Steve and Kayla were sitting at their regular spots at the dining room table, both of them eating a bowl of chowder. While they weren’t feeling the jump effect any longer, neither of them were felling very well. Steve’s vision had begun to acclimate, but his body was feeling what it had been through in Italy. Kayla, on the other, hand, was healthy, but the pregnancy was giving her all kinds of symptoms, including a queasiness that left her not so much eating her chowder as stirring it around.
The silence was awkward, and neither of them knew what to say, exactly. The fact was that they were now in a time that they were wholly unprepared for. Marina was in town, and she was like Starbucks, literally around every corner.
Steve had dreaded jumping here. It wasn’t better or worse than when he’d jumped to Italy, it was just more. It stirred up so much anxiety in him, he couldn’t even think of that time without getting upset. With himself as much as with Marina. Not telling his wife about his first marriage was the worst mistake Steve had ever made, and unfortunately, time had not eased his self-inflicted wound as much as it had eased Kayla’s. The only thing that tested their marriage more was when he died.
“How are you feeling?” Kayla asked. It was strange to hear the awkward tone in her voice. Steve was scared that it was Marina that had put it there.
“Beat up.” He finished the last of his chowder.
“I’m sorry,” she said flatly. Why wasn’t she looking at him? His heart raced.
“How ‘bout you, baby?”
“Nauseous.” She laughed a little. “And big.”
“You’ve never been big, Sweetness.”
“Oh please,” she dismissed.
“Big with baby is not being big. And I like it when you’re big with my babies.”
Kayla got sad for a minute. “I never got very big with Joe. He came too early.”
Steve took Kayla’s hand. “He came through, though. Stronger than ever.”
Kayla slipped her hand out of his and replied with a melancholy, “Yeah.” Then she got up and picked up the two bowls to head into the kitchen.
Steve felt the air in the room like a thick fog, chilling him. “Baby, we can’t do this.”
“It’s just a couple of bowls, it’ll only take a minute.”
“Kayla, put down the bowls!” Kayla narrowed her eyes at the sudden outburst. Steve stifled a wince as he got up and paced. He wanted out of this time. He wanted out right now. “We gotta get out of here, Kayla, we can’t stay here.”
Kayla didn’t like what she was seeing on Steve’s face. It was like back at the Pioneer Village; he was a live wire of angst. “Here … as in my folks house? Then let’s just go home.”
“You know damn well that’s not what I mean!”
“Steve,” she sighed wearily, “it’s ok.”
“How can you say that, Kayla? It’s not ok! Marina is here!” Steve’s anxiety was rising, and Kayla didn’t know what to do to help. This was a demon she knew he’d never fully excised. She had; he had not. “We’re pulled out of heaven, and dropped here. With her. She’s here, baby, and she’s hell bent on messing up our lives! We’re right in the middle of it again!”
“Steve, what do you want us to do about it, get on a plane to North Dakota and hide until the spring thaw?”
“That’ll work for me. While we’re at it, we can find a wood chipper.”
That made Kayla laugh. “Well, if we just wait long enough and don’t say anything, Isabella will get her out of the way, and my alibi would be a lot better.”
Steve wasn’t laughing. “Why aren’t you more upset about this, Kayla? I know how bad I hurt you, why aren’t you acting like it?”
Kayla stared at him dumbfounded. “What do you mean, why aren’t I acting like it? What’s that supposed to mean?” Steve palmed the back of his head. “You want me to be mad? You want me to feel that hurt all over again?”
“No, of course, I don’t, baby, I just don’t get how you’re letting this all roll off your back, because I know how much I hurt you, and now you get to relive it.”
Kayla was nearing her own limits on her patience, and her voice had now taken on the frustrated edge that her husband had expected in the first place. “Steve sometimes letting things bother you is a choice. I just made a different one.” Steve stood with his arms crossed and his chin in his hand pensively, but he let her continue without interrupting. “You said to me a minute ago not to shut you out. Before you got here, you said not to shut you out. And it made me realize that that’s exactly what I did with Stephanie, I punished you and shut you out and didn’t tell you when I should have. I’ll regret that forever. But I realized I had this chance to do something good, fix it, like you did before I jumped into Italy. It was a choice, Steve. You want me to say your secret wife still upsets me, fine she does.” Steve reacted to her use of the term “secret wife,” but Kayla had a point to make now. You want me to say that you did the wrong thing and you hurt me, well too late, because I already did that for days and weeks when we did this the first time. You want more of it? Really?”
