Steve felt his pulse in his throat as Adrienne stood at the step to the guest room looking at them uncomfortably. It wasn’t surreal, like with Marcus, it was more like with his mother. To see his sister looking so young and innocent, it was a bittersweet gift. This was before their father had raped her, he was sure of that. He knew he had to keep his head and not go to her and hug her, though the thought of doing so did run through his mind. But the discomfited way she stood and the fact that she was at the loft at all told him that he didn’t know who she was yet and that she figured he was just as disdainful of her now as this time’s Steve was.
“I’m sorry,” Adrienne said defensively. “I didn’t know.”
Steve swallowed and tightened his grip on Kayla’s hand. “Didn’t know?” he asked. “Didn’t know what?”
Adrienne shifted her eyes and crossed her arms in front of her. “That you were here. I didn’t know you were coming over or I would have left. Or stayed in my room or somethin’.”
“Oh. Well, uh,” Steve scratched the back of his head stalling for something to say, because he was plum clueless about what he should say to her. So, he opted for the simple. “No, that’s ok.
“It–?” Adrienne got a hopeful look in her eyes. “It is? But I just interrupted you – again – and I know I’ve been a pest and all.”
“Adrienne, ah … you’re staying with me.” She phrased her question as a statement, beginning to remember this timeframe a bit better. Not great, but better. She was nearly sure Jo hadn’t arrived in town yet, it was just Adrienne.
“She’s staying here?” Steve asked.
Adrienne tried not to sound defensive. “It was just that my place got broken into, see.”
“Right, I let her stay with me for a while,” Kayla remembered. “You, ah, weren’t real happy about it. I think,” she kind of whispered in Steve’s direction.
Steve turned away from Adrienne and lowered his voice to Kayla. “This is before—“
“Pretty sure,” Kayla clipped back just as softly.
Adrienne looked upon them whispering and felt completely in the way. Nothing got more in the way of her mission to get her brother back in their lives than herself, and she just wanted to lash out. Like right now, obviously they wanted to be alone, and she was making him hate her even more just by being there.
“Give me ten minutes, I’ll clear out,” she said, unable to hide the disappointment from her voice as she headed back to the guest room.
“No!” they both said. Adrienne stopped in her tracks and looked at Steve with adoration that he clearly saw now but that sailed over his suspicious head back then. “I mean,” Kayla quickly finished, “that you don’t have to leave on our account.”
“No, I’m in the way. I was in the way the other day, I’m cramping your style. I really want to give you your space.”
“’Cause we were just about to head to Steve’s place—,” Kayla said quickly.
“We were?”
“Yep, sure were!” Kayla said enthusiastically. Then she reached for Steve’s hand, held it up in front of them both, and squeezed it.
“Yeah, that’s right, baby, we were.” Then he turned to his sister and looked her right in the eyes. “Yeah, we were just leavin’, Adrienne, so you’re not bothering us at all.”
Adrienne. Her heart was bursting when her brother said her name without anger, snark, or suspicion for the first time since she’d shown up in Salem. She was almost afraid she was going to wake up. “Really?” she asked.
She sounded like a little girl, and Steve wished with a tinge of regret that he’d known her growing up. “Yeah, baby, you do whatever you want, Kayla and I —“
“—Are going now!” Kayla took Steve’s hand and awkwardly told Adrienne goodbye before Steve could say anything else to her.
“Kayla, Steve, wait!” Adrienne shouted to them as they pulled open the loft door. Kayla turned to look at Adrienne very hesitantly, wanting nothing more than to get to Steve’s apartment so they could talk about this. “Don’t you want your purse?” Kayla looked around, having no clue where that might be.
Adrienne was surprised that Kayla was looking at her with an almost lost expression on her face, so she pointed at the counter. “Over there,” she said. Kayla grabbed it and let out a nervous laugh, then let Steve lead her out the door. “Kayla,” Adrienne laughed. “Aren’t you going to put on your coat? It’s freezing out there, isn’t it, Steve?”
Steve couldn’t help but feel annoyed to be delayed but also happy to hear his sister’s voice. He ran his hand through his hair and kind of grinned at her, which made Adrienne completely self-conscious.
