Steve didn’t know how long he’d been stroking his wife’s hair as she cried into his lap, but it was killing him. Seeing her like this, feeling her cling to him in a way she rarely did – it was painful. It was so painful to see her this way. He was grateful to be able to find the strength to be there for her now. Because he was long overdue.
That didn’t mean his own pain had disappeared. It was there, and it burned at him. The act of comforting her, loving her, saying these meaningful words to her was chipping away at the thick, black walls he’d erected around it. He’d hidden behind that barricade, protecting himself from what lay on the other side. He couldn’t lose that control. He’d felt it paw at him, and he’d seen the chasm open up with his own mind’s eye the one time he did start to let go with the other Kayla outside his apartment. But even as he did it, he saw the damage he was doing to her and to their relationship. He just didn’t know what was worse, that or losing his mind. Now the façade was breaking down, because his wife was breaking down, and that he couldn’t let happen.
Kayla didn’t realize just how emotionally exhausted she was – how much she’d had pent up inside her – until she started letting it out. She was lucky she’d had her visit to the house, because without it, this here right now would have been so much worse. She never doubted that her husband loved her, but her need for him was so great that hearing the words out of his mouth and feeling his hands instill it with his strokes were like stitches mending her soul. Still she cried. Because it wasn’t just one thing, it was so many things wanting a piece of her. She knew she had to stop this, it had been long enough; but she couldn’t seem to get herself in check with this perfect storm of emotional havoc converging on her without mercy.
“Sweetness? Please stop, now baby.” Kayla took a weepy breath. “Please … You don’t have any voice left, honey, come on, you’ve gotta calm down now.”
Kayla took a very deep breath then wiped her face against the blanket covering Steve’s lap. “I mi-miss you,” she shuddered.
Steve couldn’t help but notice her use of the present tense. “How long have you been here?”
“Three days,” she replied quietly.
Steve tried not to feel the jealousy. He really tried to stay very rational. But their state of undress – that they’d stopped because he wouldn’t say he loved her meant that … she would have gone through with it. It was conspiring to cause the neurotransmitters in his brain that controlled the envy and covetousness to inject a greenness everywere that could feel.
“All this for just three little days?” Kayla didn’t reply to that. She knew what he was trying to do, to somehow gloss over the distance that had come between them, but she was done tiptoeing. She wanted him to hear her.
“I’ve been missing you for a long time,” she squeaked with her hoarse voice.
Steve paused mid-stroke over her hair, then continued. “I’ve been with you every day.”
Kayla shook her head. “No. I’ve been with you. You haven’t been with me.”
“That’s not true, Kayla,” Steve insisted, jealous of himself again. He lifted her by her chin to sit up and face him. She couldn’t believe he actually sounded offended.
“Don’t tell me how I feel,” she parroted words to him that he wouldn’t be remembering.
Kayla sat up and backed into her own personal space against the headboard for the first time since Steve arrived. This was when he finally saw her arm wrapped in the ace bandage. He took it very carefully in his hand and brushed his thumb over the top.
“What happened here?” he asked.
The last of the threads holding Kayla together these last three days and last endless number of jumps since God took Emily from her snapped apart.
“Here? What happened here? Which here are you referring to? I’m going to need you to specify exactly which here you mean, because there’s a lot of heres that have been happening, so why don’t you narrow them down for me.” Steve wouldn’t be getting a word in edgewise; the dam had opened, and once the flood waters rushed forth there wasn’t going to be anything that would cull them back. “Where would you like me to start? Here my broken wrist? Is that the here you mean? Here Chicago? The room? Here in this bed? Or maybe we should talk about the here where I woke up in Chris’s bed where he was so happy I came and hoped I’d remember it.” Steve winced. Was she trying to hurt him?
“That’s enough!”
“No, I don’t think it is, ‘cause I’m not done with heres that have happened yet. Maybe you mean here in the alley where Same-Guy-Different-Year beat the sh*t out of you again, and I had to drag you back to yet another shitty apartment and take care of you so you could berate me some more!”
Steve wouldn’t let himself hear the words “berate me,” because he couldn’t. He couldn’t hear that he’d been a dick to her. He also couldn’t stop his brain from flying through the seedy operations he was part of during his stints in Chicago and which guy this was and/or when he’d gotten beat up. He remembered this seedy place, and it made his basement apartment in Salem look like the Bellagio. Shame for this existence he’d slipped into so many years ago spread through him to share the dark space his jealousy was already occupying.
“Oh, I know!” Kayla mocked in laughter, “I’ll bet it’s the here at the bar across the street where after busting my ass to get to you so you wouldn’t be alone when you jumped and I wouldn’t drown in my own misery in needing you so badly I found you ready to f*ck the brains out of some SKANK!”
“Jesus, Kayla, stop!” My God, she saw him? She saw him with another woman? He didn’t want to remember any of those women. What kind of nightmare was this Rolf had jumped them to? You did this to yourself. Unshared time happens because of you. Steve didn’t know if this jump was another ripple from their last two years or if it was some other change the timeline didn’t know what to do with, but he hated that they were here – that Kayla was here. There were only a handful of places he wanted to go less.
