"I don't want it, Jake. I want you to start living again, to figure out what you need … here, now. Not keep mourning me forever like you've been. It's time to let go."
"What's he doing?" Making love to you, kissing you from navel to collarbone? No wonder she sounded so breathless, he thought, muttering a quiet curse.
"Scott's not here right now," she told him, her tone more clipped than usual.
He buried his head in one hand, staring at the floor beneath his cowboy boots. The dismal room he'd been calling home lately, with its torn mattress and lopsided dresser, only made his mental state more dark and oppressive.
"What if I can't stop?" he whispered into the phone. "What if it's not possible?"
"It's not what I want, Jake. Don't make me start screening your calls." She attempted a laugh, but he knew her too damned well. The jocular note was entirely false. "I love you, Jake, and I always will; but I really just want you to let this go."
"This … or you?"
"Our past. I want you to move on."
"Where am I supposed to move on to? Huh?" He felt tears sting his eyes. He'd been caught in an impossible triangle with his younger self and his one-time wife for five months now, and he wasn't even treading water. He was sinking fast. He guessed that Hope could read that in him; no wonder she was getting more forceful.
"You should go back to the main base in Wyoming."
"And if Scott returns? I can't be in the same place as he is, not if I don't want to obliterate us." He laughed mirthlessly. "You of all people know that I can't occupy the same space and time as my younger self. The universe just isn't going to tolerate that kind of displacement."
"Scott and I are staying here at Warren Air Force Base indefinitely," she told him. "Working with the Joint Alien Task Force. So it's safe for you to go back, and you should. Make a life for yourself with your own people." How easily she dispensed her advice, how simple she made it all sound.
"Are you happy?" he asked, a stab of pain digging into his chest.
She hesitated, blew out a sigh. "How do you want me to answer that?"
"I want to know it was worth it, everything I gave up. Everything I've lost with you. I need to know that you're happy with him. …" He paused. "And that he's happy."
"You remember what we shared in your past," she admitted in a thick voice. "You already know what it's like."
"Oh, gods," he half moaned, shaking his head. "Look, I gotta go."
"Jake, please—"
He cut her off, positioning his finger over the end button. "Gotta … go," he repeated, realizing that what he needed was to get shit faced and lose himself in a bottle. But he didn't tell her that. "You take care, sweetheart," he said in a choked voice, and quickly disconnected the line.
Some guys just ought to know when to stay down. When the jaw took a certain kind of hit, when the guy clubbing him had all the advantage, well, hell, that was the time you should just play possum. Of course Jake Tierny wasn't one of those guys, and Shelby would have been disappointed if he had been. Still, she winced watching him flip backward over the pool table, his long, lean legs buckling over his head.
"Hey, hey," she tried to intervene, peering across the table at her fallen friend. "Enough's enough, no?" She looked up at the red-faced hitter, who tossed her a glare, then revved his fist up once again, ready to deliver another blow.
"He had it coming, okay? He brought this shit down."
"I'm sure that's true." She pressed her eyes closed, not wanting to see yet another fist pummel into Tierny's already bruised face. "But surely a guy's paid his price after, oh, an hour's bout or so?"
"An hour!" The jerk straddled his awkwardly crumpled opponent on the far side of the pool table. "Hell, we ain't been at this but five minutes."
A gathered group of onlookers parted for her, an assortment of potbellied men with alcohol-reddened faces who'd been cheering the whole thing on. A few of the fools even hung their heads shamefully. "Sorry, ma'am," one of them muttered, cigarette dangling from his lower lip.
She squeezed through the pack, rolling her eyes in disgust at the lot of them. Men could behave like such overgrown children when it came to their egos and territory. She stepped carefully past a splintered pool stick, tempted to pinch her nostrils shut. The nauseating scent of aggression permeated the bar, nastying up the place with its twin odors of sour alcohol and day-old sweat.