“My, ah … right. Yes, I am, I guess I’m just so lost in thought I forgot!” Kayla gave another nervous chuckle as she glanced around the room desperate to leave and finally spotted it on the coat rack right where it belonged. She slipped on the long navy blue coat with white etched line pattern that she’d remembered so fondly. What ever happened to this coat? she absently wondered.
Adrienne thought the two of them were acting a little weird but didn’t want to say anything to anger Steve now that he’d seemed to lose his smarm and snark and was being nice to her. So, she just kept her mouth shut and smiled as she watched them stumble through leaving the loft.
Once out the door they could not move to that elevator fast enough. “You ok?” Kayla asked after Steve dragged the gate heavily across the elevator threshold.
“Yeah,” Steve said with a bit of a sigh. “I think I’m starting to get used to it.”
Kayla had been warily preparing to jump since practically the minute she arrived. She felt like time was running out if they didn’t talk right away. But she knew that seeing Adrienne had to be tugging at him; it was affecting her, too. She brought his hand she was still holding up to her lips and kissed it then looked up at him. “I’m sorry, Steve. I hope it’s ok that we didn’t stay.”
Steve pulled her into an embrace and let the scent of her hair wash through him. I don’t think we had a choice, Sweetness. We’re doin’ the right thing, we can’t get distracted right now. I don’t know what happened, but this can’t be good.”
Once in Steve’s car, they didn’t waste any time. “That’s twice, Kayla. Twice that you’ve jumped before me.”
“Yeah, but why, Steve? Why am I jumping first now?” Steve didn’t say anything, but Kayla watched as he worked his jaw in frustration. Steve had a thought that clawed at him. He didn’t want to think about it and pushed it away. “Steve?”
“What?” he asked sharply.
Kayla heard the tone in his voice but was too on edge to tiptoe. “Do you think it’s something we did? Or didn’t do?”
“I don’t know, Kayla!” Steve yelled harshly. “What am I, Carnac, now, baby, I don’t know!”
Kayla startled at the way he’d just lashed out at her, then stiffened in her seat.
“Why are you yelling at me?” she bristled.
Normally Steve regretted speaking harshly to her the minute he’d do it. This time, however, he was too freaked out to get quick hold of himself and continued. “Because I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do, Kayla! You’re askin’ me like I’ve got all the answers, but I don’t know sh*t, here! I can’t stop it, I don’t know what to do to get us back in sync, I don’t know how to make us stop jumping! Hell, I just want to go home! How do we get out of this goddamn loop, baby, I don’t know! Now I can’t even hold on to you from one jump to the next, and all I really wanna do is just get home and be us, doin’ whatever we want and not have to worry if we’re f*cking things up! THAT’S WHY, BABY!
Kayla listened to Steve’s tirade with swelling anger of her own, but rather than sling it back at him, she turned away and thought hard about something he’d just said. It made the gears turn in her head, and worry lurched her stomach into knots.
They quickly arrived at the pier outside Steve’s apartment, but his mood hadn’t improved any. Kayla got out of the Bluesmobile, shut the door hard, and walked over to his side of the car where he was still sitting in the driver’s seat with his fingers firmly gripping the steering wheel. She stared down at him until he finally looked up at her with a slightly milder eye. She stepped aside as he got out of the car. The leather of his brown bomber jacket squeaked as he shoved his hands in his back pockets and shifted from one foot to the other.
“Feel better now?” Kayla asked with annoyance.
“No,” Steve exhaled deeply as he pulled his wife to his chest and held her tightly. “I’m sorry, Sweetness, I’m an asshole.”
Kayla layed her head on his chest, the cold leather sending a chill through her, but feeling him holding her more than making up for the cold. “No, you’re not, you’re upset. I am, too.”
“Yeah, baby, but I’m the only one yelling. Why do you stay with me?”
She reached up, grabbed his chin, and gave it a little shake. “So, is it out of your system, now?”
“I don’t know about that,” he admitted lifting his head a bit to silently encourage her to nuzzle in his neck, which she did. “But I’m sorry I yelled at you.” He continued to hold her tightly.
She lifted her lips toward his and kissed him.
