“Well, it was—” he paused. “There was—hmmm,” he tried again, a frown of concentration furrowing his brow as he attempted to pull his scattered thoughts together. He released me from his embrace, turning to his back at my side and looked up at the ceiling, mentally absorbed as he raked a hand through his hair while trying to remember.
“What?” I asked impatiently, sitting up again beside him and resuming the gargoyle pose. I wanted desperately to hear him confirm what I already knew to be true and had to bite my lower lip to keep from saying anything as I waited for him to say something coherent. I was determined to allow him to tell me and not, in any way, lead him or give him any ideas that might not be his own, until I was absolutely certain.
“It was such a weird dream, Torie, just really odd,” he finally began. “I was in Fremont, I think and I remember that there was a band playing some music and a really cool old gazebo and I think it was ‘the gazebo’, you know, the one that I told you about that used to be on the old town square?”
He paused again, looking up at me for confirmation and I nodded that I recalled, then his eyes lingered on me thoughtfully and he lifted a hand, pointing an index finger at me.
“You were there I think…” he said trailing off again with a frowning, faraway perplexed look on his face, before his stare settled back on me again and he had the most helpless confusion shining from those beautiful blue eyes of his. “No, that’s not right, Torie, because it wasn’t you but it was this little girl, or I guess she would’ve been a teenager, with long medium-brown hair and dark green eyes.”
Damn it, this could take all day, I thought in frustration but out loud I said. “Wait just a minute. I’ll be right back.”
I clambered over his body eliciting an ‘oof’ sound from him as, unfortunately; my knee had caught him squarely in the gut.
“Sorry,” I apologized as I exited the bedroom, racing downstairs to the kitchen and returning shortly with my laptop and climbing back into bed.
Sitting cross-legged, I laid my laptop on the bed before me, keeping my back toward Dave because I didn’t want him to see what I was doing until we were a good deal further into this discussion. I opened my computer and began logging on to my family tree program.
“Go on, what else do you remember about the dream?” I said over my shoulder as he continued to lie on his back beside me and I waited for my family tree to load.
“Why is it so important? It was just a stupid dream,” he said, sitting up and kissing my bare shoulder while slipping a hand under the bottom hem of my tank top as his fingers slowly came around my waist, reaching upward in search of my breasts. I hugged his hand to my stomach with both of my arms, squeezing hard and effectively halting his advance.
“Just humor me, Dave, would you please?” I asked gruffly, turning and giving him my I-mean-business look.
“Okay, okay,” he relented with a heavy sigh and dropped back onto his pillow, stacking his hands behind his head and looking, once more, up at ceiling as he began.
“I remember that there was a large crowd of people and I was with a small group of kids, I guess you could say—younger people. There was a blonde named Jennie and—”
I turned from my computer to look back at him. “How do you know her name?” I interrupted anxiously.
“Do you want to hear this or not?” he asked, crooking an eyebrow at me.
“Sorry,” I said. “Go on.”
“As for how I know, I know several of their names because people with me were using them. Anyway the blonde named Jennie asked me to help her spread out a blanket and I didn’t understand what the hell was going on and was so confused by everything going on around me that I just stood there like an idiot wondering why she kept calling me Wyatt. Then I remember sitting down facing this little kid, a girl with blonde pigtails named Katie who kept making faces at me and then the green-eyed girl, the one that I told you about—well her and I went off together and this kid stopped me and asked me about a cow or something and then I was walking with the girl and she took me around the side of this building into an alley—” he paused and slowly I turned to look over my shoulder at him again.
“—This is going to sound crazy, Torie, but she told me that I needed to trust what she was going to say and to act accordingly.”
I had goose flesh shivering over every inch of my skin as he described to me exactly what I’d done and said after we’d left Arlan on the sidewalk and started off again toward the drugstore.
“She told me,” he continued. “That I needed to pretend that I was Wyatt and that the girl Jennie, who we’d left on the blanket, that she was my girlfriend, and she told me that she was my little sister Molly and that she didn’t have time to explain anything else.”
“Was this her?” I interrupted him excitedly and crawled on my knees over to sit beside him. He took his hands from behind his head and sat up with interest, taking the laptop from my hands and placing it upon his lap.
He looked at the old tintype of Molly Mills for only a moment before he nodded, his face going totally blank.
“Yes, that’s her,” he said in amazement.
“And then after she told you that she didn’t have time to explain anything else, she told you that she was Torie.”
“Yes and she told me that I was caught inside her time warp. How could you possibly know?” he asked me with such a look of incomprehension that I nearly laughed but I didn’t.
“Dave, it was me. I had the exact same dream but it wasn’t a dream, it’s something about this house,” I said flapping a hand and gesturing, taking in the expanse of my bedroom around us. “Or it might be something about Fremont or maybe, now that you’ve experienced it also, maybe it’s something about our genetics, too. I haven’t been able to figure it out.”
“What the hell are you saying? Are you telling me that this has happened to you before?”
