Predestination Unknown

by Tanya Chris

  I started off—to where I couldn’t say, just down the road in the direction the wagon had gone. If I jogged, I could probably catch up to it, but my father’s stupid-ass loafers were miserable even for walking in and I couldn’t see myself as a highway robber, flinging bodies from a stagecoach to rescue the fair maiden.

  So why was I headed to Salem? I was done with Salem. I turned around and walked the other way, even though I had no idea what lay in that direction. Boston maybe? I’d go to Boston and start a new life and it would have nothing to do with Ezekiel Cheever or witches.

  I pretended I didn’t notice that I was going past the Nurse homestead again or that Ezekiel was standing where I’d left him, halfway between the road and the barn, but my feet stopped and my body turned without any input from my brain.

  We faced each other. Both hurt, I guess. He looked hurt and I felt hurt. There was a lot of mistrust between us, but how could there be anything else? I hadn’t been honest with him.

  “Zeke—”

  He cut me off by diving for me. His arms wrapped around me and mine wrapped around him. His nose rubbed against my neck, cold and a little wet, and my cheek nuzzled his temple.

  “I need to tell you something,” I said into his skin. “I need to tell you where I’m from. Not out here though, not in the open like this.”

  It wouldn’t feel right being inside Rebecca Nurse’s house when she was on her way to jail, so I pulled Ezekiel over to the barn. It was filled with chickens and cows and the same kind of miscellaneous junk that choked every shed at the back of every house ever. There was a ladder leading up to the hayloft where it smelled like summer and the din of squawking chickens was muted by the bales of hay. A single glassless window had its shutters thrown wide to the afternoon sun.

  I plunked myself down on the floor with a bale of hay at my back and Ezekiel landed next to me. I’d let go of his hand to climb the ladder, but I picked it up again now. I ran my thumb over the calluses on his palm, feeling his strength. I had to believe he had the strength to hear what I was about to tell him.

  “I really am from Connecticut,” I started. “I’ve never lived anywhere else, except for college, but that was just a few years in New Jersey.”

  “South of Connecticut.”

  “Yes.”

  “But not so far.”

  “No.”

  He waited. I stalled. His hand was warm and our shoulders and thighs touched. I was afraid to lose him.

  “What is it then?” he asked finally.

  “I’m from Connecticut,” I repeated slowly, “but I’m not from 1692. I’m from 2017. From the future. My friends and I were in Salem that day I ended up in your barn, but not the Salem you know. Salem 2017.”

  “Two thousand …”

  “And seventeen, yes. Roughly three hundred and twenty-five years from now. We were in Salem because it was what we call Halloween. I don’t know if you have Halloween …?”

  Ezekiel shook his head.

  “OK, well, it’s a holiday where we dress up in costumes and pretend that things like ghosts and witches are real.”

  “Witches are real.”

  “Let’s come back to that. The point is that I was in Salem with my friends and it was 2017 and then something happened, which I can’t explain, and the next thing I knew I was here. With you. And it was 1692. You remember I had to ask you what year it was?”

  “I think … you are not well, Luther. I think … I cannot believe these things you say.”

  “OK, I get that. I had a hard time believing it too, except that here I am, so I didn’t have much choice. But you know how the way I talk is weird? And how some of the things that are normal where I’m from aren’t normal to you? Like, in my time two men can love each other, and there’s no such thing as slavery.”

  “Not anyone is a slave?”

  “Right. Everyone’s born free.”

  “I would that such a world were true, Luther, but I do think as you must dream it.”

  So far this was going about as well as I’d expected. It was time to play the one card I held. I pulled out my phone and thumbed the power button. He’d seen my phone once—that very first night, before I’d known to keep it hidden—but he hadn’t seen what it could do.

  The camera, I decided. We’d take a selfie, the two of us. If I ever made it back to 2017, this photo would be all I’d have of him. I pulled up the camera app and set the camera to front-facing and held it in front of us where we could see ourselves.

