Way Back

by Abbie Williams

  “I know,” he whispered. “I’ve never known anything more.”

  Much later, wrapped around each other in the shelter of two heavy blankets positioned near the scarlet glow of the embers, he murmured, “I miss the strangest things. Like Twinkies. You know I don’t even like the stupid things and yet I find myself craving one.”

  “Chili fries,” I said, and giggled as he groaned. “Like your Aunt Julie made at The Spoke.”

  “Hell yes, and what about Chinese takeout…”

  “Mmm. Egg rolls, fried shrimp….oh God, chocolate-covered peanuts…”

  “You do love those. You had them in our coffee canister, instead of coffee.”

  “Pizza,” I said, giggling more, my cheek against his chest in this languid moment between bouts of lovemaking. “Maybe we could try to make one. Has pizza been invented yet?”

  Marshall laughed, burying the sound against the top of my head; I could almost pretend we were in our old queen-sized bed in our little apartment in Jalesville, once upon a long time ago, over a century into the future. He whispered, “Imagine the sound when you pop the top on a beer can.”

  “What about a toilet flushing?”

  “Or a radio.”

  “Car engines.”

  “My hands sometimes twitch to feel a steering wheel when I’m riding a horse.”

  “Mine too, that’s funny.”

  “I’ve dreamed I’m playing my drums, a couple of times.”

  “Oh, honey…”

  “It’s funny the stuff you practically forget you knew.”

  “Remember when we had sex in your dad’s basement while you were playing your old drum set?”

  “Of course. You didn’t think I’d forget that, did you?”

  “The cymbals kept pinging.”

  “You kept pinging,” Marshall teased, and we scuffled, the blanket on top of us sliding free and exposing my bare legs to the chilly air. He was quick to tuck it back around us, tenderly kissing my neck, using one hand to latch my right leg more securely around his hip. “Stay in here, angel, it’s cold out there.”

  “Only because you make me ping so hard,” I said as he shifted our positions, tucking me underneath him. Enfolded in his delicious heat, I snuggled closer.

  “Nothing brings me more pleasure,” he murmured, licking a teasing, ticklish path upward between my breasts. I could smell my scent all over him, just as his inundated my skin and hair and tongue. We’d sweat and come all over each other so many times in the past few hours, as the stars rotated above us, that I’d lost count. We hadn’t slept, too preoccupied with one another.

  “Are you hungry?” I worried, hearing his stomach growl, pressing my palm there.

  The teasing expression on his face dissipated. “Yes, but the sight of your face is all the sustenance I need.” He used his index finger to outline my lips, then traced a soft path down my neck and a gentle circle around each nipple, at last resting his palm over my heartbeat. His voice was a husky murmur. “And this. Feeling you beside me, the warm softness of you, seeing the love in your eyes. I don’t know how I’ve gone on day to day without that.”

  Our bare limbs were intertwined; Marshall had come in me probably a dozen times already. The flesh between my legs was decidedly tender but still I craved the feeling of him inside me again, where I could hold him as close as humanly possible and know for those moments we could not be forced apart.

  “I’ve thought so many times about the first night I ever touched you,” he whispered, curling his fingers through mine and bringing my knuckles to his lips. “August eleventh, 2013, the most incredible night of my life, to that point. I will never forget the perfect beauty of that, when you let me touch you for the first time. Ruthie, I have thought of nothing but you, for so long…”

  “I shouldn’t have left,” I whispered, and tears blurred my vision. It struck me that I hadn’t apologized for the winter afternoon I’d fled our apartment. I cupped his face with my free hand and finally said, “I know I hurt you in so many ways and I am so sorry. I know you were just worried about me.”

  His eyes were wet with tears as he studied me. “I would lie awake and think of what I would say to you if I had the power to rewind time. How I would beg your forgiveness. What I would feel to have you back in my arms. I was so jealous, and so stupid. I let my anger get the best of me…can you forgive me?” His throat was raw with emotion.

  “Marshall Augustus,” I whispered. I traced my thumb over his cheekbone, caressing the contours of his face as I had always done. “I forgave you a long time ago. We’re together again and it’s all that matters.”

  He held me close to his heart.

  I confessed, “I’m scared to sleep, for fear when I wake up this will have been nothing more than a dream. I’ve dreamed of you so many times.”