“Every night that I’m in this house it happens. It’s always different dreams but always traveling back in time. The oldest time that I’ve visited was 1872 as a five-year-old girl shortly after my great-grandparents had built their first log cabin just down the road from here and the most recent time has been the year 1928.”
I took my laptop off of him, setting it down on the floor, and then crawled back into bed as the tears began to well up and overflow.
“Ah, Torie baby, don’t cry.” Dave said in sympathy, lying down as I draped myself across his broad chest while his arms enveloped me.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help it,” I blubbered as I kissed his neck and wrapped my arms around him, holding him tight with my hiccupping little sobs shaking both of our bodies.
“I’m just so happy to know that it isn’t only me because I’ve been thinking for months now that I am going insane.” My tears were mostly happiness and relief; happiness that Dave now knew and relief at not being alone with this huge secret anymore.
“Torie, sweetheart,” he crooned while rubbing my back gently as if settling a skittish animal. “It’s all right—it’ll be all right.”
I lifted my head and Dave crooked his neck and frowned down at me sympathetically as he wiped my tears away with a corner of the bedsheet that was covering him and afterward he lifted his head from the pillow and kissed my cheek gently.
“I love you so much, Dave Cameron,” I whispered with a sigh, my tears now completely spent.
Dave smiled at me and then in one fluid motion he rolled me off of his chest, tossed the sheet off of himself and rolled further until I was beneath his naked body.
“I’ll never get tired of hearing those words from your lips, Torie Mills. I love you, too,” he declared as his lips lowered to mine.
“Time travel, huh?” he questioned with a smoldering soft smile. “We’ve got a lot to talk about, lady—but later.”
***
The steamy water cascaded over Dave’s shoulders as he blocked the spray, bending to kiss my lips lightly. He lifted my clean hair and smoothed it down my back, so
that it wouldn’t hamper him as he squirted a handful of body wash into his palm and began washing me, his hands moving slowly down to my stomach and lower. He was a good boy, though; he didn’t prolong it longer than was necessary to do a thorough job.
“So how do I get back to the square and get a better look at that gazebo?” he asked while he turned me around to give my backside a good washing.
“It doesn’t work that way, Dave,” I explained for the third time and I had to laugh at him because he was totally obsessed with getting back to have a closer look at the construction of the buildings and especially the gazebo on the old town square.
“Cameron!” I scolded him, when his hands had started doing some rather questionable maneuvers that had more to do with seducing than basic hygiene.
“Sorry,” he apologized rather insincerely as I grabbed up a loofah and handed it to him over my shoulder, deciding that it would be much less stimulating than those expert hands of his.
“I think that you’ve done a good enough job down there. Wash my back please,” I said, moving my hair over my shoulder and out of his way as he grumbled something unhappily under his breath about me not being any fun and it made me smile.
“Anyway,” I continued. “You aren’t in power when you’re in there or out there, wherever ‘there’ is,” I shrugged helplessly. “It’s like you’re an actor and playing a part.”
I took the loofah from his hand as I traded places with him so that I could rinse, and then I used a generous squirt of shower wash and gave his back and perfect rear a good washing to his obvious pleasure, I decided because of the rumbling growl he emitted as he turned around, taking me into his arms again. I accepted his slow deep kiss before I discarded the loofah on a handy holder and then ran my hands all over him.
“No fair,” he moaned with a chuckle.
I kissed his parted lips once more conciliatorily before I released him, trading places with him and turning him so that he was under the spray and then I lathered his hair with shampoo and rinsed it for him.
“So about the gazebo,” I said as he turned around to face me and I smoothed his clean hair off of his forehead. He pulled me forward into his arms and I tried once more to divert him from his more than obvious desires. “You may never see that place or time again. It was probably a one-time occurrence.”
“But it was there for decades,” he argued. “If I got back to old Fremont, I’m sure that I could find my way to it.”
I wriggled past him so that I could turn off the water and opened the shower door, reaching out; I grabbed up a couple of towels off of a shelf just outside and handed one to him.
“Let’s get dressed and you can run over to Jeff’s house and pick up Shadow and I’ll start us some breakfast while you’re gone and then we can get into a deep discussion about it if you want or—”
“Yes?” he interrupted with interest, the slow smile telling me where his thoughts had again strayed.
“Christ—you’re sex fiend, you’re insatiable,” I observed. “Or—we can wash laundry and go into Oskaloosa and do some grocery shopping.”
He grinned at me as he buffed the moisture from his hair and blotted the water from his face.
“We’ll just see about that,” he said dropping a smacking kiss upon my smiling lips.
***
I heard the front door open and close soundly as Dave called out.
“Torie?”
“Kitchen,” I directed him and a moment later he pushed through the swinging door from the dining room and paused to prop the door open with the door stop and I then saw that Shadow was close on his heels.
“Hey, Shadow. How are you doin’, boy?”
Shadow stood quietly at Dave’s side and wagged his tail languidly, while his nose tested the air, seeking out the source of the food smells. I returned my attention to the stove and finished adjusting the sausage so that it would brown evenly and replaced the splatter screen.