  “It’s a mirror,” he said, relieved when my shiny oddity didn’t do more than show him his own reflection.

  “Wait,” I told him. I leaned my head into his and smiled into the camera and he smiled back. I pressed the button and the fake snick of a shutter snapping sounded. “Now look.” I handed him the phone.

  He nearly dropped it. I’d forgotten how slick those little devils were, especially if you weren’t used to them, but I steadied his hand around the phone, keeping our fingers to the edge so he could see us on screen. We made a handsome couple. We looked happy.

  “The mirror stops time?”

  “It’s called a phone and it doesn’t stop time. It just captures a memory, like drawing a picture except faster. We can take as many pictures of ourselves as we like and they’ll all be stored in here, but that’s not all it does. Here, try this.” I activated the voice recorder app and held the phone near his mouth. “Say ‘Hi, Luther.’”

  “Hello, Luther.”

  I pressed play and watched his expression grow fearful as he listened to his own voice play back.

  “It’s a kind of magic.”

  “It’s not magic. It’s an invention, like …”

  Shit. What had been invented at this point? Not cars, obviously. The cotton gin? If I’d known I was going to travel back in time, I’d have paid a lot more attention to History in school.

  “Like the printing press,” I came up with. I knew they had printing presses in 1692 because the Bible I’d been reading to Mrs. Nurse when they came to arrest her was printed. “Before the printing press was invented, if you wanted a copy of a book, you had to write it out by hand, right? But now you can set the book in type once and make as many copies as you need. Over the next few hundred years, a lot of things are going to be invented, and this device is one of them, but it’s no more magic than the printing press.”

  If only it were. I kept waiting for my phone to save me somehow, but the best it could do was a few tricks to impress Ezekiel.

  “I know not how to think,” he murmured

  “Forget the phone for now. I didn’t show it to you to freak you out. I want you to believe I’m from the future because I need to talk to you about what I know is going to happen here. There was a reason I was in Salem for Halloween. These witch trials are going to put Salem on the map, and not in a good way.”

  Ezekiel leaned in and whispered, “Does the Devil conquer Salem?”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “No, there’s nothing supernatural going on here. Just greed and fear and a lot of good men like your father looking the other way. There’s no such thing as witches, but that won’t stop Salem from hanging them.”

  “How many?” he asked. “How many shall we hang?”

  “At least twenty. Martha Corey is one of them. Rebecca Nurse is another.”

  Ezekiel looked like he felt the way I did the morning after the 2016 election, when I wanted it to not be true but knew that it was, when I scrambled to figure out how to fix it and realized that I couldn’t. Maybe Salem couldn’t be fixed either. If Ezekiel and I had tried to fight off Corwin’s goons, would it have made a difference? Or was Rebecca Nurse destined to die no matter what I did?

  Puritans believed in one kind of predestination. I was living with another.

  Ezekiel had a lot of questions for me, but it broke my heart to answer them, so I pulled up the Wikipedia page and handed him my phone. Which he immediately dropped. After we’d fished it back out of the hay, he mashed the volume b
utton, then managed some kind of unintentional zoom maneuver. It was worse than watching my grandmother try to work a phone. I decided to hold it while he read. There was no way he’d master swiping.

  If I’d had service I could have shown him how one link led to another, but then we’d have been stuck in that hayloft for the rest of our lives. Wikipedia was a time sink even for those of us who’d grown up with it.

  When we’d reached the bottom of the entry, I powered the phone back down. My battery was under thirty percent, a stat which would’ve concerned me even back when I’d had near-constant access to electricity. Now? I didn’t know if I was concerned or not. On the one hand, once the phone was dead, it was dead forever. On the other hand, maybe then I could finally let the future go.

  Ezekiel hadn’t said anything in a while. He oozed down bonelessly until he was lying flat on the layer of silt and straw that blanketed the hayloft. I lowered myself down next to him and put a hand on his stomach.

  “You OK?”

  His eyes flickered shut like he couldn’t stand to look at the world anymore.