“I—I’m not sayin’ that, baby, I just—”
“Then lucky for you, you missed it the second time around when I did it with the other you before you got here.” Steve shuffled his feet and fidgeted with his bandage before placing his hands on his hips.
“You said that?”
Kayla nodded. “Right before I told you that I forgive you. There was no point playing my role. The damage was already done, it was all out there, you were begging and pleading with me not to leave you, and … Steve, we’ve already done this. It’s not like there were any more secrets to uncover. What was the point? Maybe this Kayla hadn’t forgiven you yet, but I forgave you a long time ago. And I’m not interested in making you suffer for it anymore.”
“Sweetness—”
“So, I made a choice not to. That’s all it is, Steve, don’t you see? You paid for that mistake.” She went to him and caressed his face. “You were beat up, you lost your eye again, and I left you.” She repeated the last part in a sad whisper. “I left you. I know what that did to you, I watched you suffer.”
“Baby, I deserved it.”
Kayla sat back down heavily in her chair, she really didn’t feel well. She nodded at her husband’s last statement. “Yeah, I thought you did, too. But I still kept this pregnancy from you when I shouldn’t have. One should have had nothing to do with the other, but I let it. I told myself that if I told you, then I’d never know if you were choosing me out of love or obligation.”
Steve leaned his hands against the table at her. “Sweetness, you can’t be serious. Obligation?”
Kayla put up her hand. “It was bullshit, I knew it was bullshit. But I was so angry.” At first I knew you’d never leave for Italy to get that damn key and get rid of her if you knew I was pregnant.”
“Damn straight!”
“Second time you’ve said that tonight,” she deadpanned. “But then it was just one excuse after another, and it was wrong. I tried to tell myself I did what I thought was right, but the truth was I knew the whole time that it was wrong. And I did it anyway. I remember the look on your face.” Kayla fought the sting in her eyes. “After Jack told you, you came back here. Probably right about now, too. And your heart was broken.”
Steve didn’t deny it, but he refused to meet her eyes or acknowledge it.
“Steve, all I’m saying … is that we’ve been through this. You’ve paid for that mistake, I forgave you, and we got past it. So I could sit here and get angry again, or I could set something right, and so that’s what I chose.”
Steve knelt in front of Kayla. “The guilt is too much for me sometimes. I—I feel what I did, what I caused, and I don’t know what to do with it, I—I—I wanna go back! I don’t wanna be here!”
“Oh, Steve,” she said with comfort on top of her own pain. “I know. That’s what makes it worse. If only we jumped to our wedding or something, but instead we had to go from there to here.” Finally Kayla began to cry. She’d been staving it off, but now she let the tears come. “Ya know what hurts right now, Steve? The constant loss of our lives every time we think it’s safe to breathe. That’s what’s hurting me right now. I just had my perfect life ripped away from me an hour ago, and now I have to adjust to being here with,” a brief pause, “Marina,” and she let the name come out bitterly. “And, yes, part of me still hurts when I think about it, but if I’m being really honest, Steve, not that much. Not like it did at the time. You just have to release it, baby, you do.”
Steve wiped her tears, and then he stood up, his anxiety much diminished. Kayla always knew how to calm him. He went and sat back down in his chair. “I thanked your pop.” Kayla looked at him sympathetically. “I told him—I told him that I wished he really were my own father. He had broken dishes all around him and food flying all over the place, but after you’d gone and I was hangin’ on to you, I looked him right in the eye and thanked him for the happiest five months of my life.” Kayla took his hand across the table and let more of her tears spill down her cheeks for the poignance of what that must have meant to him. “And ya know what he did? Instead of kicking this man who’d gone insane on his dining room floor out on his ass? He called me son.” Steve couldn’t hold the tears in, that heightened sense of emotions breaking through whether he wanted them or not. “He called me son, Sweetness.”
They were both crying. For the loss of 1979, for the year and circumstances they now found themselves in, and for the plain and simple fact that they now had to start all over again regardless of when it was.
“So what do we do now?”
Kayla shrugged. “I don’t know. Go back to the house, I guess.”
“I mean … about her. Do we try to prevent her death?”
Kayla sighed. “I think we go home, get a restraining order in the morning, and just figure it out from there.”
Steve’s eye was itching him, and he tugged at the bandage, then nodded. “Yeah, ok. My smart wife.”
“That is what I am, Steve. I never won’t be.”