“Oh, but there’s so much more!” Including what had just happened with Ray. Even amidst her anger, Kayla had to protect him from what Ray had tried to do to her, because she knew Steve would lose his sh*t. She was contemplating how to tell him so she could explain what the “here” was with her broken wrist that kicked off her mad rant, but the thought got lost when Steve started giving back as good as he got.
“Well, I can’t hear any more!” he boomed. “You wanna pick a fight, that’s just fine by me, baby, but you’re gonna have to find some other bullshit I can’t control, because I can’t hear any more of this!”
“Too bad, Steven Earl Johnson! Too bad! I didn’t have a choice when I got here and had to do it all by myself and find a way out of my job and this life I don’t remember any of, so you’re not getting one, either!”
Steve knew something was very wrong with his wife, but he was too upset in his own right to do anything but react. “I get it, Kayla! You think I don’t get it?!”
“No, you don’t!” She pulled the blanket up against her bare chest. Steve scoffed; he hated that she did that. He had to get up. He had to get up and pace or jump up and down or run, but he had to get up and engage his body or he would explode. When he saw the towel on the floor he wrapped it around his waist.
“You think I don’t understand what it was like for you? You had three days with a me that didn’t know you, but I had eleven!”
Kayla’s mouth dropped open. “Now I know you don’t get it,” Kayla sneered, which was not a good look on her. “From all accounts your eleven days were pretty damn good, what with you becoming my boyfriend and me throwing myself at you through the adjoining rooms!”
“That’s not fair,” he growled.
“Yeah, well my life hasn’t been very fair lately, so you’re just going to have to learn to live with the disparity!” Steve was so angry that he could feel his pulse throb in his neck. “It’s not just the three days, Steve, it’s all the days! All the days since we left our life in 1989 have been days I’ve looked for you!”
“And I was there!”
“You weren’t there!”
“Stop saying that, goddamnit! I know what happened before, but I thought – didn’t we get past that?!”
“Steve, we go home to different apartments every night!”
“Because you made us!” he pointed viciously. “All that space you insisted I have!”
“You insisted first,” she croaked, “I just gave you what you really wanted.”
Steve had had enough. “What I want? You really think living apart is what I want?” Kayla shrugged. She was tired of this argument that was going nowhere fast. “You’re unbelievable right now, ya know that, baby?” She silently fumed at him. “I haven’t been here 20 solid minutes, and when I come to,” he lowered his voice to a hiss, “you’re naked with me. A man who had to have been a real asshole, ‘cause you may not remember you, but I remember me real good. And here you are, about to have the kind of sex I know this guy had back then. WITHOUT ME!” he shouted, “And you’re the one who’s angry?!” He was reacting right now on the pure blackness that had been hiding inside of him that he knew he couldn’t let out. What he needed to do was take a mental step back and think straight. There were things he had to say, like that he’d jumped from an unconscious state in a hospital; things he needed to ask her, like how her wrist got broken and why it wasn’t in a real cast. But his mind was purely in this enraged, painful, and heated moment. So, instead he paced back and forth like a bull, barely able to contain himself from charging while she smoldered daggers back at him.
“Steve, I’m so angry that I don’t know which way is up! You’ve hidden away from me. You closed yourself off, we don’t sleep together, and I need you! Do you know you haven’t even really kissed me in days?” He did, actually. And he missed her as much as she missed him, if not more. “It’s like you’re afraid to touch me.”
Because he was. His fear of that darkness that would drive him to insanity was too close now, she’d gotten right at it. If he showed too much of his love for her, he wouldn’t be able to stop, and his sanity wouldn’t survive. And even if it did, the slipstream probably wouldn’t. Then where would they be? Where would Stephanie and Joey be? Imploded. As gone as their sister. He was protecting them all … Why can’t you understand that?
Kayla watched as Steve’s eye turned dark. “You’re right, I am afraid to touch you,” he said. “I’m afraid if I touch you there won’t be an us.” His tone was … heavy.
Kayla wasn’t the least bit intimidated. She’d hit her limit right here, right now, come what may. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re already not an us now.
Steve stopped breathing. Her words were devastating, and he was destroyed by what she’d just said. He walked up to the bed and loomed over her. “You take that back. Right f*cking now.”
“No,” she said softly but significantly.
“Take it back!” he bellowed in that deep voice that was rarely denied what it commanded.
She narrowed those piercing blue eyes of hers that were still puffy from the ordeal of the day, tilted her head, and leaned into her positively defiant reply. “Nooooo.”
Kayla barely saw it when Steve climbed onto the bed and tore the blanket off of her, he was that quick. But the electricity coursed through her body when she felt him pull her into him by her thighs. She saw the wildly possessive and uncontrolled look in his eye … and she wanted more of it. She wanted more of that wild, unrestrained longing.
Steve saw his wife look at him through this version of her he’d never known and knew she wanted him to f*ck her as hard as he could. Kayla’s nipples stiffened with painful arousal upon making that connection with her husband, and he felt them against his bare chest when he pressed himself against her and kissed her with a ruthless entitlement.
Kayla didn’t just kiss him back, she swept her tongue into Steve’s mouth and insisted he accept it. Which he did with a ferver he’d rarely known. His love for her was so deep that her refusal to take back those words – that they were so damaged that she could even feel that, let alone say it – had started to draw out that insanity he was trying so hard to keep inside.
