Parallel (The Parallel Duet Book 1)

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  It’s easy enough to picture. I remember Nick kissing me against that tree outside the high school. If any voice but his had been calling me, I’m not sure I’d have returned.

  “These aren’t memories, though,” I argue. “These are things that never happened. Like, I see myself living in London with Nick, or growing up with him in another state.”

  She shakes her head. “All those things must have happened. You can’t travel to something that has never or will never exist. All I can think is that maybe someone changed your timeline.”

  It’s exactly what Grosbaum said. And it would mean that my dreams about London, about Nick as a child and our high school romance…aren’t dreams at all. They actually occurred.

  Nick blows out a breath, sinking backward into the booth. “If this is all actually possible,” he asks, “why would someone be messing with Quinn’s timeline in the first place?”

  “I don’t know,” she replies, raising a shoulder. “Maybe to make sure she doesn’t do something in the future.”

  “I’m not Hitler,” I argue. “I don’t have a powerful job. I don’t even fudge my taxes. There’s no reason someone could ever be scared of what I might do.”

  “Maybe she wants something you have,” Rose says. “Yeah, a time traveler can just take almost anything she wants but”—her eyes flicker from me to Nick—“some things you can’t just take. Maybe it’s him this person wants.”

  I can’t believe I’m hearing this suggestion again too. “We, um…aren’t together,” I reply.

  The girl raises one perfectly groomed brow and starts laughing. “Oh really?” She isn’t merely dubious. She’s acting like what I’ve said is so ridiculous that laughter is the only possible response.

  “Yes. Really. I’m getting married next month.” Nick’s hand, resting at the edge of the table, clenches into a fist.

  “Then I can only think of one other possibility,” she says. “Someone’s trying to kill you and keeps botching the job.”

  Nick’s body leans forward, suddenly shot through with tension. “Why would anyone want to kill Quinn?”

  She glances at me, hesitating. “I don’t think I should say anymore.”

  I see her looking around as if she plans to disappear again and my pulse skitters. I need to know this.

  “Please,” I beg. “We’ve got to figure this out. If I can find a way to stop whatever it is I’m doing, or stop this person, maybe the brain tumor won’t keep growing. You’re my last hope.”

  She swallows, looking behind her before she turns back to us. “There’s something called the Rule of Threes.”

  Goose bumps crawl up my arms. I recognize the phrase. It’s something I talked about in therapy as a child. “I’ve heard of it,” I say quietly to Nick. “I spoke about it in those dreams I had as a kid.”

  Beneath the table his fingers twine with mine as he looks at Rose. “What is it?”

  “That spark I mentioned she has?” Rose says. “Imagine it’s like a flame that can be shared but can’t be spread too thin. It’s limited to three females in a family. No one knows why it’s this way, but it’s what keeps the population small and ensures that no family has too much power.”

  I must be missing something. There’s absolutely no way that can apply to my family. I have two living female relatives at most.

  “So how do you choose who gets it?” Nick asks.

  Rose yawns, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. I wonder where she’s from and what time it is there. “That’s like asking how you choose eye color,” she says. “You’re just born with the mutation, or you’re not. And it would be unbelievably rare, but if four people were born with the mutation in one family, then that’s one too many, and the weakest one just…dies. Usually the oldest, unless there’s someone like Quinn, who’s allowed her spark to fade out early.”

  “I don’t see why that would lead someone to kill her,” Nick argues.

  She shrugs. “Think about me and my sister. It won’t happen, but let’s say my sister gave birth to two time-travelers. Then there’d be four of us, and one of us would die. Killing me would ensure that she and her kids were safe, right?”

  Nick scrubs a hand over his face. “There’s no…I don’t know…penalty for that? I can’t believe I’m even asking this question, but isn’t there some authority who keeps you from doing that to each other?”