She dropped to the floor, squatting beside Jake. "What have we here?" She chuckled, balancing her hands on both knees as she bent closer to examine Jake's injuries. Her patient squinted up at her, lifting a broken beer bottle in a toast. Then all of a sudden Shelby was being airlifted, Jake's assailant having slid his pair of beefy hands beneath her armpits. She flailed with her sandals, one of them flying like a dagger at the far wall, clattering as it bounced off the vinyl-paneled surface.
"You. Let. Me. Go!" She writhed her hips, bicycling her legs until she finally managed to kick her attacker. He dropped her with a painful thud onto the cement floor of the pool hall, climbing past her to get at Jake.
Huffing like he'd just run five miles, the human took advantage of Tierny's prone, drunken position. He snatched Jake's broken beer bottle right out of his hand, drawing instant blood with a slice to Jake's forehead.
Shelby had truly, finally, and completely had enough.
She grabbed the brown bottle out of the attacking redneck's hand, gesturing toward him with its sharp edge. "Do that again, and you'll lose half that pretty face of yours. Okay? This is just ridiculous, so stop it already."
"He came in here looking for a man. You don't come in our bar, in our town, pulling shit like that." His overbite seemed to get worse, his mouth turning down at its edges until bloody spittle shot toward her. "It just don't go over, not around here."
Shelby thought fast. "He's looking for his missing twin brother." She worked her face into a mask of semi grief, weaving her hands together in front of her chest as if she might break into prayer at any moment. "Gone so many months now. So very many." She shook her head wistfully, raking her eyes over Jake meaningfully. "It's terrible when someone you care about vanishes without a word."
The attacker tugged his T-shirt down over a beer belly that protruded like a swollen upper lip. "I don't care who the hell he's looking for, not after what he called me. Y'all heard it." Thrusting his chest out and preening like a flkiisii, the fool gestured at his pals, who'd closed a small perimeter around her and Jake.
Uh-oh. Warning bells chimed like midday mess call inside her mind.
"Yeah? What did that boy say, now?"
"Called me. Something I can't repeat, using that funny language of his." The surly redneck pointed his forefinger at her, wielding it like the stubby barrel of a sawed-off shotgun. "Couldn't pronounce it."
"Called him a slav'nrksai." Jake struggled to sit up, temporarily bobbing out of his drunken haze.
Just freaking brilliant. Here the guy was lost in South Texas, in some after-hours honky-tonk, calling this dude by a particularly obscene Refarian expletive. Perfect. Perfectly perfect.
"Jakob Tierny," she announced in her loudest, most annoyed voice. "You don't have a fuck's clue what you're doing, now, do ya, boy?"
Closing one drunken, long-lashed green eye, Jake stared up at her with the other, wrestling to untangle his legs. "I'm all right." His voice was a slur.
"Yeah—and that's why I told you that you needed a guide here in Texas." She gestured at his assailant, who looked ready to pounce on Jake again without the slightest provocation. "I did warn you about needing some qualified help."
More than four months had passed since last December, when Jake had hauled ass out of their compound—without her offered guidance. And, man, had she ever offered it, practically insisting that he cart her along with him on this crazy-assed odyssey of his. But the stubborn fool had snuck off base in the middle of the night, leaving her with a packed bag—and a few shattered fantasies about what might have happened between them on the open road. She'd real
ized it wasn't personal, not for a loner like Tierny, and finally managed to put the whole dang thing out of her mind.
Besides, from the look of things right now, he hadn't stopped grieving the loss of Hope Harper, not for one day since his hasty departure. He might have come down this way with the thinly veiled excuse that he was searching for the real Jake Tierny, in order to stop him from killing Hope a second time, but it was more than obvious that he was lost in a haze of drunken grief. He couldn't be with Hope, so chasing Tierny was obviously the next best thing.
Knowing that Jake was still in love with Hope had made it obvious she should just forget him completely. That was, until their commander had asked her to go after him. She'd do anything her king requested, including following Tierny into the deepest bowels of Texas, and so she complied. Her mandate was to bring Jake back to their camp, and now she was here to follow through. She'd die before disobeying Jared Bennett. And she might die, actually, right here in this hellhole of a dive, if she couldn't disentangle Tierny from Redneck Man in five seconds flat. In fact, it sure looked like dying was the major part of Jake's plan.