“Well, here we are, again,” Kayla said once inside Steve’s apartment. The sense of urgency to have this discussion had not diminished, because she didn’t know when it was going to happen, but she was cautiously waiting at every turn for the jump effect to begin. So, she took off her coat, threw it on the chair, and started right in.
“Steve, we should think about where we’ve been and what we did just before we jumped there. Maybe we’re doing something.”
Steve shook his head. “Naw, baby, that’s not it, the jumps are just random. We’re not doing it.”
“Shouldn’t we at least think about it?” She paced the room and absently noticed the neon of the Shenanigans sign bathing the basement apartment in a steady rhythm of red. “I mean, haven’t you noticed that things are getting harder about these jumps, not easier?”
Steve had noticed it. He’d noticed other things, too, that he didn’t want to admit to himself. Things about Cleveland. He didn’t say anything, but Kayla caught the look in his eye.
“Our first few jumps weren’t just together, we were actually touching each other when we got there. Then there was that jump on the pier. We jumped to the same place, but we weren’t with each other.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but it’s not like we were separated like when we got to the compound. That was the first time we were actually separated.”
“Wait, where were we just before that?”
Steve had to think hard, and it occurred to him how ludicrous the whole thing was that he was now not only remembering their lives in their original timeline, but now he was trying to recall this new one, too.
“You were drunk. That was the night you got drunk with Adrienne, we jumped away right when you were feeling sick.”
Did we make any changes? The thought flitted through Kayla and a nagging worry continued to press on her as she struggled to remember what they may or may not have done.
“Ok, then you found me in the truck.”
“And we had our Frontierland adventure time with a gift shop and everything,” Steve smiled. “So damn cute, baby.”
Kayla smiled back enjoying the moment. Then her expression turned serious again. “Then there was the poisoning, and we were separated when we arrived there, too.”
“But with Cleveland, we were together there.”
“Well …,” Kayla interjected,” I guess we were. Kind of.” Steve raised a questioning brow to her. “Well, we were both in my apartment, but you were behind one door, I was behind another. But … yes, you’re right, we weren’t separated there …” Kayla trailed off as they both got lost in their own thoughts. Her mind raced as she jumped from one thought to the next and soon got lost in the sea of leaps she tried to keep track of.
Through this discussion and especially with the mention of Cleveland, Steve was getting more and more agitated as his true fears gnawed at his subconscious. Though he didn’t voice them, they were the same fears Kayla was having as she tried to piece together a theory. And it wasn’t a good one.
“Steve?” she began cautiously, “Steve, where are all the places we’ve been so far?”
“Too many places to remember, Kayla. A lot of places.”
“We need to write this down, I can’t keep it straight. Do you have paper and a pencil?”
Steve looked at her with irony. “I dunno, baby, I haven’t lived here in 20 years, you know as much as I do.”
Kayla rolled her eyes and tried to let his snark roll off her back. “Well you’re the detective in the family, could ya maybe open a drawer?”
Steve rolled his eye and sighed, then went through a couple drawers before he found an unopened bill and a pen. He handed them to her and kissed her forehead in apology. They sat down on the bed facing each other and she ran her finger down his patch in acknowledgement.
Together they recalled all the places they’d been, beginning with the loft the day after Marlena (didn’t) die.
“That was a lot of panic and looking for Joe.” Kayla felt a pang of sadness as Steve exhaled heavily. “And I gave you the pool cue,” she added.
Steve perked up at that. “Yeah,” he smiled. “Then we went to the house. I got to be with my girls,” he continued smiling.
They continued through all the jumps: The few moments in the hospital elevator, New Years Eve at the Deveraux estate, Stockholm, the pier on election night, the loft when she was drunk, undercover as Daniel Lucas, back at the Deverauxs when she was poisoned, then to Cleveland, the Emergency Center after the junkie, and now back to the loft again. It took quite a while to get it all down, figure out what they were each doing right before the jump, and before they knew it an hour had gone by.