  “It’s not all bad,” I told him. “Society will learn a lesson from what happens here. We won’t let it happen again.”

  That wasn’t exactly true—we weren’t calling out witches anymore, but we were still finding ways to label people, to deem them less worthy and deprive them of life—but I figured Ezekiel could use an it-gets-better speech without too much emphasis on how slowly it would get better or how much room there still was for improvement.

  “In my time, we can get married. You and me, I mean. To each other.”

  “In the church?” Ezekiel rolled onto his side so we faced each other. His face was filled with wonder.

  “Well, yes. In some churches and in the eyes of the state.” Here in Massachusetts, in what would become the United States, there were churches that would marry us. That was all he needed to know.

  “And what of God?”

  “My grandmother says God will bless my union, so I guess I have to believe my grandmother.”

  “But how could such a thing be, that two men should be married? I cannot fathom it, no matter that you say it be so.”

  “It’s like this: by 2017, we’ve learned that what matters is how we fit together here.” I touched my hand to his chest, over his heart, then to my own. “Not how we fit together here.” I tugged his hips against mine and rolled my groin into his.

  “But, Luther?” His voice trembled and suddenly neither of us was thinking about witches or what year it was anymore. “How do we fit together there?”

  “So many ways.” God, I wanted to show him every one. “So many, many ways.”

  I took his hands in mine as I rolled on top of him, pinning them over his head so our bodies stretched flush against each other. He was so lean that his hard cock was the highest point on him and my body was pretty cut too after a few weeks of hard labor and no caramel macchiatos. The pressure of cock against cock was almost painful, but that didn’t stop him from arching harder into me. He whimpered, his eyes screwed tight with concentration, or maybe denial, as his lower body strained upward.

  “Zeke.” I needed him to be looking at me when I brought my mouth to his and ignited the bonfire we’d been building since the night we met. I needed to be sure he could live with whatever we did, because when I’d told him that what mattered was the way our hearts fit, I hadn’t been speaking generically.

  I, Luther, loved him, Ezekiel. Specifically. Loved him too much to engage in sex that would hurt him.

  “Luther?” His tone was reverential when he stilled his hips and opened his eyes.

  “Yes, love?”

  “Where you’re from, this is normal?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t lie. “Even where I’m from, this is special.”

  I brushed my lips against his, only meaning to do it lightly, but his lips clung to mine so sweetly that I couldn’t tear myself away. I took a second pass against them, then another, until our mouths fused and my tongue found its way inside him. He inhaled sharply. His hands clenched mine so hard I thought he might break my fingers, but he hesitated only a moment before tangling his tongue around mine with breathless enthusiasm.

  I had to have more of him touching more of me. My hands worked at the way-too-many layers he had on. I reminded myself to be cautious—clothes weren’t disposable in this era—but my hands were shaky and my need was high and there really were way too many layers. How did anybody get it on in 1692 when they had to peel their way through four layers to get down to skin?

  His cloak fell away with a few buttons, forming a blanket beneath us. The frock coat was too tight to remove with him lying down. I had to haul him upright to get it and his doublet off. With each step forward, I expected him to back away, but he let me disrobe him, even let me take the hem of his blouse and pull it over his head, baring his chest to my eyes.

  He was so beautiful, so absolutely perfect. His nipples made hard dark points against the cream of his chest. Man, he was white. I didn’t even know guys came that white. The skin above his collar had some color, but his chest had probably never seen the light of day before. I couldn’t help but touch it, to make sure he was made of real flesh and not marble, but his skin was warm beneath my hand and my Greek God breathed.

  I kissed him as I undressed myself, just our lips touching as my hands undid my own multitude of layers. I didn’t have a frock coat to wrestle off, but I had to break the kiss to pull Robert’s shirt over my head. When my head popped free from the long-sleeved cotton undergarment, I caught the look of confusion on Ezekiel’s face and remembered my t-shirt. There was a giant Snoop Dogg glowering at him from my chest.