"So, Bruiser, you drive a truck?" she called over her shoulder, lifting her shirtsleeve to Jake's bloodied cheek. "You freak," she added under her breath, scowling down at her crumpled comrade. "Told you. Told you not to try this alone."
Jake laughed up at her, blood gurgling from between his swollen and bruised lips.
She blotted at his mouth with her sleeve. "This ain't funny. You're in a shit storm now 'cause you didn't listen."
"You're that pretty little medic with a southern accent," he announced wondrously, both eyes rolling back in his head.
She just clucked her tongue. "That I am, boy. That I am."
"He's about to kick my freaking ass." He managed to focus his gaze again, leveling her with his startlingly beautiful green eyes.
"He's already done that, but I'm getting you out of here before he finishes the job."
With a one-eyed squint Jake studied his human opponent. "I'm not done with him yet."
"Jakob," Shelby said with an intense, meaningful glare, "say you're sorry. Just go on, now."
"All right." Jake wrestled to sit up straight, his legs finding a semblance of the floor, his back pressed up against the wall. "I never called anyone a slav'nrksai"—he kicked Redneck Guy in the shin—"especially not your mother. I don't need that word for someone like your mama."
Shelby barely heard the roar before she saw the pale human's fist rip into Jake's jaw like a ball-peen hammer bludgeoning a melon. "Oh, no." She ducked out of the way at the very last minute.
Some aliens just never learned, especially the green-eyed, wickedly handsome kind.
Jake's head cracked back against the wall, and hard, but not before she managed to half whisper, "Lieutenant, good thing I came after your ass."
"Holy hell, that hurts." Jake moaned, ducking away from the medic's efforts at working on his bruises. His first thought was that he hadn't managed to get himself killed in that bar, not like he'd wanted to after that pointless call with Hope. Moaning, he tried to force her from his thoughts, glancing about him in an effort to determine where he'd passed out.
Obviously, he'd slept the damn brawl off, but somehow—some way—he seemed to have wound up in a motel room. Not his own room, in the center of what passed for a town around here, but one off a local highway. He could tell that much because of the occasional sounds of trucks and other vehicles busting past their thin door, the way it rattled with the roadside vibrations. Somewhere else around here he had his own room, a dingy bit of a place where he'd been keeping his pack and measly belongings while he trailed the real Jake Tierny around half of Texas.
"Holy hell?" Shelby repeated, bending over him until her long blonde hair tickled his throat. "You done become a real Texan, boy. Haven't you?"
Jake growled up at her, ducking away from the damp cloth she was working over his bruises, and spit at her in low Refarian. If the dainty little medic was going to accuse him of going native, well, by All, he'd fight her fair. He was no more Texan than she was, what with that pretty little accent of hers, fake through and through.
The both of them had been raised on a planet far, far away—so far away that they'd learned English in their own separate manners. Shelby Tyler had apparently done so right here in Texas a few years back. Jake, on the other hand, had learned the language on the endless transport from Refaria to Earth, the computerized dialect and linguistic files training him. He'd always prided himself on his accentless English, that it could belong only in the United States—not Great Britain or elsewhere on the planet. He and his fellow aliens hadn't made their home in London or Sydney, and his bland accent reflected that fact.
But not Shelby; no, her version of English, from the very first time he'd met up with her five months ago on the base back in Wyoming, had been heavily infused with a southern accent. Quite Texan, he'd later realized as they kept talking—and that fact had been confirmed once he'd ventured down to this part of the United States. Hers was an authentic drawl bought by time in the trenches. His questions as to how, precisely, she'd earned that time, well, he figured they'd be answered eventually. She'd told him vaguely that she had been posted to their Texas facility prior to its decimation by their enemies—and while that explained some aspects of her acquired Texan nature, it hardly explained it all. This woman had passed plenty of time among the locals, not something any of the soldiers at the Texas facility would or should have ever done.