“Is this what you want, baby?” Steve huffed between angry kisses. “You want me to kiss you?”
“I want more than that!”
“And touch you?!”
“Yes,” she panted, her legs open wide and wrapped around him. What he felt at her center enraged him.
“You go to him to make you wet when I wasn’t doing it?” He bit at her neck and she cried out. “He make you wet, Kayla, he stick his fingers inside you and feel how wet you are?!”
“You made me wet!” she confirmed.
“HE DID!” Steve reached down between her legs and ground his thumb into her clitoris. She immediately began unbridled moans of pure sex. “He did!” Steve rasped as he continued to stimulate her. “Say it!”
“He did! But he’s you!”
“No, he was me. And he was scum!”
Kayla wrapped her right fist into Steve’s hair and turned his head harshly toward her. “You weren’t! God, can’t you see I needed you?!”
“So that what you did, baby, you went and got it from him ‘cause I wasn’t givin’ it to you?!”
“YES!!!”
My God, the truth hurt. Both of them. It hurt so much.
Steve and Kayla’s frenzy was blinding. They felt the carnality like animals desperate to mate. No matter what, no matter how, no matter when, Kayla needed to feel him, and Steve needed to make her feel.
Steve squeezed his wife’s breast and savagely began devouring it. He sucked it into his mouth and bit on her nipple. “You need more of that!” Kayla nodded her head in agreement and held him, still by the hair, to her breast, arching her back into his ministrations. His tongue flicked over her erect peak, and he breathed hard against her. Then he latched onto a milky white spot beneath her nipple and began sucking hard. She moaned and whimpered as he placed a ferocious hickey on her, so next time she looked in the mirror she’d know who she belonged to. The pain was divine, and when his tongue darted out to lathe the vicious violet mark, Kayla wished the hard cock she felt against her thigh was inside her. Steve felt her thrust her hips at him and knew what she wanted. So, he ground his thumb harder against her clitoris, eliciting all kinds of desperate sounds out of her. “He make you come with these fingers, Kayla? Did he make you come?!” There was real fear Kayla heard layered beneath his anger that another man had given her that pleasure that was only Steve’s to give.
“I told him to! But he didn’t!”
“Why?!”
“Because you stopped when I said stop!” Kayla’s mix of pronouns was dizzying. “I’m not saying stop now! I want to come! I want you to make me come!”
Steve bored his eye into hers arrogantly and pressed his thumb mercilessly against her swollen bundle of nerves. “You like it when I finger your clit! Yeah, you do, that’s right, you moan for me, Kayla!” But instead of moaning she gathered Steve’s tattooed blade in her teeth and took her turn to mark him in kind. It was carnal and greedy, and Steve cried out, because it hurt. She was glad it did – and so was he. But he was still livid that she was going to sleep with him before he got there. When she was done she gave him a final nip and felt immense satisfaction in the way her husband’s face twisted with the painful pleasure. They ate at each other’s mouths, and when their eyes next met they were already f*cking each other with just their visual connection, the need to release overpowering their every thought. Kayla reached for his cock and stroked her tight fist up and down over it, trying to position herself so he could impale her.
“You need to feel me, is that it? Need me to f*ck you?!
“Yes!” she thrust up at him, her voice gone but for a debilitated rasp. “Yes, you f*ck me right now!
Steve grabbed his wife’s hand from his erection and pinned it beside her head. Even amidst the utterly frenzied need for sex and connection, he was careful not to jostle her broken left wrist. Kayla noticed his care and loved him so damned much. Then he kissed her hard again, sliding his cock up and down through her wet groove. He felt a testosterone-fueled satisfaction that he’d drawn out some of that arousal, but the fact was that some of her slickness was brought out by another man, as far as he was concerned, and it drove him mad.
Steve released her lips and reared back onto his bent knees. “Gonna f*ck you hard, Kayla!” The wanton look in her eye matched his own. He pulled her thighs roughly up and over his hips and could see how tight she was going to be. His dick throbbed, leaking cum over the tip. “You wanna feel me?!”
“I wanna feel you love me!!”
“That’s what I’ve been doin’!”
“Then do it! F*ck me!”
Steve looked her right in the eye, gripped her hips hard, and slammed his cock into his wife with a force that they both wanted, craved, and demanded. The pleasure of her taut wetness squeezing so blissfully around his shaft was ecstasy … too much ecstasy … and lasted only one second before the the pain registered on Kayla’s face, and she let out the scream that would haunt him for a very long time to come. The sensation he’d felt only one time before this was upon him again, only this time Steve didn’t gently love his way through Kayla’s virginity. This time he ripped through her hymen savagely, uncontrollably, unlovingly. But he did love her. My God, he loved her so much he didn’t have the words. The harsh reality hit him, and this angry, unbridled fever came crashing down around them like a punishment.
Kayla knew just as well as her husband did what had just happened. What she didn’t understand was how. The pain radiated through her core, but the sharpness of it quickly ebbed as the abject confusion settled upon her. She’d already slept with Chris. Right? And she knew for a fact that the physical barrier had been broken then, because she remembered it. So, this couldn’t be possible. There was no doubt in her mind, however, that it was true. The pain of her freshly created lips that, for the second time in her life, her own husband and love of her life had given her burned, and the stretch of her vagina ached with the immediate force of his thrust instead of the gradual adapting of his thick erection. But it was the look of guilt on her husband’s face that hurt her the most. So, she couldn’t help the tears that ran down from the corners of her eyes and cursed herself when she watched Steve hate himself for it.
