She let her eyes wander to the strong muscles of his abdomen and the chiseled definition of his chest. “This is wild,” she said as her hands touched the pectoral muscle that she’d never seen without its dagger tattoo. Then she felt herself up much like she’d done many times before to assess her place in time. “And these, too. Wow. They stand straight up.”
Steve’s penis started to stand up, too, and he got a look in his eye that turned ravenous in an instant. “You don’t know how hard it’s been to keep my hands off you, Sweetness.” Kayla took a breath that made her chest rise up, hardening him more. “I’ve wanted to be with you so bad.”
“I’ve been right in there, apparently,” she chuckled.
Steve reached over and undid the bottom button of her nightgown. “No. Not all of you.” He looked her right in the eyes as his fingers worked the button above it. Her eyes were amazing. “Baby, you told me in Italy that the other you – you said ‘she is me.’ But I’m not so sure.” Steve worked on the button above her bellybutton, and Kayla felt the nipples of this body she was in harden. “I mean you’re you, that’s for sure. I think we’re definitely still us, it’ not like we’re one person now and then a different person after we jump in. ‘Cause I could feel you when I held you in my arms. But it’s not the same, baby, it’s just not.” As he reached the button at her sternum, he was reminded of her stitches and how she didn’t want him to see them. He’d kissed each stitch. He unconsciously felt for them between her breasts, finding nothing but her unblemished skin. “The girl that lives in that room? You? You will be 2009 Kayla one day with stitches from open-heart surgery and all our memories together. But you didn’t remember me. You didn’t remember that I was your husband.” His breath caught in his throat as his subconscious finally allowed him to feel that loss of the last five days. As he opened the next button like he’d kissed the next stitch, he thanked God she was there. “You didn’t remember quarantine or that Joe sleeps over there when he stays here overnight.” Steve angled his head toward the desk, and it was the first time he’d referenced his baby boy even in his own head since he sat at that desk and let the pain touch him on his first night here. “I’ve been here five days without all of you,” Steve whispered hoarsely as he undid her very top button, “and baby, you’re just not complete unless you’re all there. I couldn’t be with you like that. I wanted to, because I wanted you so bad, baby, I wanted you so bad. I missed you. My whole Kayla.”
“Oh, Steve,” she tilted her head in understanding and so much love.
“Now that you’re all here …” Steve parted her unbuttoned nightgown and slid it down over her shoulders to reveal her naked breasts. Only now did he let his gaze leave her eyes and settle on them. They did look different than any version of her breasts he’d ever seen before. They hung differently on her body, and they were just a little bit smaller. But that didn’t change how he’d felt about any of them. “… I need you.”
Kayla had so many questions. So much she needed to understand about when they were and where they were expected to be. But right now, her husband was looking at her like he could come just from the vision of her, and for the first time, she felt this very young body of hers heat up.
“Take what you need,” Kayla said with her own building excitement.
Steve looked toward Kayla’s room. It felt very odd to be worried about being discovered, but this was their situation. “I just need to feel you,” he said.
Steve knelt on the floor and turned her to sit on the edge of the bed. He palmed one breast in his right hand while his other hand ran up her left thigh. He’d touched Kayla’s naked body hundreds of times, but this was not the same. “You are so beautiful.”
“I think you already mentioned that,” Kayla cooed.
“And I’ll mention it over and over again, baby.”
Finally, Steve sucked his wife’s left breast into his mouth and let his tongue swirl around. Kayla gasped. It felt amazing. Her husband sucked and licked and dragged his teeth over her small areola while his thumb teased the nipple of her other breast. She felt desire pool inside her and wanted him to possess her. She could feel between her legs, however, what she knew in her head she hadn’t had in a very long time; maidenhood. That didn’t mean she wasn’t enjoying what her husband was doing any less. Steve stifled a moan as he devoured her, and Kayla fought with everything she had not to emit a sound.
“You taste so good. God, you taste exactly like you should.”
“I want to taste you,” she said.
“Mm, baby, I want that, too. But we can’t here.”
“We can. We’ll be quiet. I want to give it to you.”
She was torture. And before he could control himself he’d crawled into the bed and laid with her next to him and started grinding his erection into her thigh.
“Baby, I love you,” Steve softly whispered into her neck as he very quickly reached the edge of his climax. Then, as he clutched his wife’s bare chest to his and his arms were wrapped tightly around her body like a protective shell, Steve came hard. The only thing that would have made it more intense was if he’d been inside his wife’s body. That was going to have to wait, Steve knew, even if it hadn’t hit Kayla yet. But the rush was deep, and feeling Kayla’s hands wrapped around him as she let him find such badly needed release was loving and beautifully selfless of her. Steve panted soundlessly. “Thank you,” he kissed her. “Thank you, Sweetness. Next time, we come together.”