Kayla stayed seated cross-legged on the bed getting everything down in a truncated sort of shorthand on the limited real estate of the standard envelope. Meanwhile, they were both hungry, and Steve happened to have a pretty stocked fridge. He made them turkey sandwiches on soft, crusty rolls with lots of lettuce and tomatoes, and potato chips. Steve opened a beer and looked forward to self-medicating his nerves. Both of them ate every last bite, as was common for their meals since their leaps had begun; they never knew when their next opportunity to eat would be and/or if they’d jump in the middle of it. The last real meal they’d had was the spaghetti at Gabrielle’s house. We didn’t get to finish what we started until Cleveland, Steve thought becoming less and less able to ignore what kept bubbling up to the forefront of his mind.
Eventually, Kayla had a solid list of their jumps, how long they lasted, and anything they did there. They looked for patterns in the places they were, the time of day they jumped into, the length of their stay, the people that surrounded them. Was it something they were saying? Something they were doing? They each silently hoped to find some kind of pattern, something that would pop out at them when written down like this. Anything to steer them away from what they both feared but weren’t saying.
Steve watched Kayla study the list and chew on her bottom lip as she contemplated it. He frowned. He knew what it said. He didn’t want to acknowledge it. He tried to push it away, afraid to say it to Kayla. Both of them were so lost in their own worry that they didn’t realize they’d both come to the same conclusion.
Kayla looked up to see Steve boring a hole into her with his green eye. “I, ah, I think I found something,” she said with a disquiet in her voice. Steve didn’t answer her but came to the bed and sat beside her. “When we jumped to the pier, it was our sixth jump,” she said. “It was the first time we arrived somewhere separated.”
“We weren’t though,” he said gently. “It’s not like you were in one part of town and I was in another, it’s just that there were a ton of people around. It’s the first time we jumped somewhere with other people.”
Kayla hadn’t considered that, and she felt a sliver of hope. “Ok, that’s true, too. So, it was the first jump with other people there. But—but it was also the first one where we weren’t right next to each other when we arrived into our past bodies.”
Steve kept silent and let her continue.
“Just before that we were in Stockholm. We—we—we were, well we were intimate.”
“I’m not listening to this, Kayla,” he turned away from her, not wanting to hear any theories that involved not being able to touch his wife. “Yeah, we were intimate, and we were also eating, maybe it has something to do with food, huh? Wasn’t I out getting you towels, maybe it’s because we separated when the jump started!”
“But then when we were at the loft, I was drunk, and we were really going at it there, too.”
“No, we didn’t do anything. You fell asleep on me – just like last time,” he grinned but neither of them were feeling any amusement. “And, yeah, I couldn’t help myself, I was crazy wanting you. We both wanted it, not just then but the first time, too. But we didn’t do anything more this time than we did last time!
“Are you sure? Because I don’t remember either time well.” Steve bristled, and Kayla immediately felt bad for the statement. “It’s just that when we jumped, we were completely separated. I was in the truck, you were at the compound. You can’t tell me that was the same location, it wasn’t. I was in that van driving for a long time. And then—“
“Ok, yeah,” he said frustratedly, “but we’ve been more intimate than that and not arrived separated on the next jump, so I don’t know what that had to do with anything. I mean, we didn’t actually do it either time you were drunk, Kayla, you think I was gonna take you while you were sleeping?”
“Let me finish.” Steve let out a pfft and held up a hand in supplication. “Then … then, we made love in Cleveland.” She couldn’t help it, a tear ran down her face, and this is just where Steve was desperate not to go. “Way before we ever did anything at all together. Way before we had our first kiss in this very apartment right over there,” she tossed her head over her left shoulder to the stairwell. “And now we’re suddenly not even jumping at the same time anymore. It’s not just that we’re in different places, I’m leaving you behind.” Another tear slid down her cheek.
“Kayla, we messed around lots of other places, and we didn’t arrive separated. There are other things we did that were very different, like the hayride and election night, and we didn’t arrive to the next place separated.”
“But Cleveland …”
“No, Kayla. NO!”
Steve refused to believe that merely touching Kayla in a time that he hadn’t previously would throw them askew if pummeling that reporter or bugging out of the election night party didn’t. And the truth was that Kayla didn’t really believe that, either. But Cleveland … jumping without Steve … she believed that Cleveland did something. That they she believed. Steve had already come to the same conclusion, but he just couldn’t bring himself to say it.