Steve hadn’t moved. He was buried inside his wife to the hilt of his erection. His body was hurting her, but he didn’t know what he should do next. Why didn’t she tell him? Didn’t she say she’d woken up in Chris’s bed? What was happening? He knew he was hurting her, but he was afraid if he tried to withdraw that he’d hurt her even more. So, all he could do was stare down at his wife’s beautiful face and wait for her to tell him what to do. But she was too stunned, herself, and would be of no immediate help. Finally, when Steve spoke, all the rancor was gone, replaced with what Kayla had wanted in the first place – deep, loving intimacy.
“Sweetness,” he whispered in such tenderness and guilt that Kayla shed more tears. It was the first time he’d called her that since they began this vicious fight. He had to wipe her tears away or he’d crumble. “Baby, I’m so sorry.” He stroked her thigh with his warm palm. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Kayla reached her hand up to him, and Steve took it in his own and squeezed. His incredulous face was so troubled. “I didn’t know … I would never have … I didn’t know.”
Kayla swallowed and tried to calm her breathing. “I didn’t, either … I don’t understand. I-I-I didn’t either. I’m sorry, too. I’m so sorry, too.”
“You don’t have—”
“Yes, I do.” Her very insistent voice was filled with a kind of anxious calm. “I’m sorry, too. And I’m ok.” This Steve did not believe, because he heard the pain and confusion in her voice. My God, she looked so lost. He was still facing her on his knees and suddenly hated this position. He needed to hold her. “I’m ok,” she insisted. “I … it’s not your fault.”
Steve looked down. “You’re bleeding,” he said tearfully. “Sweetness …”
“You’re a dirty virgin … I’m gonna pop that cherry … I will take your virginity!”
Kayla realized with frightening clarity just how lucky she was that the previous version of her husband was there to protect this precious part of her so that she could, again, give it to this rightful version of him. It wasn’t gentle and beautiful like it was in 1979, but it was still loving, because he always loved her, she always loved him, and it was still sacred. She was still his.
“I don’t wanna hurt you, baby, what should I do?”
“Will you hold me?”
“Maybe first I should–”
“Just hold me,” she cried as she reached up to him.
Steve’s own tears began to spill down his face, as he reached down for the hand of his wife. He pulled her very slowly up so that she faced him. Still connected, Steve held her securely around the waist and caressed her face with the back of his hand. “I love you,” he whispered. “I—I shouldn’t have been so rough. Why did I have to be so rough?” He was breathing very hard, the significance of this unfortunate act weighing on him so heavily. “You know how much I love you …” He cupped her face and kissed her like that might heal her. “You know how much …”
Kayla held her husband’s hand holding her face “I know.” She looked directly into his eye. “I know, baby. I love you, too. With all my heart.” Steve nodded, then held her tightly against him.
Steve was overcome with guilt, and so was Kayla. The insanity he was trying not to face momentarily forgotten, the butterfly they’d surely stepped on irrelevant. They simply held each other through the confusion until they’d both calmed down.
“I’m going to pull out of you now. Is that ok, Sweetness?” He kissed her face with gentle lips and received hers back.
Kayla nodded, and he gently broke their physical connection. When Steve saw the discomfort pass across her face he hated himself. For taking her virginity like that without knowing. Without the reverence that act deserved. That she deserved. And not just without tenderness, but with anger. It couldn’t have been more wrong.
Kayla immediately closed her legs, curled up on her left side, and faced away from him. She didn’t cry. She’d stopped crying. She was tired of crying. But she couldn’t face him. Steve slipped his hand over her shoulder. She took it and nuzzled her chin against his fingers, but she didn’t look at him. She felt so responsible for this heavy burden she knew her husband was not going to release easily.
“Baby?”
Kayla shook her head. “I need a minute.”
Steve nodded. “Ok, Sweetness.” He leaned his lips down to her temple and kissed her. Then he got up and went to the bathroom to do what he’d done the first time in the loving surroundings of their very own house. Being in there for the first time in forever was as rude an awakening as seeing the main room was. He tried very hard to ignore the pit that his wife had been living in with him for the last three days and focused on taking care of her. Something he knew now with painful certainty that he’d failed her on since …
… Steve shook the memory of 1989 away.
Kayla watched Steve look all around until he finally went into his closet and came out with what he wanted. When he sat back down on the bed he had a warm, wet washcloth and a fresh towel. She knew what he was going to do, and she was relieved that it was a fresh towel, because if he’d tried to use the one that Ray’s hands had touched she would have freaked out. Steve pulled her to lay on her back, but she kept her legs together. He rubbed her calf lightly.
“Let me do this for you, Sweetness. Please.”
Slowly, Kayla opened her legs, and Steve found the flesh that belonged to him. Very gently he cleaned her up, being very careful not to hurt her. “That feel ok?”
“Feels good,” Kayla nodded. “Thank you.”