“You’ve wanted to do that for a long time, didn’t you?”
Steve smiled seductively. “I want a lot more than that. But, yeah, I wanted that so much that last week I actually had my first wet dream in years.”
“Wow,” Kayla said with amusement. “Must have really been a good one. Hope I was in it?”
“Kayla,” he said almost offended since he knew she was kidding, “You think some other woman makes me come in my sleep? Yeah, you were in it. And it was a great dream. At first. The number 69 must have been on my mind, baby, ‘cause you gave a mind-blower.” Kayla smiled. “I could taste you. You came, I came. But then you were gone. You’d disappeared, and I remembered you were lost in time. So, that greatness didn’t last.”
Kayla kissed him gently. “Right here,” she assured him.
“For now,” he dared to say. Kayla didn’t reply; there was nothing she could say that would make that statement untrue.
Steve turned his grin back up. There goes another pair of underwear, baby. You do it to me even in my head.” That made Kayla feel oddly secure and like she and Steve held at least some of the cards on this journey. Stefano or whomever was doing this to them could take them out of each other’s timelines, but never out of each other’s heads.
“So, yeah, I’ve been wanting to. And you really wanted to. Resisting you was hard, Sweetness.”
“I wanted to, too?” she repeated then put two and two together. They gazed into each other’s eyes as she lay securely within the embrace of Steve’s right arm. “I wanted to, but you said no to me … because I hadn’t arrived yet.”
“Yeah. And you didn’t understand, because you fell in love with me.”
“I did?” Then she stuck out her chin. “Well, of course, I did, you’re the finest man there ever was.”
“You might have thought so the other night, but then last night you didn’t go to bed happy. You didn’t understand. How could I love you but not make love to you?”
“How did I know you loved me back?”
“I told you.” Steve felt a little apprehensive to tell her this.
“You did? When? I wish I’d been there, too.”
This statement did more to solidify how Steve felt about the whole thing than she could know. He took a shuddering breath, and told her everything about them. From the beginning. In detail. She listened with rapt attention, and it was nothing short of fascinating. Almost like she was hearing the story of two star-crossed lovers from a romance novel somewhere. When he got to The Rose Steve stopped abruptly.
“What is it?” she asked. They were still laying in his bed, and now he began stroking her belly with his warm palm.
“It felt so right at the time, but now it feels like I did the wrong thing. Almost like … cheating.”
Kayla was afraid to move. “Wh-wh-what do you mean?” He felt the stab through her heart, just at the concept. Oh God, he really did. “How could you cheat if you were with me?”
“Maybe that’s the wrong word, like I said, I was with you, Sweetness. But I made a memory – an important one with you that you’ll never have. You’ll never ever have it, Kayla. And I think that was wrong. I cheated you out of it.”
“But kissing me and mildly groping me is ok?” she asked genuinely trying to suss out with him where the lines should be drawn. She looked at him with so much maturity in her eyes that the girl who went to bed that night did not have.
“I don’t know,” he said with a deep sigh. “I only know what felt right. I know I never felt like you were a different person. That I know. And I know that kissing you isn’t feeling wrong now. Touching you didn’t go very far, and I think that’s because I knew it would go farther, and that did feel wrong. But that’s my whole point, baby, I’m not sure this stuff is really ok.” He felt her snuggle up against his side, and he let loose with the pent up anxiety. “This is f*cked up, Kayla, it really is. Who knew when we got married that we’d have to figure out how to act with ourselves when we started travelling through time? I’m confused, baby, all I can tell you is that something’s not right in my gut about sex when we’re not both there with each other. And I don’t know how I’d feel about it if the roles were reversed. If you jumped to a version of me that didn’t know you or know yet that I love you. And you made him fall in love with you.”
“Steve, stop.”
“I’m going out of my mind, Kayla.”
“You didn’t cheat on me, Steve, you didn’t! I would have loved you, anyway.”
Steve held her more tightly. “I know, baby. I really know.”
“Because of the other night?” Steve nodded. “Ok, so tell me about it. Share it with me, and then I’ll know.”
“But you won’t remember it with me, and that’s what I don’t like.”
Kayla understood, and she didn’t disagree. That was a slippery slope, and she actually felt herself start to get a little jealous … of herself! No, this is a road you won’t go down, Kayla. Nothing good this way comes. What’s done is done, and so learn from it, don’t resent it. “Tell me anyway? Please?”
Steve’s expression changed suddenly, and a smile played on his lips. He got up out of the bed and reached for Kayla’s hand. She stood up with him, and he brought her to the embrace that was second nature to her, dancing with her husband. “I’m not going to tell you. I’m going to re-make it with you.”