  “There are penalties for a lot of things,” Rose replies, aimlessly pushing the remaining fries around on her plate. “But not for that, if all the stories about it are true. In theory, if you do it in just the right way—stab a family member with the spark in the heart—it will strengthen yours. It might even heal Quinn’s tumor. Or it could be some crazy old wives’ tale. I’ve never done it, obviously, so I have no idea.”

  My fingers tap restlessly on the seat beside me. We are wasting precious time on a line of discussion that couldn’t possibly be relevant. “Look, there’s just no way this can apply to me,” I interject. “I have no immediate family left other than my mom, and she obviously isn’t time traveling. But this weird jumping thing I’m doing—why is it so limited? Every single memory is about Nick and things related to him. I don’t remember my parents or my friends or my classes…it’s like my entire life is a blank slate aside from him.”

  “Limited?” she asks with a sharp laugh. “Jumping between timelines the way you are—it’s unheard of. I have no idea how you’re doing it and how it hasn’t completely fried your brain, but I guarantee you wouldn’t be sitting here right now if you were letting in more. For you to be doing it at all… there must be something there you want super badly, is all I can say. Enough that you’re willing to die for it.”

  I flush as Nick’s eyes meet mine. I’m fairly certain we both know what it is I want so badly from those previous timelines. He leans in, his forearms on the table, hands clasped. “So is there any way you can help us?”

  “Like what?” she asks warily.

  “I don’t know,” he says, staring at his hands. “Maybe you could undo something. Or time travel forward and see if they’ve developed a way to bypass the amygdala so we can reach Quinn’s tumor.”

  “I’m fifteen,” she says. “You’re really going to trust what I tell you so much that you’ll cut into her brain based on it?”

  His mouth twitches. “Probably not. Especially since you said you were sixteen a minute ago.”

  She grins. Her smile reminds me of someone, but I can’t place it. “I’ve jumped back and forth all day. Maybe it scrambled my math a little.”

  “Convenient,” says Nick, restraining a smile of his own. “What about going backward to fix things? If someone died, and you knew how to cure it or change something, could you do that?”

  I feel a lump in my throat. He’s thinking of his brother, I’m sure, and I wonder once again how devastating it must have been for Nick to lose his twin. I’ve never even met Ryan in this lifetime, yet somehow the fact that he’s dead is hard for even me.

  “Like, could I go back and assassinate Hitler and stop all those deaths in World War II?” she asks. “No, for a variety of reasons, but most importantly, it wouldn’t do any good. Once someone is gone”—she averts her eyes—“they can’t come back. Otherwise, I’d have gone back to save my mom.” For a moment, she looks young, and heartbreakingly fragile.

  “Which reminds me,” she says, throwing her napkin on her plate, “I have to get home to my sister.”

  I exchange a panicked glance with Nick. I’m not done. Rose is the key to solving this, I feel certain of it. “Is there any way for us to get ahold of you?” he asks.

  She smirks. “Sure, if Quinn finally learns how to time travel.” She thinks for a moment, rubbing a finger over her lower lip. “Look, I really have to go. But I can come here tomorrow morning, if you want. Early, though. Like, seven. Just bring my stuff.”

  With that, she slides under the table. And all that remains behind are her clothes.

  22

&n
bsp; QUINN

  Nick and I sit alone, staring at each other in shock.

  “Dammit,” he says. “I just wish she’d stayed five minutes longer.”

  “Well, there’s still tomorrow.” I look at my watch. “It’s already after midnight though. You should go home. I’ll get a hotel up here somewhere and see what she has to say in the morning.”

  His jaw sets. “No way. We’re in this together. We’ll stay up here and come back tomorrow.”

  My heart flops in my chest like a dying fish. It’s one thing to go get a second opinion with my gorgeous doctor in tow. Jeff wouldn’t have liked it, but it felt justifiable. As did driving to Baltimore tonight. But staying here with him? There’s no stretch of imagination by which that is okay. And yet here I am, nodding in agreement.

  We get in Nick’s Jeep. “I’ll go on Expedia,” I say, pulling out my phone. He’s doing all this for me and I can’t possibly let him pay for his own room, but my stomach sinks at the cost of one room, much less two.