When he was done he gave her some more space while he finished up in the bathroom. When he came out Kayla had gotten up and was wearing a button-down shirt that he actually remembered from this time he’d tried very hard to forget. He’d put the towel back around his middle. Steve silently watched for a moment as Kayla stood at the windowsill and gazed out over the darkened downtown area.
“Are you ok, Sweetness?”
Kayla looked over her shoulder at him and tried to smile. “Yes.” Then she turned a little more fully. “Are you?” Steve surprised himself with his honest answer.
“No.”
A thrill passed through Kayla. Not because this excited her or made her happy, but because he was letting her in. She didn’t hesitate. She went to him, and when she opened her arms, he melted into her.
“Kayla … baby, do you know how many years I’ve spent praying never to see that look on your face? I’m supposed to make love to you, not hurt you. Not … it was just like that time on the beach. Angry. I took you so rough. God, what have I done?”
“Oh, Steve,” she whispered as she stood on her tip toes so she could hold as much of him as she could, “you once told me that every time we have sex we’re making love. Do you remember that?” Steve nodded. “It doesn’t matter how, we’re always making love.”
“Even when we’re so mad?”
“You love me.” It wasn’t a question. “I love you, too. So, yes, even if we’re mad.” She pulled back and stroked his cheek. “And you didn’t do anything to me, I was there, too.” Now she looked to her feet. “I wanted it. I begged you for it.”
Steve tipped her chin up. “You never have to beg for anything. Ever.”
Now Kayla’s eyes finally watered again. “You haven’t been there,” she said very softly. “I needed you so badly.”
Finally, Steve accepted the truth of it, and his voice trembled. “I know. I’m scared.”
Kayla nodded. “Me, too.”
Steve felt closer to his wife right now than he had since before they’d jumped from 1989. He leaned down and covered her lips with a tender kiss that infused them both with loving warmth.
They slipped back into bed and held each other as they began a very long night of talking. It was the best thing they could have possibly done. Much as they needed a physical expression of their love, it was the talking that they needed most. The communication. The comfort.
The first thing they did was figure out how Kayla could have misread her virginity. She explained how she’d woken up and what Chris had said to her, and very slowly she was able to find a long forgotten memory of drinking her sorrows away after a boyfriend she’d had for a very brief time broke up with her. That must have been why Chris “took good care” of her and “didn’t peek.” Because he really didn’t peek. The strange, almost one-sided conversation they’d had about the robot and the coffee had gone right over Chris’s head, because the thing hadn’t poisoned her yet. Steve’s ears perked up at this.
“Wait, you were poisoned before Deveraux? After all these years how do I not know this?”
“I barely even know this, it was so long ago. It was a cleaning chemical. There was this robot.”
“Say what?”
“Do you remember Eugene Bradford?”
Steve actually chortled. “Yeah, I remember that guy. What ever happened to him and that hat friend of yours?”
Now Kayla chuckled right back. “You mean Calliope? I have no idea, we lost touch a long time ago. You know, I lost touch with Chris, too.”
“Yeah, that’s ok with me.”
“Steve.”
“Ok, sorry.” He took a deep breath. “So, you didn’t know?” He was back to her virginity. “You couldn’t feel it?”
In retrospect, she could feel the difference, and if her frame of mind had been right instead of all turned around, she would have known she was a virgin. But that wasn’t the case.
“You said at the loft last week that you’re f*cked up,” she said quietly as her injured wrist lay over his bare chest. “I’m f*cked up, too. I didn’t know.”
Kayla felt her husband hold her a little tighter, then he said, “I feel like I ruined something.”
Kayla leaned up on her elbow. “You didn’t. Nothing is ruined. That night at the house. It was beautiful, Steve. Nothing can mar that. Nothing can touch that. Just like nothing can ruin our first time on the roof. Nothing.”
“You didn’t see your face, baby.”
“I saw yours. I’m so sorry.”
Suddenly Steve took her lips with a passionate kiss overflowing with the love that he felt surge forth in his heart. Kayla returned the kiss with little sighs as his fingertips brushed her cheek. “That’s twice,” he said softly. “Twice you’ve given it to me.” Kayla smiled. “Thank you, Sweetness. I love you so much.” She closed her eyes to the sound of her husband’s words. He saw how much they affected her and resolved to never again withhold them from her, slipstream be damned. “I love you.”
“I will give it to you again and again. It will always be yours.” Steve knew that might not be true … “I love you, too.”
They continued talking well into the overnight. When Steve told her about the night they jumped, leaving work and getting beat up on the pier, Kayla became distraught. Not nearly as distraught, however, as Steve was when Kayla started telling him about what life here was like for the three short days she was here without him. From her veritable exodus from Salem, to Alice Horton, to Kayla’s avoidance of her family, to how their first meeting went down at Murphy’s across the street, Steve listened raptly. And he had a very hard time with it all. One, because he felt immense guilt in hearing how badly he’d behaved and how hard it was for Kayla to break through. Two, because this timeline was so off course, now, that there was no way time wasn’t going to notice.