Steve danced them silently beside the window where a gentle snow had begun to fall. Kayla fell into step with him and listened carefully as he bent his softly whispering lips to her ear. As soon as he began to sing the words of The Rose a shiver ran through her.
“Some say love, it is a river
That drowns the tender reed.”
“Oh, Steve,” Kayla’s eyes filled with tears that she couldn’t stop, the emotion was so thick inside of her. He kissed her gently on the cheek then continued singing her the entire song as she let the tears leak from her very young eyes. Every word was sung with the same amount of love as when he sang it two nights before. The image in his head as he forged this memory with the rest of Kayla was the same as two nights ago; a vision of her in a charcoal trench coat and his mother’s necklace in the alley outside his apartment as he read the words that she, herself, originally wrote to him on the first Christmas present she’d ever given him. As he whispered those words back to her now in this bedroom that didn’t really belong to him in this time that wasn’t really theirs, he felt just how true they were; how prophetic they would be.
“When the night has been too lonely
And the road has been too long,
And you think that love is only
For the lucky and the strong,
Just remember in the winter
Far beneath the bitter snows,
Lies the seed that with the sun’s love
In the spring becomes the rose.”
Steve stopped their movements, and they silently held each other.
“That was beautiful, Steve.”
“I love you, Sweetness. I said it then, and I’m saying it now. Then you said it back to me. That you loved me, too.”
“Well, that’s because I do. I do love you, too.” Then they lost each other in their kisses, completing the memory for both of them.
By the time Steve was able to focus again and explain everyone’s whereabouts it was just past 3:00 AM, and Shawn was going to be waking up soon, and they had to get to their beds. Kayla was not thrilled about going to class in the morning, but she agreed that if there was ever a jump where they had to just go through the motions of the daily routine and take on those roles, this was it. she was also nervous about seeing her father. After the emotionally charged visit a few jumps ago, she wasn’t sure she could pull it off. And class? She had no idea what her schedule even was, but when Steve said Tuesdays and Thursdays were the academics, some of it came back to her. Still, she had no clue which room to go to for which class. She wished she could just go online to get her class schedule, but the grind that was old school information gathering was in full swing here. She was going to have to go to the administration building and get her schedule.
Finally, Steve walked Kayla back into her room. “There’s more to tell, baby, but we’re out of time. Shawn’s gonna be awake in less than an hour to catch fish, and tomorrow’s my first day of work. I’ll see you off to class before I meet him down there.”
“Steve,” she said suddenly wide-eyed, “what if we jump?”
“Then we do, we have to accept that we have no control.”
“Why can’t I just be sick again, I don’t want to be separated.”
“And that’s why you have to go to class and I have to work the fish market. You are 18 years old, Kayla. No job, no emergency center, no nothing. You’re in school. And trust me, hustling at the Heart isn’t a sure thing in ’79, I figured that out quick. I couldn’t think of anything else but getting your pop to give me my old job back and us living here safe in the house you grew up in. I didn’t know any other way for us to be together, ‘cause even if I could get an apartment, I couldn’t figure out how to get you there with me for at least a little while.”
“Well, we could have dated,” she smiled sweetly. But Steve was done with the slow burn.
“No. You’re my wife. We live under one roof, Kayla. I work for your pop, we stay together. I haven’t figured out how to get into the same bed, but I’m not living apart from you, baby. I mean it.”
Kayla smiled and placed a gentle hand on his chest. “I never wanted to date, anyway.”
Now Steve smiled, too. “Good, now that that’s settled, this whispering’s making my throat ache. One thing at a time, let’s get through the morning first, then the day, you come home after class, I’ll close up at 5:00 PM with your pop, and we’ll wing it.”
He was about to kiss her goodnight when a thought came to her and she stilled him with her hand. “Steve … what if I never jumped in? And you were stuck here with a me that didn’t know you. What would you have done?”
Steve looked at her and told her the truth. “I would have eventually relented, made love to you, and loved you until the day I died or jumped, whichever came first.” She didn’t say anything, just took it in in the pitch blackness of the wee hours.
“I don’t want to sleep apart,” she practically mouthed, knowing her father would be up any minute.
“No choice, baby.” Then he got a very solemn look on his face. “Kayla?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re a virgin.”
Kayla nodded, and Steve swallowed. “I know. My entire body feels different.”
“It does?”
“Hard to explain, but yeah, it feels different.” She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him deeply. Then she said, “I can’t wait to give it to you.” Steve kissed her back then smiled as he felt his penis stir. But they were now going to be operating on no more than four hours of sleep, so there would be no energy in either of them to indulge.
“Good night, Sweetness. See you in the morning.”
“Goodnight, Steve. I love you.”
“I love you more.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Kayla said.
For once he didn’t fight her.