  “Let’s not worry about that right now,” I told him. I threw Snoop Dogg off to the side and pushed Ezekiel back down onto his cloak. To be naked from the waist up was enough for now, I decided. To be naked from the waist up was amazing, in fact. His skin against mine—the silky slide, the stunning contrast in color—his tongue eager and aggressive in my mouth, his voice breaking in choked whimpers against my ear. Glorious.

  Our cocks rubbed at each other through the thinner layers of our pants. I lowered a hand to his fly, fumbling at the buttons. When my hand finally found him, he ripped his mouth free from mine and gazed up at me with wide eyes—hungry and confused and a little scared.

  “Zeke? You’ve touched yourself before, right?”

  He ducked his head, tucking his cheek into the curve of my neck, and nodded.

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” I told him. “It’s natural. Normal. Everyone does it.”

  He laughed a little—a weak, helpless sound. “Oh, Luther. Are you sure you’re not the Devil sent to tempt me?”

  “Just wait until I show you heaven.” I wrapped my hand around him more firmly and started my demonstration. He was all eagerness beneath me, participating actively in his own ruin as I brought him to the edge of reason. His hands bore down on my shoulders as his body strained upward, his hips thrusting to match my motion. He was gorgeous in his pleasure and I’d never been so fucking hard.

  “Touch me,” I begged him. “Please touch me.”

  His hand threaded its way between our bodies fast enough, but he didn’t make much progress on fighting his way through my clothes.

  “Your pants have metal seams,” he complained.

  Ah, zippers hadn’t been invented yet. I knelt up and took care of it myself.

  “Another thing we’ll worry about later,” I told him as I pushed down my pants and long underwear and boxers in a single swoop. Then I went for his pants, lowering them far enough to be out of our way and safe from our eruptions.

  His cock was so pretty, just like the rest of him—lean and pale and almost delicate, and it had missed me while I’d been messing with our clothes, so I crawled back over him and put my hand on it and felt his hand come to mine and ahhhh … finally. God.

  I was supposed to be remembering not to take the Lord’s name in vain, bu
t my brain was barely functioning. I might be the experienced one, but I hadn’t come in weeks and there was a new level of sensation coursing through my nerve endings. That wasn’t just a hand on my cock—it was Ezekiel’s hand on my cock. It was his breath on my neck and his moans in my ears and his naked skin brushing mine. It was the purity of his passion, the warmth of his goodness.

  Love, love. It was all love. Everywhere I touched, everything I felt, was love.

  I couldn’t call to God, so I called to my angel and he called back as our hands got tighter and our thrusts grew wilder until I passed that moment of inevitability and felt my orgasm meet his. My balls were tight, my hand was wet, our stomachs slid together through the mingled film of our ejaculations. His eyes were pressed shut and my mouth drew kisses over them as I kept saying his name like it was the only word I knew.

  “Are you OK?”

  He shook his head, his eyes still closed, but his arms clung tight around me and his face delved into my neck with warm kisses.

  Please be OK, love. Please be OK.

  “I love you,” I told him. I rolled us so my back was on the floor and he lay half over me. I wrapped him up tight and told him again that I loved him.

  “I never thought as I would have that,” he said.

  It wasn’t the declaration of love I might have liked in return, but it would have to do for now. I used Snoop Dogg to clean us up, then stuffed the shirt behind one of the bales of hay. I imagined a future farmer finding him, imagined Snoop Dogg becoming a local legend, maybe a God. The giant head of the Black man imprinted on cloth! People would come from far and wide to see it for a penny apiece.

  Ezekiel was too quiet, too solemn as I re-dressed first him and then myself, fastening us back into the clothing of respectable seventeenth-century men. I feared I’d done a terrible thing, but when he spoke, it wasn’t about us or what we’d just done. It was about Salem.

  “How then shall we stop this?” he asked. “If there be no such thing as witches, then no one must be hanged for a witch.”

  “We can’t tell anyone else where I’m from,” I warned him.