“And ya know what, baby, I see other things on that list, too. Like how about that we keep jumping to the loft, huh? Why’s that? Maybe it’s not about sex at the wrong time,” saying it out loud for the first time only agitated him further, “maybe it’s something about the loft, it’s the only place we’ve jumped to more than once. Maybe we’re supposed to be doing something there that we just haven’t figured out yet. Ever think of that?”
“Like what? There’s nothing consistent about our jumps to the loft. Our first one was there, then we were there a few more times, none of them the same.”
“Baby, what about the poisoning? We were there more than a week. Its’ the only place we’ve been that long, maybe we should be looking at what’s triggering our jumps.”
“I thought about that. Maybe. But, our shortest stay was in the elevator, and it was a bad jump, we weren’t in a good place there. But the only jump worse than that was the poisoning, and it was the opposite, we were there the longest. So what would we look for as a trigger?”
Steve didn’t know, so he moved on. “What about all of our jumps being before we were married?” Steve was starting to phone in this conversation, going on autopilot so that he wouldn’t have to face Cleveland.
“Steve, hello, undercover at the compound? The house? We were married already!”
He realized his error and cursed inwardly. He was grasping at straws, trying to think of anything else that made sense. Not that sex at the wrong time made actual sense, either, but he couldn’t deny that jumping out of sync was bad. Really bad. And the only thing they’d done in Cleveland that didn’t happen anywhere else was have sex. Years before they did the first time.
“Couldn’t it just be that every jump is taking us farther and farther apart when we land? We woke up on the couch together the first time, and now this last time …” Steve trailed off realizing that wasn’t actually the case and cursed again.
“No, we were right with each other between—“
“I KNOW!” he yelled, standing up and throwing up his arms. Then trying to control his tone, “Baby, I don’t see any patterns with any other jumps, but you’ve been worried about sex at the wrong time from the beginning, maybe your mind is just trying to make it fit there so you can explain it.”
“Maybe it is! I don’t know! But I’m scared, Steve!”
“Of what, of me?!” he yelled.
“No! Of jumping without you! Of causing it ourselves and not knowing how!”
“You want answers, Kayla, Dimera’s your answer, dammit! It’s Dimera doing this to us, I’m telling you!”
“How, with some magic time machine?!” Now Kayla jumped up and stood facing him. “I mean I’m sure, stranger things have happened with that monster,” she yelled back sarcastically, “and I dreamed … I dreamed something, I don’t know what, but maybe—ok—I DON’T KNOW! But … but … I can’t help what I’m feeling, Steve. You said just now, you said, you just want to be us again, doing whatever we want to do and not worry if we’re going to mess things up?” Steve didn’t respond to her right away. “Right?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said.”
“Because you think we messed things up in Cleveland, too.”
“I just want, to go home, Kayla, stop analyzing me!”
She ignored the words that she knew were said in fear. “Yes. You want to go home. So we don’t have to worry about what we’re doing, if it’s going to mess things up.”
“I believe I said ‘f*ck things up,’” Steve snapped again.
“Yep, you did. So, maybe we f*cked things up.”
Something in Steve snapped as he grabbed one of the spice jars in arm’s reach and hurled it across the room. “Dammit!” he bellowed. “It’s my fault, I did this!” Then he grabbed another one and threw it harder. Shards of glass mixed with oregano and coriander flew everywhere.
“Steve!”
He reached for another one, but Kayla grabbed his arm. He wrenched it away from her and let out another angry curse. “I couldn’t keep my dick in my pants, Kayla! God what did I do? What did I do?”
“You? Steve, how can you say this is your fault? If I recall, I was the one who couldn’t keep my hands off of you first. In fact, I told you exactly what I wanted you to do to me. It does take two, doesn’t it?”
“I busted out of that closet with one thing on my mind, baby.
“And I ran out of the bathroom with the same thing on mine!”
“This is nuts, baby. You’re my wife! WE,” he pointed to her and then slapped his chest hard with his palm, “are MARRIED! Married! We are married!” he made the sign for “married” slipping his fingers over his left hand’s ring finger. WE are not these bodies, WE are the people from 2009, Kayla! How is it wrong for us to do anything? So, I’m not supposed to make love to my wife? Showing you that I love you in the wrong timeline did this to us?!