Kayla cleaned up what few dishes there were and went to Bo’s old room to get her things, as that was where she remembered staying; it was the only room that had an unoccupied bed, since Frankie and Max were in her and Roman’s rooms. It was weird being in there compared to where she woke up that morning.
Steve went to their bathroom and took a look at his eye, which was bothering him. It wasn’t pretty, but it was different than his original injury, as the eye socket had been so expertly repaired. He heard Kayla gathering her things. Steve really couldn’t wait to get inside his house. Before he went he took a look into what had just recently become his old room; there was no indication, of course, of his ever having lived in it. Not in this timeline. Still, he found himself going to the closet where the hardwood was covered with about a hundred Saturday morning cartoon action figures. It made him smile as he brushed them away from the spot on the floor that he’d hidden the precious evidence of his lifetime. He wanted so badly to believe it was there beneath the floorboards but couldn’t bear the thought that it wasn’t. He crouched down and stared at the spot but took no further action as a stab of sadness lurched through him.
Steve started to get up when a stab of something else lurched though him, as well. In his weakened state it was enough to knock him on his ass. “Oh, you’ve gotta be f*cking kidding me!” He listened for a second but didn’t hear Kayla rooting around anymore. Had she jumped? From five months to an hour? He called out her name but heard nothing back. He grabbed onto the doorframe and called out again. He heard someone call back to him, but it might have been his mother-in-law. After a few moments, as it always did, the jump took him. It was one of the rare times he welcomed it. He only wished he’d known if his Kayla would be waiting for him on the other side or not.
Kayla was in Bo’s bathroom when she heard Steve call to her. She hated yelling through the house, but called “just a minute!” back out to him. She was washing her hands when she realized why Steve had yelled her name and nearly passed out when she felt the pull at her diaphragm. What made this one so intense coming and going she didn’t know, but she suspected it might have had something to do with the pregnancy. Was it like this in Italy? She didn’t remember. She was absolutely shocked to be jumping so soon, though, that was for sure. “Is this really the jump?” she said out loud. When the room hung in her vision, there was no doubt. Please, God, somewhere without any drama.
God had nothing to do with it, it was all Rolf, not that she had any way of knowing that. He watched their graph lines and registered that the gap in arrival times was still completely random as far as he could tell.
He’d had a breakthrough when he’d proven what was causing it all to unravel. It might be possible to force the cause into a constant. But the effect, that was the variable that he’d discovered was folding back in on itself.
Their actions within their jumps were the cause. The effect was two-fold. One was the arbitrary gaps in arrival times, and the other was the duration of each one of their jumps. And Rolf was now fairly positive that he could not hope to be in control either of these effects.
Rolf was a complicated individual. When he’d first begun working for Stefano, he was overjoyed to have the unlimited resources that allowed him to carry out the groundbreaking work that the Italian maniac had tasked him with. On some level, he knew every one of the experiments were wrong, but there was so much more at stake than these people’s lives. The very foundation of science was in his hands, and he wanted to be the one to re-shape it. Only he never got any of the credit, because he couldn’t be revealed without implicating his benefactor, so one miracle of science after another went unrecognized, and he’d simply had enough. He’d made enough bank that he quietly set himself up with his lab and promptly disappeared.
In all these years, there was just one more frontier he had left to harness. And that was time. He could have used anyone, but he did, actually, have a conscience, and the things Stefano made Rolf do to the man’s own brother were even beyond his willingness to further exploit. He’d done quite a number on Steve Johnson, too, but it was John Black’s brain that was more scrambled, so Johnson was the better candidate. And the fact that Johnson had missed out on 16 years of his life actually fuelled the scientist to use him. Not only could he prove his theories of time travel by actually making it happen, but he could give Johnson and his wife some of that extra time back without the need for them to age a day. To use both of them meant they had to be on the exact same trajectory and limited to shared time, so that’s exactly what he’d programmed into the computers.
He had no idea that they’d make changes monumental enough to destabilize the slipstream and send them down this ludicrous path of uncontrolled jumps. Now it was a mess, five months in 1979, really! This was not what he intended. No one was supposed to get lost in time, and no one was supposed to go anywhere but where they’d both been together. They weren’t supposed to have gaps in arrivals or go anywhen not pre-formulated. But time was a bitch, and she showed Rolf who’s boss.
He checked the numbers, and his jaw dropped. He ran to the computer showing the slipstream and let out a string of German curses that would have put an American truck driver to shame.
That was it. Rolf had had just about enough. He had to stop this from going any further into hell, because this was not what he’d intended. It was time to tame this bitch.