"Who are you, Shelby Tyler?" he asked softly, staring up into her clear blue eyes, finally letting her blot at his bruised jaw without ducking away. For a long moment she seemed arrested by his question, staring back at him wordlessly, hand frozen midair.
"You know exactly who I am." Her words were careful, precise. No more Texas accent, not this time.
"I don't know meshdki about you, Medic Tyler. So start talking."
"And if I don't?"
He propped his head along one elbow, giving her a smile. He hoped it looked wicked, seductive, even though he felt too battered at the moment to really mean it. "Well, I'll have to extract that information."
"Don't even try and go that devilish, charming route with me, Lieutenant. Seen it all from you before."
He narrowed his eyes, studying the pretty blonde medic In their few interactions he had no memory of having been either devilish or charming. Maybe there was something between them that he couldn't recall?
"Say what you mean, Shelby Tyler."
She removed the damp cloth from his face, making a great show of folding it first in half, then over again. "I know all your moves, sir, that's what I'm saying. Gone a few rounds with you down in the medical center and come out on the … well, the winning side, I'd say. You'd say different, no doubt."
"Are you talking about when you stitched up my belly?" He remembered how she'd tended him after his fight with the Antousians months back.
"Not your belly. Good lord, more than that. I mean when I was your night nurse, sir. Took care of you after your legs were shot out from under you at Warren."
Jake's eyes slid shut. "Oh. Him."
"Yeah, him—your younger self, that's who."
"You're talking about Scott Dillon. He's the one you tended to after Warren, not me." He shifted on the mattress, fighting a wave of nausea. "I'm not him, and I keep telling all of you that." After all, Hope certainly knows that's true, he wanted to add.
Shelby sidled closer, wedging her hip right up against his as she leaned down over him. "Um, then, who are you, sir? I mean, really? You're him, come back from ten years in the future; of course you are."
Jake turned away from her, putting his face to the wall. "Go away, Shelby Tyler." He groaned, working a hand at his temple; it throbbed with a hangover from last night's drinking and brawl. "Honestly, just get away while you still can."
"You denying it?" She pressed her face into the small space between the wall and his body. He couldn't avoid h
er, not like this—especially not with her wide blue eyes peering right into his own so openly.
He burrowed his face into the flimsy pillow. "You took care of that knife wound of mine, end of story. Now, go away."
"Our king charged me with a duty—to bring you back with me to Wyoming."
He had to hand it to the woman: She was persistent if nothing else. "Tell him I wasn't willing."
"I can't do that, now, can I? We're talking about Commander Bennett. Imagine me reporting something like that back to our king? No way, no how. You're coming, too."
Jake rolled onto his back, shoving Shelby back across the bed. "Look, Nurse Tyler, clearly there are a few things you don't understand right now. One"—he raised his index finger—"I'm not Scott Dillon, not anymore. I don't have his body, or the exact memories your Lieutenant Dillon has … or that his wife does, either." Jake battled a spasm of intense, choking pain for a moment.
"And two?" Shelby prompted, blue eyes alert and waiting.
"Two, is that my business down here isn't finished. I have to find Jake Tierny, the one who murdered Hope in the future, and stop him from killing her again—in this timeline."
She nodded thoughtfully, but still he knew that some kind of snappy retort would be forthcoming. The only surprise was that it took about fifteen seconds, not two. "So, sir, you were what? Just renting that body back in Wyoming? The one that still belongs to Scott Dillon? That wasn't you?"
He flopped back against the pillow, staring at the ceiling. "Where is this going?"
"I'm just trying to be clear on why you won't go by your proper name, that's all, sir."
Jake bolted upright in bed, clasping Shelby's arm tightly. His fury always simmered just beneath the surface, ever since the day of Hope's murder at the hands of the real Jake Tierny. "I died when I took his body," he snarled. "Don't ever ask about it again. Do you understand?"
She met his steely gaze with an unwavering, purposed one of her own. Never flinching, never backing down. "Understood, sir."
"And don't call me sir. Not for the reasons you're doing it."
Parallel Desire Page 2