The vibe in the air was heated and to Steve’s utter ambivalence, his penis was hardening with remorseful lust and yearning.
Kayla didn’t need to feel him hard against her, she could see in his face that he wanted her, and she became just as aroused as he was as a result. He saw her breathing hard and started to lose control.
“I love you Kayla. You love me. How could we have done this?
They looked at each other with heady desire pushing aside all thought.
“God, I want you,” Kayla said huskily.
“I want you more,” Steve rasped.
In the next instant, they were on each other, kissing with aggressive abandon in the same spot as their first kiss that took place just a short time ago. Kayla ran her tongue over Steve’s lips as he nipped at her jaw and started clawing at her clothing. He ran his hands over her breasts, feeling the firmness of them beneath the softness of her orange sweater. He lifted it over her head as she unbuttoned her own pants. Then she moved on to his. She got the button open and zipper down, then shoved her hands into the back of them to tightly squeeze his ass before shoving the jeans down his legs. As she did, his throbbing cock was released, and she immediately pushed him back on the bed, layed next to him, and took him fully into her mouth with a tight, hot suck. Steve moaned loudly as he fisted the bedcovers and kicked off his pants. “God, yeah, just like that, baby, just like that.” Kayla continued licking and sucking as she gently squeezed his balls. “Need you,” he panted. “Need you, too.”
Kayla released him from her mouth and got up on her knees. Steve joined her on his and roughly tugged down her black pants and underwear while she took off her bra. Steve lifted the button-down over his head, and they both collapsed back onto the bed kissing and fondling each other like there was no tomorrow, because they really didn’t know when tomorrow would be coming.
Now naked in each other’s arms, Steve rapidly rolled on top of his wife separated her thighs with his knees and impaled her with his rock hard erection. Kayla cried out at the sudden intrusion, but then she grabbed his ass with both hands and pushed him inside of her. “Uhhh … Steve … I love you …”
“I love you, Kayla.”
“… I love you.”
Steve interlaced the fingers of both her hands with his, then brought them up to each side of her head and pinned them there. He could feel how tight she was as he moved in and out of her and realized that her body hadn’t had sex in a long time. The thought made him impossibly harder. He kissed her lips, tasting her, and she tasted so sweet as she spread her legs wide for him to thrust into her over and over again. She met each one by bucking against him until he felt his orgasm start to quickly crest within him.
“Come for me … Kayla, come for me, baby.”
“Make me come!
Steve lowered his mouth to her breasts and sucked one into his mouth while releasing one of her hands to squeeze the nipple of the other breast. She cried out, then he moved his mouth to the nipple he’d just squeezed and ran his velvet tongue over its tip. Then he trailed his kisses to the spot on her neck that made her crazy. All while he was still gliding in and out of her while she writhed in ecstasy beneath him.
“Oh, Steve, yes! Don’t stop!” Steve could feel her start to come, the urgency of her whimpers driving him mad. Kayla moaned freely with the sublime feel of his hard cock sliding over her swollen clitoris and Steve joined her with grunts of his own. “Gonna make you come,” he clipped looking right into her eyes. “Gonna make my wife come. Scream for me, Sweetness!” And that’s what she did as her orgasm overcame her. Her body jerked hard in his hands, and he felt her slick walls contract around his cock.
“Steve …,” she sighed thickly as she felt the waves release intense pleasure within her. “Mmm.”
Just then with thoughts of Cleveland in his head, Steve pulled out, flipped her over, then pulled her hips toward him so he could enter her from behind. He encircled her abdomen and reached up to squeeze her breast with his other hand as he hard thrust in and out of her. Her sensitive clit set off aftershocks, and she almost couldn’t take it as she cried out her ecstasy. While Steve felt her spasms tighten around his penis he moaned her name loudly as his climax washed euphoria through him. “Baby … oh, Kayla, baby.”