Rolf went back to his case notes from when he’d taken his controlled jump into Stefano’s compound. He was terrified and exhilarated at what he knew now to be true – that he was going to have to jump into their arc and intercept them.
Rolf fell heavily into his chair with this realization and threw his head into his hands. “Sheisse.”
When Steve inhaled he was assailed by the taste of beer. A very specifically tasting beer. The dizziness passed very quickly this time, and his vision wasn’t so difficult to acclimate to now. He noticed the difference having just had two eyes so recently, but this time it was much easier to adjust than last time. He saw right away that this was Shenanigans, and that made him smile. So far so good. Kayla was sitting across from him wearing a sweater he knew well and a scowl he knew better. That scowl was a direct result, in fact, of what that taste in his mouth told him she’d just watched him swallow. Looks like I jumped first.
Apparently, she was too grossed out to notice his change in demeanor, because before Steve could say a word Kayla had picked up the raw egg that Joey had just delivered. She cracked it into the glass, and Steve found his first words.
“Kayla, you don’t wanna do that.”
“Yes, I believe I do,” she replied with an enormous heap of mock confidence as she sat up straight and stuck her chin stubbornly out as far as it would reach. “I think that’s, ah, a real interesting breakfast. Gotta love that protein.” She was trying so hard to be all casual that Steve just could not keep the laugh inside of him. “You’re laughing at me?”
“No, baby, I’m not laughing,” he laughed.
“You don’t think I’ll do it. Well, I’m the one who’s going to be laughing in a minute.” Then she lifted the glass to her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut. Steve got it out of her grasp just as the slimy fluid reached her lips.
“I said, you don’t wanna do that, Sweetness.”
A mixture of frustration and relief flashed across her beautiful features. “I-I-I wasn’t bluffing,” she practically stuttered, “I would have drank it!”
“I know you would have.”
“Oh please, don’t patronize me.”
This was feisty Kayla. Innocent, feisty Kayla before all the problems they’d ever have were a glimmer in their eye. He was so happy to see her but, like always, was left wondering when his version would arrive. “I’m not, baby, I just can’t watch you drink it just to prove to me that we’re more alike than different.”
“Ok, now you really are patronizing me.”
“Sweetness, I’m not playin’ with ya, here, really. I mean, I want to, believe me, I,” he sighed with the memory,” I really want to.” Then he paused to smile at her like he knew a secret she didn’t. Which he did. “But I can’t do it, you’re just too damn … right about things.”
“I am?”
“Yeah, and you’ll also kill me later if you get wind of it, so I’m taking the high road for a change.”
“If I get wind of what?”
Steve didn’t answer her. “What are you doin’ right now, I forget what – what’s today?”
“The date? December 12th.”
Steve adjusted his patch – Oh man, that feels good. “Not ringing any bells. You working today?” Then he remembered why he knew that sweater.
“Tomorrow. Today’s my day off.”
Marlena. Damn. This is the day of the explosion, it all started with that egg beer. “So much for simple,” Steve muttered to himself.
Kayla cocked her head at him. “You know, you’re acting very weird.”
Steve thought fast. He had no interest in being with people he had to be on for right now. He quickly deduced that just one phone call would save the house from exploding, all he had to do was call in an anonymous tip, and Marlena would be safe from Orpheus at least another day. For now, he wanted to just wait to see if his Kayla would arrive right away or if it would be another long wait. “How ‘bout I teach you how to play pool?”
“I already know how to play pool,” she replied haughtily.
“Oh do you?” he laughed again. This destination beat the last one, that was for sure.
“Yes, I do.” After a beat. “So, are you asking me out on a date, Mr. Johnson?”
Steve smiled very genuinely at that, and he could see that this Kayla took it very differently than the entire rest of that conversation. She took it with the affection with which it was intended. The blush that rose to her cheeks warmed Steve from the inside out. “Yes, I am Mrs.—Miss Brady.”
“I accept,” she smiled. “Don’t cry when I win.”
“Can’t promise you that,” he murmured. “Not these days.” Steve stood up and dropped $10 on the table. He took Kayla’s hand, as she rose to meet him. “There’s one thing I’ve gotta do first. Hope you won’t mind.” Then he leaned over and kissed her softly. When he broke away, Kayla’s eyes had become the half-lidded pools that new love inspired. “Was that our second kiss?” he asked.
Kayla nodded her head. “um-hmm.” “Good. Let’s head for our first date.”