This led to a very intense discussion about just what they were going to realistically do from now on. How they were going to live. If they should still go find each other in unshared time. A true and right answer wasn’t as clear cut for either of them anymore. Steve’s fears for all of their futures had not ebbed, but he agreed now that separating to live apart, no matter when they jumped to, was very bad for them. Maybe if their last two years together hadn’t happened. Maybe if they hadn’t had Emily. But they did happen, they did have her, and their hearts were broken. They needed each other if they were going to get through it. Kayla had hoped Steve would start really facing his grief as they talked about this, but he didn’t, and she was too emotionally exhausted to push him into his own emotional exhaustion. They did, however face what Steve had jumped into now, twice.
“You don’t know what it does to me to see you being with the other me like that, baby. I can’t take it.” Steve had put on a pair of underwear, and the two of them were now sitting cross-legged facing each other, a position they took up a lot these days.
“Didn’t you once say that eventually you’d make love to me if I’d never shown up in 1979. That you’d make love to me and love me for the rest of our lives there?”
“Yeah, but … baby, this one was different, we … I wasn’t doin’ things right.”
“We.”
Steve nodded. “But I don’t know how to make myself ok with this.”
Kayla tilted her head and realized something. “You haven’t had to make this decision yet. I’ve been with you when we were already sleeping together, but you’ve never been with me.
Steve thought about it but shook his head quickly. “Italy. I jumped to Italy. When you jumped in I was holding you.” He was right. “That’s the first time we ever talked about this. You said, ‘she is me.’” Steve watched her think it over. “What do you think now, is she you?” After a moment, Steve pushed on. “What if I’d made love to her there?” He’d made that point before, and like before, she agreed that it would have hurt.
“But we didn’t originally make love in Italy, what about the times we did? What would you do if you jumped to our first time on the roof. Would you avoid me or would you go through with it?” Steve was silent. He didn’t like the answer that immediately came to mind and tried to change it before it even left his mouth. “Be honest with me, Steve, what would you do?”
“I never want that night to change, Sweetness.”
“It’s not just sex, what about our wedding or some other special or intimate thing, would you back off?” Steve pumped his jaw. “So, you’d do it. Without me, you’d do it.” Steve nodded and crossed his arms then glanced at the window so he wouldn’t have to face her. Kayla didn’t like that answer any more than Steve must have liked it when he jumped here.
“You ok with that, baby?” he asked with an arrogant sarcasm.
“No. Happy?”
“So now what?”
Kayla dropped her head in her hand. “Survival. That’s what you called it. It’s survival.” Neither one of them were happy with this, but they didn’t know what else to do. Their unspoken agreement was made, but it hurt. “What about other people?”
Now Steve flared hot. “What the f*ck about them?!”
Kayla smirked. “Did you forget about the timeline and Rolf saying we had to live it and not make changes?”
“Like this one?”
Now Kayla got up and paced. She’d been cooped up here for almost four days now, and she had serious cabin fever. “Ya know what, you need to back off. I know it was a mistake to come here, I know that now. I apologized to the other you, and he accepted it.”
“Sure he did, he wanted to get in your pants!” The look of hurt on her face made Steve so ashamed of his jealous temper that he was surprised she hadn’t left him by now. He shot up and took her in his arms. “I’m sorry. The asshole that belongs here is rubbing off on me, I’m sorry, Sweetness.”
She let him hold her, but she set him straight, too. “For your information, the man that belongs here fell in love with me. And I know this, because I know what you look like when you’re in love with me and trying not to be.” Steve chuckled at that. She pulled away from him and leaned her back against the door. “Now I told you I was sorry, and I am. I’m the one who prevented you from going out on the job, I’m the one who got you beaten up by Werner. Whatever effect this all has, it’s going to be my fault, I know. And I’m sorry, I just—”
“You needed me, because I’ve been too wrapped up in losing everything that all I could do was protect us from losing more. I know.” Kayla didn’t reply to that. She was so tired of the husky squeak in her own voice. “I just wish you didn’t have to be here and deal with me when I was this complete waste of space.” Kayla stiffened when he used those words – which were the exact words his destination version had used to describe himself.
“You’re not a waste of space! You never have been. The other you said the same thing, I’m so tired of telling you otherwise!”
“Ok, down, baby.”
“Don’t pacify me, it hurts me when you talk about yourself that way.”
Steve held her out at arm’s length. “Kayla, look at me. Look at this place and everything you’ve told me about for the last three days. Trying to ditch you at the train station then trying to lose you in the city all by yourself when I knew you were following me. Does that sound like me bein’ a good man, Sweetness?”
“No. But I know why you did it, because you were scared of your feelings. And I know that, because I remember the first time you realized you loved me, you did the same kind of crap.”
“Why do you stay with me?”
“Because you are a man who spent every dime he had to get a woman clean and out from an abusive pimp so that she could give a better life to her six-year-old son, then went to jail for her when he ran out of money for them and picked the wrong house to rob.”
Oh, how Steve loved his wife.
He ran his fingers down the flawless skin of her neck. “I never wanted you to see me this way.”
Kayla nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. I … shouldn’t have come, then?”
Very quietly Steve said, “We shouldn’t be with each other in unshared time like this.” Kayla whimpered a small cry. “But I can’t take being apart from you. I can’t take … not being an us.” Kayla had forgotten she said that. “Don’t tell me you didn’t mean it, because I know you did, and I can’t have you feeling that way.” She didn’t know what to say. “Sweetness, you’re my wife. I’ll always find you.”