“Coffee,” I asked as Dave came up behind me and kissed my cheek over my shoulder, while I stirred the pan of scrambled eggs.
I pointed with my chin to the cupboard just above the coffee pot and Dave reached for one of my recent acquisitions; coffee cups and a perfect reproduction of the antique china pattern called Royal Crown Derby. They were beautifully patterned with orange and navy-blue flowers on a bed of beige with gold details. He removed a cup for me, as well, and proceeded to pour each of us a serving of the steaming brew.
Grandma Rose had possessed only one lonely tea cup in this pattern that she had inherited when her mother Jane, who had lived in Ohio, had passed away. She had told me about how it had arrived together with several other items and packed in excelsior to protect it. She had treasured the cup very much and had kept it inside a china cabinet in the dining room behind a paned-glass door. I had scoured the Internet until I had found a close resemblance to the pattern and had bought a sixty-piece service for eight including plates, cups, platters, a gravy boat. Most of the set, except for a few pieces for my daily use, were still boxed up because I am still looking for an antique dining room hutch like Grandma Rose had owned. I haven’t found one yet but I feel that it is only a matter of time.
I gave Dave a kiss on the lips as he took his cup of black coffee and went to have a chair at the kitchen table, looking out into the backyard.
“So about the warps,” he said turning back to look across the room at me as I added cream and sugar to my coffee. “And my getting back to the old town square.”
I took two plates from the cupboard and started filling them with scrambled eggs and sausage and then popped some bread into the toaster oven.
“Okay,” I began, joining him at the table and sitting across from him with my cup of coffee in hand. “What I’ve found out up until now—and please keep in mind that I’ve been totally winging it and I have no idea what this is all about but what I do know is that you don’t have any control and you can’t just pick and choose where you go or what you do and I know that you can’t significantly alter the experience that you’re in.”
“But I felt as if I would’ve been free to do whatever I would have wanted to do,” Dave said.
“Except that you didn’t, do that, did you?” I reminded him. “If you’d had free will to change the experience, I think that you would have been heading for the next county. You were so totally freaking out.”
I laughed and Dave chuckled along with me.
“I was freaking out,” he agreed.
“See? So, no, you can’t change the course of the experience. I’ve been able to make small insignificant manipulations but the overall experience ends with its historical conclusion.”
“But what about when we went to get the fountain drink? Couldn’t we have just kept on going?”
“No,” I shook my head decidedly. “We wouldn’t have been able to leave the area.”
He frowned, readying to argue the point further but the toaster dinged just then and I went to butter and jelly a slice of toast for each of us and brought Dave his breakfast, setting it before him along with silverware and a paper towel to use as a napkin before bringing my own breakfast to the table and taking my seat across from him again.
“Since you know now, I’ll tell you about that closet that you added to my bedroom.”
He looked up from his plate with interest. “What about it?”
I had such a mixture of relief and trepidation about revealing all of my secrets to him but relief was uppermost and I continued with a smile.
“You’ll think that I’m crazy but I’ve actually been able to use that closet to bring small items back and forth—nothing major, just a few photos and small odds and ends.”
“That’s what you had me make that for?” he chuckled with a shake of his head. “A wall safe—I knew that was a load of crap—but what do you mean, back and forth? Are you saying that the closet appeared in the past in the same room?”
“Yes and don’t ask,” I said quickly, forestalling his
next question. “I have no idea why it works—it just does. So,” I said going back to our previous subject as he glowered at me good-naturedly. “Regarding the warps, I was hoping that having you stay overnight here might be a way to keep the travels from happening because when my friend Mindy stayed overnight, I didn’t warp—but apparently you are being invited in.”
I wiggled all ten of my fingers in the air toward him spookily and added a mysteriously ghostly, “Boooo!”
“Well, I’m stoked about it,” he assured me as he took a bite of sausage and gave me a closed-mouth smile as he chewed his food.
“So, as for getting to someplace where you want to go—like the gazebo and even though it was around for decades, you might never visit that place or time ever again. Next time, you might be at a dinner table with your great-great-grandfather and be a ten-year-old boy, or possibly you will be your great-great-grandfather himself and you won’t be able to just get up from the table and leave, not only because as you get better at the travels you automatically try to fit in but also because if you did try to walk out of the room, the others at the table would question you and besides, even if you made it out of the room and the house—sometimes you can’t even recognize anything to tell you where you are—you aren’t even sure of which direction is north. The craziest thing though, is that you have all of your own faculties and you still know everything about your own real life and times but you also know that your life is far away and unattainable—somehow you just instinctively know.”
“But if I was in my own house or this house since I know it so well, I could easily find my way to town.”
“Dave, I’ve tried,” I tilted my head, indicating the house around us as I sipped at my coffee. “I’ve spent entire days in this house in the past, and I’ve walk all of the rooms and I’ve gone out into the yard but it’s always within the constraints of the experience—I can never just walk off. I think that you’ll just need to experience it for yourself, that is, if the travels happen to you again.”
“I wonder if we will be in the same experience together every time?” he asked.
“I guess that if you want to, we could stay here again tonight and we just might find out.”