The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance (46 page)

“If I live, you’ll lose your job, won’t you?”

He managed a laugh. “It’s more complicated than that. But yes. At the very least, I’ll lose my job.” I felt his hands against my back clench into fists. “Screw the job.”

I pulled out of his embrace. “How much time do we have before . . . you have to go back?”

“The killer comes through the window at 7.24 a.m. We have two hours and forty-eight minutes.”

“Come on,” I told him. “We have to hurry.”

I nearly dragged him through the door and locked it behind us.

“You love me?” I whispered when we were inside.

“I love you,” he said.

“I’ve never been in love,” I told him. “And I’ve never had anyone who loved me. I’ve wanted, and dreamed, and hoped, and looked, but there was never anyone. There may never be anyone again.” I reached up and touched his face. “But right now, just this once, I want to know what it feels like to be loved. To love. In the little time we have, can we . . . Can we do that?”

He pulled me into his arms and kissed me.

I don’t know about perfect kisses. I know only that I will never forget that one. In Per’s touch, in his taste, in his hunger lay the promise of a lifetime of wonder.

We held each other, undressed each other, moved over and against and into each other, and I knew that our one brief moment wasn’t going to be enough.

It wasn’t the sex. I’d had good sex.

This was
everything.
It was knowing that he knew me, and knowing that I needed to know him just as well. It was wanting to hear all his stories, wanting to wake up every morning to roll over in bed and find him there. It was needing to walk down the street holding his hand, and wanting to sit on the couch beside him, not doing anything in particular, because being with him, just breathing the same air, had a magic to it that I had never had before.

And was never going to have again.

There wasn’t ever going to be another moment for us. And there wasn’t ever going to be another him.

We lay in my bed afterwards, and I realized he was looking at me with a worried expression. “I’m . . . sorry?” he said.

I realized I was crying.

“It’s not . . . It wasn’t you. You were – you
are
amazing. Wonderful. I just . . .” I closed my eyes, and took a deep breath and said, “I’ve been waiting all my life to meet the man I wanted to be with. I knew when I found him, I’d know. And now I know. And I can’t have you.”

“You would want me?”

“I
do
want you.”

He looked away, and I saw his jaw working again. Under his breath, he muttered something that sounded a lot like “. . . no guarantees . . .” And then he said, “Your computer . . . is it on? Is your internet connection working?”

“I shut down the computer, but I have broadband. The internet will work as soon as the computer comes on.”

He nodded, pulled on underwear and his jeans, grabbed his backpack. He said, “We’re almost out of time. I’ll be right back.
Stay here
.”

I nodded, and he jogged out of the bedroom. I wondered what he wanted with my computer. I wondered even more what he wanted with the internet. I heard the computer’s boot-up sound, and him walking around in the living room, and then a couple of quick taps on the keyboard. And then nothing. A whole lot of nothing. I waited. That “stay here” had sounded important.

Then I heard footsteps on the little patio outside my bedroom window, and I looked at the clock.

7.23 a.m.

7.23 a.m.

I stopped thinking at all.

I stared at the window, shuddering, willing my body to move. I heard the aluminum frame start sliding open. The blinds were drawn, so I was in near blackness. There were no sounds from the living room any more. Which meant . . .?

That Per had realized he was out of time, and had used the internet to connect to his time travel device?

That he’d been . . . beamed home?

Or that time had grabbed him and ripped him away from me while he was trying to stop it?

It didn’t matter. He was gone.

And there was a killer outside my window.

I keep a baseball bat under my bed. I couldn’t in the orphanage, when I had plenty of reason to want one, but as soon as I got into foster care, I found a way to acquire one. Mostly I didn’t need it. Once, with a dreadful foster family, I did.

The aluminum bat lay under my bed.

I grabbed it and moved fast, because there wasn’t much time. I ran to the window.

The digital display on my alarm clock changed to 7.24 a.m. There were no more sounds outside my window. But Per had been very clear: 7.24. He’d seen the recording of my murder.

7.24 became 7.25 a.m, and someone politely tapped on the glass.

Tapped?

Baseball bat at the ready, I gave the roll-up blind a quick tug. It shot upwards and rattled around its spindle for a second before falling silent.

On the other side of the window stood a complete stranger. He had duct tape over his mouth and around his wrists. Behind him stood Per, shirtless and rumpled.

The bat dropped to the floor with a clang, and I stared. It was 7.25 a.m., and Per had not vanished into the future. He was still here.

And looking a little uncomfortable. “Let us in before someone sees us.”

“Oh. Right.” I opened the window, and my would-be killer came through head first, propelled by a vicious shove from behind by Per. Per followed, with a speed and grace that made my heart thud in my throat.

“You’re here.”

“We’ll deal with that later,” he said. Up close, I could see that he was going to have a bad bruise under his right eye, and that his lip was split and bleeding. “We still don’t have a lot of time.”

He handed me a gun. “This is his,” he said, kicking the hit man in the thigh. “Shoot him with it if he so much as twitches.”

I shrugged my shoulders just enough that Per caught the gesture.

“Never shot a gun?”

I shook my head.

He stepped behind me, reached around me with both arms, and thumbed the safety off. (I looked at the red dot staring back at me – “red is dead”, I remembered someone telling me once.) He put me in a shooting stance with the gun aimed at the killer’s chest. “He makes one move, you pull the trigger. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” I said. “I can do that.”