Steve collapsed against her with his cock still throbbing inside of her sheath. He didn’t want to leave the warmth and security of her body. He gently layed them down and palmed her beautiful blonde hair off the back of her neck and kissed her there as he pulled out of her. Kayla whimpered at the sidden emptiness before Steve rolled her back over and pulled her to his chest where she immediately nuzzled into him. But rather than bask in the afterglow of their lovemaking, tears sprang to both of their eyes as culpability crept though them.
“We did it again,” Steve said as his body recovered from the intense climax. “I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.” His voice started to break as he ran kisses down her face. “I just love you so much I can’t stop touching you. I need to feel you. I just need you.”
“Shh. This isn’t right,” Kayla said. “We shouldn’t be feeling this way for wanting to be with each other. For making love to each other. You’re my husband, I love you more than I know how to say,” her tears had started to roll down the corners of her eyes, “I have to show you this way. And—and … and I refuse to feel like we did a bad thing.”
They were on top of the made bed, so when Kayla had started to shiver, Steve brought the edges of the comforter up over them like a wrapped bundle.
“Sweetness. Oh, sweetness,” he sighed heavily. “Kayla, you’ve been worried about making love in the wrong time since this whole thing started. “What if you’re right? What if we’re jumping out of sync now because we made love in Cleveland?”
“Well … what’s done is done,” Kayla said with a confidence she didn’t feel. “I’m not sorry for making love to you.” Guilt nagged at Steve as he kissed Kayla’s temple. “Maybe it’s just random, after all,” she whispered. I mean, look at that reporter and when you took me from the Deveraux house.” Kayla leaned in and kissed the scar on Steve’s cheek. “We did things differently then, but we still jumped together.”
Steve thought about it as he rested his right hand on Kayla’s breast and ran his thumb lazily over the peak of her nipple. “You’re right about that baby.” Then after a beat, “Or, maybe it just depends on what we’ve done.”
Kayla looked into Steve’s eye solemnly and curled her fingers into a beard that wasn’t there. “You think it was the sex. In Cleveland. You … you think that was it, don’t you?” Another tear rolled down her face.
Steve kissed her tear away, but not before shedding one of his own. Then he nodded. “Yeah, I do,” he whispered.
So did she.
They layed in each others’ arms for a few minutes, caressing skin and lips and faces and breasts. The truth was that this was all just speculation. A desperate grab at something that made sense, because nothing had scared them more than these two jumps where she went first, and if they could explain it, maybe they could control it. Neither of them had any idea if they were right or wrong, they could be barking entirely up the wrong tree. But their fears got the better of them, and they couldn’t help letting those fears eat at them.
“Steve?”
“Yeah, baby?”
“I don’t have a ring here.”
“Kayla, we don’t need a ring. I do, anyway.” He brought her ring finger to his lips and kissed it.
“Me, too,” she started to sob. “I do, too.”
“Don’t cry, Sweetness.” Steve didn’t move, just continued to caress her. “This is home base, ok? When you jump, I’ll be right behind you, and if we’re separated, we meet here, ok? And if we’re not sure, we have the Stockholm question. That’s all we can do, Sweetness. We’ve gotta keep movin’.”
Kayla nodded and wiped her cheek against the blanket. “Steve, since we already did it in Cleveland, do … do you think making love here made it worse?”
Steve shook his head. “No way to tell. But … seems to me in for a penny in for a pound. Not sure what more damage we could do.”
Kayla tightened her hold on her husband and said, “no matter what happens, I’m not sorry we were with each other there. Or here.” Steve wanted to say the same thing, but he couldn’t. His guilt overwhelmed him. Kayla felt his hesitation even as he held her. “Don’t stop being with me, Steve,” she cried. “Please. Don’t stop making love to me.”
Steve hated what he was feeling in her. That she was afraid he wouldn’t want to be with her. “We don’t know for sure that’s it. Besides, if I could stop, Kayla, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. If I could stop making love to you, stop being with you, you wouldn’t be crying right now. In for the whole pound, Sweetness. Not going anywhere.”
Kayla blinked heavily though her tears. “I’m tired, Steve. I’m so tired. I just want to go home.” Kayla cried herself to sleep wrapped up in a combination of Steve’s naked body and bedcovers as he shed silent tears of his own. Home was not something they’d be finding anytime soon. Not by a long shot.