  He shakes his head, pulling onto the street. “That’s okay. I know exactly where we can go.”

  A few minutes later we pull up to the valet stand in front of the Four Seasons.

  I flinch. A room here will be a fortune. Six hundred? More? And I’ll have to pay for two. I briefly think of all the things I could have paid for with that much money. It’s half the mortgage. And how the hell am I going to explain this to Jeff? I can’t. There’s just no way.

  “Nick,” I breathe. “I think this place might be a little out of my price range.”

  He does a double take. “You actually thought I’d let you pay for this?”

  “Of course I did,” I tell him, frowning. “You’ve already done way too much. I’m sure we can find something more reasonable nearby.”

  He hands the valet his key and tucks his head, trying hard not to laugh. “Quinn, you’re not paying. I think you remember the starving-resident version of me from London. That’s no longer the case.”

  “But…”

  “Stop,” he says. “Consider it payback for the honeymoon in Paris during which I apparently never let you leave the room.”

  With that, he places his hand at the small of my back and leads me to the registration desk. He asks for two rooms and the bright smile on the clerk’s face fades a little. “You don’t have a reservation?” she asks. I’d have thought this was obvious, but apparently not. She goes on the computer and makes a sad face when she looks back at us. “We’re pretty much sold out. There are three rooms available but two of them aren’t cleaned yet. I can get you in a one-bedroom suite if that will work? It has a fold-out couch.”

  Nick and I exchange a glance. It’s less than ideal for both of us. “Is that okay?” he asks quietly. “I can take the couch.”

  “I’ll take the couch,” I argue.

  “No, you won’t,” he says, turning back to the clerk and handing her a credit card. She begins ringing us up. “I promise it’ll be every bit as boring as our honeymoon apparently was,” he adds under his breath.

  The clerk hands Nick our key cards. “Can we assist you with any bags this evening?”

  I feel my cheeks turning pink—even though we asked for two rooms, showing up here with no luggage has cheaters written all over it. “No bags,” Nick says casually. “We got out of a show and decided we’d rather not drive back to D.C. this late.”

  We head toward the elevators. “You sound like you check into hotels with strangers all the time,” I mutter.

  He raises a brow. “And you sound jealous.”

  “You wish,” I reply, though he’s absolutely correct. I am painfully jealous of any woman who has ever checked into a hotel with Nick Reilly. I wasn’t the first and I won’t be the last, and that fact bothers me more than I care to admit.

  The suite has two double beds with plush white duvets and a mountain of piIlows. I eye them longingly as I help him open the sofa bed, which is pretty much the opposite of plush. It also has loose Cheerios inside it, which makes my stomach turn a bit.

  “We need to ask housekeeping for sheets,” I say. “Go to bed. I’ll call down there and wait out here for them.”

  He laughs wearily. “Quinn, you’re not sleeping in this shitty bed.”

  I pull my hair back into a ponytail with my hands and let it fall again. “You can’t sleep out here. This bed isn’t as long as you are, even if you sleep diagonally.”

  His arms fold across his chest. “You are absolutely not sleeping on this thing. I spent many nights as a resident napping in a supply closet. This is luxurious by contrast.”

  “And you came home afterward totally wiped out and miserable,” I counter, before I realize I don’t actually know this. I sigh heavily. “Look, this is stupid. There are two beds. You take one and I’ll take the other, unless this is some kind of ethics thing.”

  He flinches. “I’m pretty sure I fucked that up the minute I agreed we could stay in the same suite.”

  Shit. My life is a disaster but am I making his one too? He’ll probably need to lie to his girlfriend about this. And what are the consequences if it gets back to his boss? “Are you going to get in trouble for this?”

  “It’s fine,” he says. “Don’t start feeling guilty. This was my idea, remember? Look, you were right. There are two beds. And I was a perfect gentleman the night I stayed in your room at the hospital, right?”