“Even if it makes the slipstream unstable?”
Steve nodded. “I won’t lose you.”
She smiled sadly. “Then I’ll find you, too.”
This was a huge decision. But they’d made it, and they both knew the ramifications. Now it was time to make another one. Kayla went back to the previous horrible discussion they were having before they got distracted. “What about other people?” Steve started to balk and turned from her to go to the window. He needed some fresh air. “I’m being serious.” She stayed in her position by the door. “Do we protect the timeline or not? Because if we live it like we did originally then we may not end up in unshared time in the first place.”
“So, you mean stay with Marina? Live in Jack’s house while you’re being poisoned?”
“I—maybe? I mean, that’s what I’m asking, what do we do when that happens?”
Steve whirled around to face her. “You want me to sleep with Marina?”
Of course she didn’t want him to! “You want me to get raped by Jack?”
That stopped Steve cold, icicles suddenly sliding down his spine. “Don’t you ever say that to me again.”
“You just said the same thing to me.”
“It’s not the same.” Kayla felt bad. “You’re right, I’m sorry.”
Steve took a deep breath. “No.”
“No?”
“No, we don’t sleep with other people. We don’t protect the timeline by living that.”
“But …”
“But nothing! It’s bad for the timeline, I’m sure of that! But I can’t live this way! I won’t be forced to have sex with someone in 1977 that I don’t want to have sex with in 2009! And I sure as hell won’t ever let him rape you again. Ever! I won’t let him do it!” Kayla went to him and felt the breeze on her face before she melted into her husband and let him hold her tight. “It’s never gonna happen again. That’s a promise, Sweetness.” Kayla nodded.
After a time of just holding each other after these two decisions that they both knew were risky, Steve kissed the top of Kayla’s head. “Thank you,” he whispered.
“Thank you?”
“For coming to me. For finding me.”
Kayla smiled. “You’re not mad that I defied the timeline?”
Steve palmed the hair off of her face and smiled sadly. “I should be, but don’t you know I’m all talk, baby?”
“No, I don’t know that,” she chuckled, “because you are so not all talk.”
“Saying I’m “so not” something is so not the right vernacular here.”
“Who are you, the idiom police?”
“Yes, and I have sentenced you to,” Steve looked around the room for some inspiration for a punishment and spotted a broken dish upside down on the floor. It was strange, because it was cracked in a starburst pattern from the center outward, like it had been stepped on. Which it had. It was curious, and another shiver suddenly ran down Steve’s spine. He tore his gaze from the oddly broken dish to Kayla’s wrapped wrist and just knew they were somehow related. She didn’t have a cast on, which meant she didn’t go to the emergency room. Why? She was a doctor, he knew that was the first thing she’d do was get herself into a cast. What was going on here?
Steve bent down to pick up a shard of plate, then he held Kayla’s wrist in his hand and inspected it far more carefully. When she realized the connection he was making she took her arm from his grasp and held it against her. She wasn’t protecting it from Steve, she was protecting Steve from the truth of it. But his eye caught something else. The purple bruise at her neck where he’d bitten her with his uncontrolled arousal. He stroked two fingers against it. Then before he knew it he was unbuttoning the shirt. Kayla knew this was not a seduction, and she wanted to stop him from whatever he was discovering, because she knew in her gut it would add up to no good, but she didn’t. When he pulled open the shirt, he saw the angry hickey marring her beautiful breast. He’d gone at her like an animal. What else had he done?
“Kayla, what was goin’ on here that I interrupted when I jumped in?” When she didn’t immediately answer, a cold dread settled upon him. “Did I hurt you?”
Round 3 was about to begin, and she didn’t know how to stop it short of lying to him. “It wasn’t you.”
“What do you mean it wasn’t me?”
“You’re not the one who hurt me.”
Steve straightened. “So, you didn’t sprain your wrist in a mud puddle?”
“No, I did. But …” she wanted to run away from this. Run so she could protect him. “ … then it got broken afterward.”
Steve made a fist. “How?”
She didn’t know if she was going to lie or tell the truth until literally the very moment the words left her lips. “The man that lives in the room next door,” she explained with as much calm as she could. “His name is Ray. He’s … he’s a …”
Understanding slowly came to him. Steve hadn’t lived here very long, and he’d forgotten the man’s name. But some people stuck with you, and he remembered the sick bastard that liked ‘em too young. Steve began putting two and two together, and the closer he came to the horrifying answer, the more of the black, inky darkness inside him bubbled up to the surface.
“He do something to you?”
Kayla blinked slowly, then nodded. “He tried.”
“He broke your arm?” Again, Kayla nodded, and he saw red.
Without warning, Steve started unlocking the door. It was four in the morning, but he was unlocking the door, and he was going to go over there, break the one next door down, and he was going to kill the man for putting his hands on his wife.
“Steve no! You can’t go in there again!”
“Again?! I’ve already been in there?!”
“Through the window. If he’s not already dead, then at the very least you castrated him. And I mean that literally.”
“Did I cut his balls off?!”
Kayla was terrified for him. This was exactly what she was afraid of. “No, but that might have been better. You made very sure they’d never work again.”
