Time Enough for Love (16 page)

The shuttered look was replaced by shock. “The
second
time …?”

“I already took a bullet for you,” she told him flatly. “Seven years from now. Only this time around, it’s probably going to happen tomorrow. The least you could do is
talk
to me and tell me why I’m going to die.”

He was struggling to understand. “You knew you’d already been killed once, and you still stuck around to help Chuck? To help … me?”

Maggie tipped her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. “Yeah, love’s a funny thing, isn’t it, Charlie? I’m in love with Chuck.” She opened her eyes and looked at him. “And I love you too. You’re
him, you know. Part of you is Chuck—except for the fact that you don’t happen to love me.” She laughed, but it came out sounding more like a sob. “How could you love me? You don’t know me. But just think, if I had seven years, I could probably make you love me as much as Chuck does. Of course, it would probably take another seven years
more
for you ever to admit it!”

Charles was silent.

“Please,” Maggie said. “Give me something. Close your eyes and find that part of you that could maybe love me in seven years. And then tell me why finding a way to travel through time has ruled your life since you were a child.”

Charles didn’t move. He didn’t even blink.

Maggie closed her eyes again. She couldn’t bear to look at him as she waited for him to say something, anything. Or nothing at all.

He cleared his throat. “I’ve … I’ve never told anyone.”

He was either going to keep going, or he was going to stop. Maggie sat absolutely still, waiting to see which it was going to be.

Charles cleared his throat again. “When I was seven years old, I … um, I realized that life was made up of linear paths. If you took one, you missed the others, and … vice versa.”

He paused, and she knew he was struggling to simplify, to make his words ones she would understand. “It occurred to me that all along these lines or paths were these … moments. Moments in time that either kept a person on track or pushed them onto a totally different path. Sometimes these moments—or decisions, if you will—seem utterly trivial, but the changes they trigger are … immense.”

He took a deep breath. “From everything you’ve told me, it seems as if my decision to continue or to stop trying to make a working theorem for time travel is one of these moments. Quiet. Seemingly insignificant. Yet from everything you told me—the bomb at the White House, Wizard-9’s interference, your own death—” His voice broke and he stopped for a moment.

Maggie opened her eyes and looked at him. He was staring down at his stockinged feet, his eyes out of focus, his jaw clenched, mouth grim. He looked up and met her gaze. “It seems the changes this decision will bring are extremely severe—unless we can somehow alter the path again and take us all in an entirely different direction. Unless …” He looked away from her, his eyes narrowing in concentration as he became lost in his thoughts.

“What happened when you were seven, Chuck?”
she said softly, gently. Chuck. She’d gone and called him Chuck. The name had slipped out.

Her mistake hadn’t gotten past him. She saw his awareness in the flash of his eyes, in the slight twisting of his lips into a half smile.

He didn’t want to tell her. He shifted his position. He ran his fingers through his hair. He looked at the walls in the closet, the floor, the ceiling. He chewed on the inside of his cheek. He scratched his ear. He stopped himself more than once from drumming his fingers on the floor.

“Another moment,” he finally said through clenched teeth, glancing briefly at her. “It was another one of those goddammed life-altering moments.”

Maggie moved so that she was sitting directly across from him. She stretched out her right leg so that her bare foot was resting directly on top of Charles’s left foot. The physical contact seemed to ground him, and for a moment he just sat there, eyes closed, absolutely still, as if gaining strength from her touch.

“I was reading a book.” His voice was so soft, Maggie wasn’t sure at first that he’d really spoken. “
The Lord of the Rings.
J.R.R. Tolkien. I was three chapters from the end, and I didn’t want to put it down.”

He paused, and Maggie held her breath as she realized that his eyes were shining with unshed tears.