He ran into the living room and came back with a manila envelope. He thumbed through it and pulled out one of those amazing sheets of paper of his. Then he crouched in front of the killer.

“Look at this, asshole,” he said.

I could not see what they were looking at, but I did see all the color drain from the killer’s face.

“How did you—”

I could not see the page in front of them, but I could hear it. Moaning and whimpering, and a man laughing, and then the front door opened. “Len, you here?”

Tyler’s voice.

And the voice of the other man saying, “Finishing up. You said make it messy.”

“Yeah. Messy.” A pause, then, “Look. I have a list of things to do after this, and I need her to still be warm when I make the 911 call. So wrap it up.”

One wet noise. And the sound of footsteps.

The killer’s eyes were bugging out as he tried to say something around the duct tape.

Per touched the surface of the paper and the sound stopped. He said, “I’ll take the tape off your mouth, but if you make any loud noises, she’s going to kill you. You understand that?”

The killer nodded.

Per ripped the tape off the man’s mouth, and he cringed and bit back a whimper.

“I never did that, man. It isn’t me.”

Per touched the paper again. “That’s what you came here to do.”

“No. Just rob the place. Seriously. That isn’t me, man.”

“See how I can make the picture bigger?”

The man nodded.

Per dragged a finger along the front of the page I could not see. “See how I can turn the image to get your full face? I can zoom in close enough to reveal your individual fingerprints. Want me to show you?”

Len shook his head. “What
is
that?”

“New police surveillance technology.”

“But I didn’t do . . . that.”

“You haven’t yet. And what happened next hasn’t happened yet, either.”

From the page in Per’s hand, I heard Tyler’s voice. “Holy shit, what a mess.”

“You said . . .”

“Yeah.” I heard Tyler gagging. Then vomiting. “The smell . . . How can you stand it?”

“You guaranteed I walk on the Burgess murders is how. No death penalty, no life in prison. I get a dismissal. And this – we all have our needs, man.”

“You’ll get your dismissal,” Tyler snarled. “Get out of here. Let me do what
I
have to do now.”

I heard boots hitting the floor, and more walking.

And then a gunshot.

The heavy thud of a body falling.

“There’s your dismissal, you freak,” Tyler’s voice said.

Len was staring wide-eyed at the paper. “He
killed
me?”

Per told him, “His story was that you tried to escape, fleeing the scene of your crime, and he shot you before discovering what you’d done. Everybody believed him, too. Except me.”

My would-be murderer stared from me to Per, and back to me. “But you’re not dead. And I’m not dead.”

At which point Tyler walked into the room.

“Which makes this tougher for me. But not impossible.”

Tyler blocked the door, and I remembered again what a big guy he was. He wasn’t lean and hard like Per, but he was wide and meaty. And the gun he pointed straight at me made him a lot bigger.

The gun in my own hands had gotten pretty heavy by that time. I could feel the muscles in my forearms quivering. The muscles keeping my knees from buckling joined them.

I had been scared of the man who had come to kill me, but I was more scared of Tyler. He was urbane. Genteel. Respected and respectable. He had people – a lot of them. Law partners, parents, siblings, guys he went yachting with, guys he went big-game hunting with.

All of them would no doubt say he was the best guy ever born. Salt of the earth.

And me . . . who did I have? I had the Thorsday Night Writers, whose odd-lot appearance and diverse lifestyles would make their testimony a hard sell.

And for the moment, I had Per. He hadn’t yet disappeared, but was probably going to any second.

Small picture, there were three of us, and only one Tyler.

Big picture, Tyler knew how to use his gun. And had every other advantage, too.

And then Len, would-be hit man, pond scum, violent criminal, said, “You shot me in the back, you son of a bitch.” With his wrists still duct-taped in front of him, he lunged to his feet, yanked the gun out of my hands and charged Tyler with a speed and a fury that made me realize Len could have been on me and I would have been dead before my reflexes even had a chance.

I scooped up the baseball bat at my feet as Len’s animal leap launched him across my bed towards Tyler. Tyler swung his gun away from me to protect himself.

Len’s gun jammed, and Tyler shot him. He dropped like a bag of hammers and lay bleeding on my bedspread.

Per lunged at Tyler. I charged at the same time, baseball bat swinging in short, sharp arcs. I swung and kept swinging, and kept connecting, until Per dragged himself across the bed and pulled me away from what was left of the would-be John Grisham of fantasy.

Per introduced himself to the cops as Per Tordönsson, of Tordönsson Detective Agency, and told them I’d hired him to check out the man I was dating. He presented them with his card and a folder from his backpack that included copies of documents on which Tyler had forged my signature, giving him control of my estate, naming him as my next of kin for all my personal effects. He handed them what he said was a phone tap of Len getting the date and time of my murder from Tyler. He said it was clean, that the affidavit was in the folder.

The cops sent someone to the ER to talk to Len, who admitted that Tyler had hired him to murder me. He also said that he hadn’t intended to do it.

No one believed him.

It was the end of a long, exhausting Friday. Per sat across the table from me in the hotel room we’d rented, his leg stitched and bandaged, working his way through room service steak and eggs, salad, roll and a dessert of questionable origin.

“What happens now?” I asked him.

“What do you want to happen?”

“I want to be with you forever. I just keep waiting for this beam of light to surround you and whisk you out of my life, and I want to know how much longer we have.”

And there it was. That smile again. The one that melted me on the inside and made me know from the first instant I saw it that this was a man I had to know.

“I’m staying,” he said.