Why? All Steve could think was that it was a punishment fitting the crime kind of reaction after the man violated his wife. Steve was losing his mind. He prayed it wasn’t so. He reached out his hands for her, and Kayla was shocked at how they trembled. “Did he … Oh God Kayla, please tell me he didn’t put his hands on you! That he didn’t … that he didn’t …”
“Shh! He didn’t! I told you, he tried, but he didn’t!” She took his shaking hand and placed his palm on her cheek like she’d done many times on this trip and always. “He tried to rape me but he didn’t!” Steve’s breaths were coming unevenly. “I promise you, Steve, he didn’t rape me!”
“But he broke your arm? Must have been a hell of a fight!”
More honesty. “It was. He almost got me. I was scared.” She told him the whole thing, and Steve barely contained his rage as he treaded agitatedly around the room. “He’s deranged. He thought I was a virgin – I kept telling him I wasn’t, but he said he could smell me. It was sick, Steve, it was vile and sick.” Steve had gone to the window and slammed it closed, then rattled it, checking to make sure it was secure as she was explaining it all. “When he had me bent over the bed, I thought it was over. I’d been kicking and screaming.”
“Oh, baby. That’s why you have no voice.”
Kayla nodded. “I screamed at the top of my lungs this time. Not like with Jack.” Steve flinched. Kayla saw it happen, but she went on. “I fought with everything I had in me, because I couldn’t let it happen again. It had all started to blend into one thing, like it was happening again with Jack. But this time I kicked and screamed and fought.”
“That’s my girl. You won this time.” Only he sounded completely off. Like a sad song set to a happy tune.
“No, you won this time. He was going to get me, the door was chained, you couldn’t get in even though you tried so hard, and—and—and I could feel … I could feel it.” She didn’t have to say any more than that. “That’s when the other you climbed in the window and kicked him so hard in the head that I didn’t just hear the crack of your boot, I felt it vibrate through his hands as they were on me.”
He put his hands on my wife.
“You saved me. He never got my towel off, it never touched me!”
Steve gathered her into his arms. “His hands touched you. Hurt you. Broke your arm. God … Kayla, what happened with us, how I hurt you like that … after what you went through?!” Kayla was saying something to him as he wrapped his arms around her and held her to him like something precious and fragile. But he didn’t hear her, because the last of Steve’s control over his grief had shattered. It only took an instant of realization to take down days’ worth protective walls. Like an embankment unable to contain its river, Steve saw the madness that lay on the other side of what had now crumbled, and felt an emotional tidal wave start to carry him off.
The moment it happened, Kayla knew. She’d been trying to tell him again that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that she wasn’t damaged and the psychopath hadn’t seen or touched her. But her husband was bereft. “Steve, look at me,” she said desperately. But he was burying his face in her shoulder. “Look at me, I’m fine. He didn’t hurt me!”
“His hands were on you! He watched you from the window, maybe he watched us together! Got a real good show! He terrorized you and tried to rape you!! As if the first time wasn’t enough! God!” he cried. “He broke your arm!”
“Shhhh,” Kayla begged. “Baby, look at me, I’m right here in front of you, and he’s out cold in his room. He can’t get to me!”
“His room?” Steve looked to their shared wall and remembered he was in there. I have to kill him!”
“No! No, you already damaged him, he’s going to be lucky to pee in a straight line, so please, don’t risk anything, you’ve neutered him, I promise you!”
“I need him dead!”
He got the door open, but Kayla slammed it shut and ducked under his arm to lean back against it. He tried to get her out of the way, but she refused, and Steve was livid. The dark rage at losing his family in 1989 was out, unleashed from it’s hole in his heart. But the knowledge that someone had tried to rape the woman he loves a second time, right under his nose, threatened to widen it. And if he didn’t fill the hole back up by killing that bastard sick piece of filth, then the hole was going to kill him.
“Please, Steve.” Kayla was crying now, her voice down to nothing. “Please, stay with me, let me help you!”
“Help me?” All he saw was the image of his wife screaming as a man tried to take her against her will. “Only one thing is going to help me. That sick f*ck in a body ba—”
The violent pull at Steve’s midsection succeeded where Kayla would ultimately have failed, because it gave her husband no choice and made the decision for him.
“No!” Then with a whimper of surrender, “Baby?” He felt to his knees, and Kayla fell with him.
“I’m here!”
“It’s the jump.”
“I know,” she sniffled. “I’m here.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.
“I love you so much, baby.”
Kayla rained a succession of quick, loving kisses down on his lips, then placed one on his patch. “You’re my hero, you know that?”
Steve smiled quickly, then got weepy, that hole in his heart becoming a gaping chasm that he knew would be following him for the rest of his life. “I’ll never let him hurt you again.” The room was seriously askew now, and he had to shut his eye to avoid passing out. “I promised you, and I won’t let him. I don’t care what happens.” He wasn’t talking about Ray anymore. He reached for her, but he only got air. In fact, he wasn’t sure he was even still there.
A moment later Steve fell face first onto the hard, cold, wooden slats at his feet, the familiar sound of his best friend the harmonica echoing in his ear, while the equally familiar sound of his other best friend, Marcus, sang something he couldn’t make out in this dizzy, nauseating arrival.