“My little brother,” he said. “Steven. He came into my room. He wanted to play Chinese checkers. But I only had a half hour before my calculus tutor arrived, and I wanted to read, so I told him no. I couldn’t play with him. I didn’t even look up from my book to talk to him—I just told him to shut the door on his way out, and he did. About twenty minutes later I heard sirens and then Danny MacAllister, the kid from down the street who delivered the newspapers, he pounded on our front door, and God, it was Stevie. The sirens were for Stevie. He was riding his new bike, crossing New Amsterdam Road, and he got hit by a truck. He was killed instantly.”

“O
H
, C
HARLES, NO,”
Maggie breathed.

“I don’t know what he was doing. He wasn’t supposed to ride his bike anywhere but around the cul-de-sac. He must’ve been mad at me—” He broke off.

“I don’t know what he was doing,” he said again, softer this time. “I never knew why he did the things he did. He was so emotional. So … illogical. He was five, and he couldn’t even read Dr. Seuss yet. He wasn’t ‘gifted,’ but he didn’t care—he was just this happy little silly kid. Everyone loved him, especially me. Everything was so easy for him. My father would play catch and laugh with him out in the backyard, and then come inside and shake his head
at me for making careless errors in my calculus assignments.”

Now that he was finally talking, the words seemed to spill out. “I used to sneak into Stevie’s room at night and climb into his top bunk and ask him what he was thinking about, and he would say something like duckies or bunnies, and I would lie there and try to
be
him. I’d make shadows on the walls with my fingers, the way he did, and I’d try to push aside all the numbers and physics equations in my head to make a little room for duckies and bunnies.” Charles laughed, a short burst of not very humorous air. “But I never really could.”

Maggie’s heart was in her throat. She could picture Charles—Chuck—as that terribly intelligent and gifted child, with eyes far too old and sober for his skinny, seven-year-old face and body.

“And just like that, Stevie was gone,” he continued. “One game of Chinese checkers. That’s all it would have taken to keep our entire family from being destroyed. But I wouldn’t play, and my brother died.”

His voice broke, and he stopped, turning away from her so that she wouldn’t see the sheen of tears in his eyes that threatened to overflow.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said, moving closer, wanting to reach for him but afraid of being pushed
away. “Didn’t your mother and father tell you that?”

“My father left town,” he said, his voice curiously flat. He held himself away from her, his shoulders stiff. But try as he might, he couldn’t stop the tears that flooded his eyes. One escaped, and he brusquely, almost savagely wiped it away. “I never saw him again. And my mother … She lost it. Literally. She went into a hospital and wouldn’t get out of bed. She died about four months later. They wouldn’t tell me what she died of—I’ve always assumed she managed to give herself some kind of overdose of sleeping pills.”

“Oh, Charles.” Maggie was aghast at the avalanche of tragedies that had begun with his brother’s death. “What happened to you? Who took care of
you
?”

“I was sent to live with my mother’s elderly uncle in New York.”

“That was where the housekeeper made you carrot cake,” Maggie realized. “And you ate it even though you hated it.”

Somehow it was that image, the image of a little boy choking down something that was meant to be a treat, that pushed Maggie over the edge. She reached for Charles, wishing that she could hold that little boy in her arms.

He resisted her for only a second, and then he turned and held her just as tightly.

His parents had deserted him at a time when he’d needed them the most. They had selfishly given in to their own pain and grief, leaving no one to hold and comfort their surviving son. Had anyone ever held him? Maggie wondered. Had anyone told him it was all right to cry, that it was necessary to grieve?

He’d been hardly more than a baby himself—only seven years old. He may have been capable of college-level mathematics, but he had been only a
child
.

Maggie could picture him, all alone in his uncle’s quiet house, sitting in his room, thinking that if only he could turn back time and tell his brother, yes, he’d play that game of Chinese checkers …

“If I could go back in time,” she whispered, stroking his hair, his back. “I’d go back to find you. And I would hold you, just like this, and I would tell you that it
wasn’t
your fault. I would tell you that it’s okay to cry—that you
need
to cry. And I would make sure you knew that someone loved you … that
I
love you.”

He drew in a ragged breath as his arms tightened around her, as he pulled back to look down at her. His cheeks were wet with tears. “I sure could’ve used you.”

