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Chapter Eight
June 21, 2014


Carter House

It’s three a.m. and I can’t sleep. I don’t think I could ever get used to sleeping by Nick Carter. He’s all legs and arms and chest. To his credit, he doesn’t try to wrap me up in his arms or anything that would have me leaping out of bed. He also has underwear on. I suspect this is the biggest effort on his part. He’s tossed and turned for hours, but now he is finally asleep. His breathing is regular and I know this might be my only opportunity. I have to find the compact.

I slide out of bed. It is dark, but not pitch black. I methodically check every section of my side of the bed, especially the end of it that I vaguely remember crawling across. Nothing. I grab my phone and wiggle under the bed. I shine my light around but there is only a few stray socks, a dirty pair of sneakers, and a bra. I stifle a curse and wiggle farther under to run a line of light along the wall.

“Looking for something?” I jump and miss really hitting my head by a millimeter. I scramble backwards as Nick’s face appears beneath the bed on his side.

“Don’t do that!” I complain.

“Whatcha lookin’ for?”

"Nothing!”

"You know what I think?”

My heart is still racing. How could someone so big be so quiet?

“What?”

“I think something’s going on besides the concussion.”

I try to look surprised. “What?”

Nick smiles. “I know you.”

“Nothing’s going on. I just thought I lost…” I trail off. “my ring.”

"Your ring?”

I nod. He just smiles more. “The one on your finger?” Damnit. The boobs have decreased my IQ.

“Oh, yeah. I meant…”

“Were you looking for this?”

My heart stops. He opens his palm and inside is the compact. Unharmed. I reach for it but he disappears and I hear the bedsprings creak. I scramble out and throw myself on the bed. He is kneeling on the bed, his arm held high above his head. I grab onto his tricep.

"I need it,” I gasp.

"Not until we talk.”

His voice is firm. I look at him in surprise. Out of the corner of my eye, I see his fingers wrap tighter around the compact. He looks exhausted.

“It won’t work, you know,” he says. I let go of him and sink back.

"What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he sits back, keeping some distance between us. It is almost like he has played this game of cat and mouse before. “You’ve tried for the last two weeks, but every morning you’re back here with me. It’s where you belong.”

“What are you talking about?” I demand.

"Court, you can time travel all you want, but don’t you see? We belong together.”

I’m horrified to see the tears in his eyes. I’m equally horrified to realize that he knows. He knows.

"If you knew what this was, why did you take me to the hospital this morning?” I demand.

“Because,” Nick takes a deep breath. “Ben’s been with Brian the last two weeks. Last night was his first time home. I told him you were in the studio and working late. I bought me some time. But then I woke up and you screamed just like every other morning and Ben ran in scared out of his mind. I didn’t know what else to do!”

“Wait, this has been going on for...for two weeks?”

“Yeah,” Nick tugs at his hair with his free hand. It’s succombed to his tossing and turning and the blonde strands are pointing in every direction imaginable. “The first day, I called in your tour physician. He couldn’t find anything wrong with you and guessed maybe you were suffering from temporary amnesia related to stress. For the next three days I fell asleep even though I was determined to stay awake. When I woke up you were as freaked out as you were the first morning. The fifth night I managed to stay awake. I saw you find this thing, do something to it, and then you shimmered and were gone. I was sure that we must have carbon monoxide in the house. I mean, you shimmered. But the next morning you were back. I had stayed up all night waiting, faking sleep when you crawled into bed and passed out. When you jumped out of bed when I touched you the next morning, I snatched it when you were distracted by, y’know, waking up next to me. Because that’s totally the reaction you want your wife to have to you touching her leg.”

I am speechless. The sarcasm of his last comment is supposed to be a joke, but I can also sense the frustration. He sighed.

“You told me that on June 20, 2014 you time traveled back to 1998 and slept with Brian. Normal people would not have believed it.” He smiles. “You didn’t marry a normal person.”

“It’s the truth. This,” I motion around me. “is a mistake.”

“Ah,” Nick shakes his head. “I disagree. If it’s a mistake you wouldn’t be ending up back here every single night. You’ve obviously tried to work your way back and then start off a day earlier than your first trip, but each time you wake up snuggled next to me.”

He has obviously put a lot of thought into this. He makes sense, but I have never been one to just give up.

"If I can just connect with Kal and Josh and explain…”

“You’ve tried to call them. Neither of their numbers work.”

“I know where the lab is. I just need to get to the lab.”

“And where’s the lab?”

“In California. Yolo.”

There is a moment of silence and then Nick begins to laugh. I think that maybe he has finally lost it. It takes him several minutes to stop laughing. When he does he grins. “It’s ironic isn’t it? Yolo? ‘You Only Live Once?’ I’m guessing that doesn’t apply to time travel.”

He begins to laugh again and I am unable to stop myself from joining him. He wraps an arm around me and then the other one, the one holding the compact. He is holding me.

Our laughter dies. We are nose to nose.

“If you say you need to go to Yolo, we’ll go to Yolo.” “We?” “I’m not going to let you go alone. I have felt like I’ve lost you for the last fourteen days. I can’t take it again. Ben couldn’t take it.” He brushes my hair away from my neck, The temperature in the room rises. He tilts his head slightly and I am worried about what he is planning. Yet, instead of acting, he speaks.

“Just tell me one thing.”

I swallow hard. My mind almost forgets that the device responsible for my escape is pressing up against my back, nestled in his hand. “Okay.”

His voice is husky. “I haven’t asked any version of you this before, but I have to know.”

I am nervous by the enormity of the potential question. “Okay,” I repeat.

“Is the life you left better than this one? Is that why you want to leave so bad?”

He suddenly looks scared. Somewhere from within I have the strangest desire. I tamper the alien feeling. He is the wrong Backstreet Boy. I am not like every other woman in the world.

But I’m the one wearing his ring.

A slideshow of my life as I know it flashes through my mind. Years of college classes, all-nighters in the lab, my small apartment, my lack of pets… “Do we have a dog?”

"Yeah, Nacho. One of my buddy’s is watching him because he’s been shaking and freaking out since all this started.”

I think about the rat that we had first tested our time travel device on. As soon as the device had been placed in his cage, he had become frantic. Nick doesn’t say anything else. He is waiting for his answer. Yet, I have another question.

“Do you have any kids?”

“I have Ben.”

“I mean…”

“Not yet.” He gives me a slow smile. “It’s pretty high on the to-do list.”

“And we’ve…”

He lets out a husky laugh. “Oh yeah. All the time.”

His free hand slides down my back. I think of my Nobel Prize...the one I would have won if I had kept my legs closed and been the observer instead of the stupid ass observed.

A family. A dog.

My career. Sharing the knowledge of this life-changing technology.

A baby. I think of the picture of me holding newborn Ben in the hospital. I’m surprised to feel tears in my eyes. Nick’s hand suddenly feels much more real on my back. It terrifies me.

"I can’t answer your question. I...I just need to go to Yolo.” My eyes plead with him.

He presses his forehead against mine and closes his eyes. I feel horrible.

"Then we’ll get you to Yolo,” he whispers.

I feel worse.