  I have a sudden vision of him stretched out on a bed—naked from the waist up, only a sheet covering the rest—asking me to admit he’d been a gentleman the night before. I also remember how badly I wanted to suggest he stop being one. My breath comes in a single shallow burst. “Yes,” I whisper. “You were a perfect gentleman.”

  “Do you want to take a shower?” he asks. My eyes widen and he bites down on a grin. “Alone, I mean. Do you want to go shower alone, behind a locked door?”

  I laugh. “Yeah.”

  I rinse off and emerge a few minutes later in a hotel robe. His eyes drift over me before he looks away. I guess what I’ll be sleeping in here once I remove the robe isn’t exactly lost on him, but it’s not like I can sleep in the dress I wore to work.

  “You’re all done in there?” he asks.

  I nod, hiding a yawn behind the back of my hand. “I’m so tired, I may be sound asleep by the time you’re out.”

  His grin lifts high on one side. “Maybe you’re at fault for our unmemorable honeymoon.”

  The truth is that I have no specific memory of sleeping with him. Just the build up to it, the heaviness of anticipation in the base of my stomach, a small beating heart between my legs. And it’s probably for the best that I can’t remember more than that—the last thing I need is one more way in which real life is unsatisfactory. “No, I feel certain it was you,” I reply, perching on the edge of the bed. “Maybe you were impotent.”

  “If you remember that,” he says, with a look that makes my whole core clench tight, “you are definitely not remembering me.”

  By the time he gets done in the bathroom, I’m in bed with the lights off. There’s just enough moonlight in the room to reveal that he is all muscle, and he’s filling out those boxer briefs in a way that would make Trevor salivate.

  “I just saw your underwear.”

  I see a flash of teeth. “They’re boxers. It’s like seeing me in shorts.”

  “Hmmm. Interesting you think so. Expect my friend Trevor to be stopping by the hospital on casual Fridays from now on.”

  He climbs into bed, the sheets pulled haphazardly to the bottom of his rib cage. I can make out the definition of his arms, even in the dim light. I’m torn equally between guilt and a desire to look some more.

  He rolls toward me. “We have somehow avoided talking about the most glaringly obvious subject,” he says.

  “The fact that we are currently sharing a hotel room?” I ask. “I thought we’d be better off pretending that wasn’t the case.”

  “Since it could get me fired, you’re probably right. But I w
as referring to the fact that two different, unrelated people have told us over the past few days that you can time travel.”

  It hasn’t been far from my head either. “I’m finding it all a little hard to believe,” I reply. “I’m 28. It seems like any magical powers I have should’ve kicked in by now.”

  “Rose said you might not even realize you’re doing it, though,” he counters.

  I wave my hand at his words, shooing them away. “How could anyone not realize they were time traveling?”

  He pushes up a bit, his elbow bent, his head supported by his forearm. I wonder if he has any idea just how good he looks like that. “You’ve been thinking you were dreaming all these times when you go back to see me, right?” he asks. “Have you ever dreamed something else and had it wind up coming true?”

  I hesitate. Swallow down the crazy impulse to tell him things I swore as a child I’d keep to myself. “Yes, but everyone does. That’s just coincidence.”

  “Okay, what about this Rule of Threes thing? There must be something there.”

  “How could there be?” I ask. “I mean, I have an aunt I’ve never met on my dad’s side, but as far as I know, she never had kids, and I have an uncle on my mom’s side, but he’s gay. And even if my aunt did have kids, and it kicked this whole thing into play, why would she mess with my timeline? Why not just kill me?”

  He laughs. “Good to know how you’d handle the situation.”

  I smile at him in the darkness. “I’m not saying I would. But you know I’m right. If she needs me out of the picture and wants to take my spark or whatever, she could do so pretty damn easily. What good would changing my timeline do anyway?”

  His voice is soft when he finally replies. “It might keep you from meeting me.”

  We both fall silent, and the sudden absence of sound underscores something I’m increasingly certain is true—I was meant to meet him. To remain with him. It’s happened before, it may be happening now…and someone is going out of her way to prevent it.