“I would’ve told you to look at me.” Maggie gazed up into his eyes, gently touching the side of his face. “To remember me. And to wait for me to show up in your life again. And I would have told you that the next time you see me, I would be there for you—forever. That no matter the mistakes you think you’ve made, no matter what you hold yourself responsible for, no matter whether you stay at Data Tech or go back to medical school or get a job washing cars, I’ll still love you. I’ll always love you. And that, from that moment on, from that moment when we meet again”—her voice trembled slightly—“the only thing that can part us is death.”

Charles gazed down at the woman in his arms, knowing without a doubt that her words were not meant only for the little boy he had once been. Her words were aimed just as well at him, and also at the man he would become.

What a powerful thing this love that she had for him was! Without any intricate equations, without any high-tech equipment, without any help from science at all, her love could travel through time and touch the child he had once been, the man he was, and the man he would become. With that love, she could soothe and start to heal wounds that had festered for too long.

And he could look into the warmth and compassion of this woman’s beautiful eyes and feel a peacefulness that he hadn’t felt in years.

But he felt a yearning too. He wanted her now, not seven years from now. He wanted to pull her chin up and lower his mouth to hers and …

As if she somehow was able to read his mind, Maggie brushed her lips across his.

It took everything he had in him not to pull her closer, not to catch her mouth with his and deepen that soft kiss. God, how easy it would be to love her. The depth of her feelings for him was astonishing. He wanted to take that love and keep it all to himself, all
for
himself.

But he knew that everything she said to him was said to Chuck as well. And every kiss she gave him was a kiss Chuck would remember. Charles was merely a transmitter, a medium connecting her to his future self—to the man she really loved.

Still, when she kissed him again, when the sweetness of her lips lingered against his, he couldn’t help himself. He gave in to the temptation and kissed her hungrily, greedily, taking what she offered and then some, plundering the softness of her mouth.

And when she tugged him down with her onto the carpeted closet floor, he could no longer resist. He gave up trying to fight as she pulled her shirt—
his shirt—over her head, as he filled his hands with her soft breasts, as he touched her silky skin.

She pulled back slightly to smile into his eyes. It was a tremulous smile, barely able to hide the tears that hovered so close to the surface.

But she didn’t stop. She unfastened his pants, and he knew if he let her, unless he stopped her, they would make love—right here, right now.

He didn’t want to stop her. He couldn’t have stopped her if he’d tried. He knew she saw Chuck when she looked into his eyes. He knew she kissed Chuck when she kissed his lips. And when she slipped her panties down her legs, when she helped him pull his own pants down, when she straddled him, surrounding him in one swift, incredible moment with her slick heat, he knew it was Chuck she was loving so completely.

He wished he were wrong. He wished she saw him, really saw
him
as she looked deeply into his eyes, as she moved on top of him.

The sensations he felt were unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, but he knew despite that, it could be even better. It would be a thousand times better if he were the one she truly wanted, if he were the one she really loved.

She moved faster now, each stroke driving him closer and closer to release. Closer and closer to …

He caught her hips, trying to still her movement. “Maggie, I’m not wearing a condom.…”

Maggie kissed him. “Charlie, there’s a really good chance I’m going to die tomorrow. I think that’s just cause for irresponsible behavior. Because I don’t know if you noticed, but I seem to have lost my handbag, and I’m currently not equipped with any pockets.…”

He smiled, sliding his hands down her naked body. “I did happen to notice your lack of pockets.” He lifted her off of him, shifting slightly as he reached underneath him, searching for something. “But I have pockets
and
my wallet, and …” He tore open the foil packet. “A condom.”

“I honestly don’t think it matters.”

He looked up at her, and his dark eyes were so serious. “I’m not going to let you die.” He actually believed his own words.

Maggie couldn’t be so certain. All she knew, all she was absolutely positive about was how much she truly loved this man. The line between Charles and Chuck had long since blurred. It had been all but erased as Charles had told her so poignantly about his little brother.