Timebound(86)

Then his mouth was on mine, hard and hungry. His hands moved up the side of my body and I arched reflexively toward him. For several minutes, there was nothing else in the world, just the two of us, his body against mine—and then he broke away and sat up, staring down at the carpet.

“What’s wrong?” I tried to pull him back toward me, but he shook his head.

I gave him a weak little smile. “Daphne’s not here. No chaperone, see?”

He didn’t respond. I was now thoroughly embarrassed and kicking myself for not letting him make the all-important first move. Biting my lower lip to keep it from shaking, I pulled away to the far end of the sofa and hugged my knees, staring at a different spot on the carpet.

After a moment, I felt his hand running gently down the side of my leg. I didn’t look up.

“Kate. Kate? Look at me. Please.” A tear was making its way down my cheek, the cheek he couldn’t see. I closed my eyes tight, hoping my other eye wouldn’t turn traitor as well. He got off the couch and knelt on the floor in front of me, brushing the tear away with the pad of his thumb. “Would you just look at me, please?”

I glanced up and he continued. “You have to know beyond any doubt how badly I want you.” He chuckled softly. “I mean, really Kate, could it be any more obvious?”

I didn’t answer, even though I knew he was right.

“At this very minute,” he said, staring into my eyes, “there is nothing on this earth that I want more than you. But we both know that tomorrow or the next day, my memory of this night will be gone. You might remember, but I won’t. And when we make love for the first time, Kate, that’s a memory I want to keep.”





Trey didn’t leave until nearly midnight. I don’t know if he ever managed to write the Huxley essay. Probably not. He skipped most of his classes the next day, arriving on the doorstep just after noon with lunch from O’Malley’s—lots of onion rings and three obscenely large sandwiches. He hadn’t shaved and he didn’t look like he had slept any more than I had.

“Ditching school again, Mr. Coleman?” I asked with a soft smile.

“My girlfriend is about to change this entire timeline. I can’t imagine any scenario in which it actually matters that I left after my first class.”

He had a point.

“What about your parents? Estella?”

“I told them that your grandmother took a turn for the worse yesterday, and that I needed to be with you. Neither of which is a lie,” he added. “I expect the flowers my dad asked me to order will be here shortly.”

We sat down to eat with Connor, who, despite his great love for corned beef on rye, didn’t seem to have much appetite. The three of us reviewed the game plan as we finished lunch. “Try your best to follow her,” Connor said, “but you also need to keep plan B as an option, in case Katherine disappears into the crowd. Because she probably will.”

Connor was right. The fair attracted an average of 120,000 visitors per day between the time it opened in May and the time it closed at the end of October. That’s about three times as many people as Disney World handles each day, and the Exposition was held on a much smaller plot of land. The odds of me being able to keep her in sight were pretty slim.

“I’ll try to keep up with her,” I said. “If I can’t, she’ll be with the mayor’s group at the Ferris wheel at ten fifteen, and after lunch she’ll be downtown at the place where they held all the big meetings during the Expo—the one that’s the Art Institute now.”

“Right,” Connor said. “They called it the Auxiliary Building. But that’s going to mean navigating Chicago’s public transit. I know you’ve read CHRONOS notes on the era, but I’d feel a lot better if you stayed close to a stable point. If worse comes to worst, you can come back here and then take another stab at it.”

He was right—we could roll the dice more than once. If I lost sight of Katherine entirely and simply couldn’t find her, I could always return to the stable point and give it another try. A second jump would, however, mean multiple versions of myself walking around the fair, which would complicate things. I had a bad gut feeling about taking too long to accomplish this anyway, and both Connor and Trey felt the same. Katherine’s house was relatively well protected by an alarm service, but we were totally unarmed. As much as I hate guns, it wasn’t too comforting that Simon and whatever other minions of Saul’s had weapons and we didn’t. And, as Trey’s dad had noted, Cyrists now had friends in very high places.