  He brought his forehead to mine, our eyes an inch apart. “I will never let you go again. Not ever. This I vow.”

  My thighs curved again around him. “I was so scared. That was my worst fear, that I wouldn’t see you again.”

  He gently tongued my lips, sinking deeper into my body as I moaned and arched upward. He whispered, “I have begged all the powers that be for you to be returned to me, angel, begged all the stars in the sky, prayed every prayer I’ve ever known, day and evening and night…”

  I dug my fingers in his hair. “I need you, I need you so much…”

  His expression was almost stern with the passionate intensity of what our love created – the strength and joy of what bound us.

  “You are mine,” he said intently, between open-mouthed kisses. “You have always been mine, Ruthann.”

  “Yes,” I breathed, clinging with arms and legs as he surged fully inside. “Yes. And you are mine…I love you…”

  He took me once again beyond any words, to the sweet, hot, sacred place I knew only because of him. The place that rose up and swirled about us, wrapped us in our own private world, let us linger there for long, trembling moments, the place that heard my gasping moans and his husky, throaty cries of release, and where we at last sank together and were allowed a moment’s respite from the outside world. And where our souls clung just as intently as our bodies, at long last reunited.

  Axton and Ranger had returned with the morning light. Marsh and I slept for a few hours before dawn, braided together; I woke to the sight of a bleak, cloudy sky, safe and warm against Marshall’s hairy chest. Axton was crouched with his back to us, tending the fire. As I stirred, Marshall opened one eye and whispered, “Morning, darlin’.”

  “Morning,” I whispered, kissing his neck, doubly grateful for the heavy blanket, as I was completely naked.

  Axton murmured, “Good morning, you two.”

  Marshall, also naked, was experiencing what we’d always called the ‘alarm cock,’ stiff as a tree trunk beneath the shelter of the blanket. His lips curved with a half-grin and he smoothed a warm hand over my ass, squeezing lightly, acknowledging what he wanted us to do but what we most assuredly could not, at least just now. His scruff was at the point it was nearly a beard, a sexy, menacing, pirate-type beard.

  “We forgot to put our clothes back on,” Marsh groaned. “Axton, I hope you aren’t easily offended.”

  “I ain’t,” Axton said, still facing away, and to my relief I detected the slightest hint of amusement in his voice. “I’m sorry I can’t give you more privacy.”

  “Axton Douglas,” I reprimanded. “You don’t have to be sorry for a thing.” I paused. “What’s your middle name? I just realized I don’t know.”

  “It’s Ethan. You told me yours one time. Marie, right?”

  “That’s right. Well, Axton Ethan Douglas,” I said formally. “What are you cooking? It smells delicious.”

  “I shot a couple of prairie hens.” Ax dared to look over his shoulder. He was exhausted; there were dark smudges beneath his eyes but his familiar face broke into a smile. “I’ve never seen you look as beautiful as you do right now, Ruthie, and it makes me happ
y.”

  There were numerous ways this could have been taken out of context; after all, I lay naked and sleep-tousled in Marshall’s arms no more than a few feet away from Axton as he made this observation. But it was Ax, whose sincerity and ingenuousness could never be doubted; I knew he loved me and was truly glad to see me in a state of happiness. Marshall was also touched, I could tell even without a word. I lay sprawled over his chest beneath the blanket and he tucked loose hair behind my ears with both hands, just as Miles had once done, with the same adept tenderness. Tears splashed down my cheeks as I whispered, “Thank you. Both of you.”

  “And I agree, wholeheartedly,” Marsh said, his fingers lingering in my curls, brushing away my tears with his long thumbs.

  “We’ve got miles to travel before nightfall,” Axton said, turning back to the iron stakes braced over the fire, rotating the meat. “I thought it might be nice to have a hearty breakfast.”

  “You thought right,” I said. There were so many things I wanted to ask – so many things we needed to discover, and so many to fear. But under this pewter sunrise, a sky thick with clouds that appeared to have been shaded by heavy pencil strokes, tucked close to Marshall, I was limp with relief. I was well aware of the dangers all around us. Vole. Aemon Turnbull. And far worse, Fallon Yancy waited somewhere out there, stealthy as a predatory animal, one that stalked its victims to certain death.

  But just at this second my mind could hold no other emotions than love and gratitude. And determination. Marshall and I would figure out what was required of us here in the nineteenth century. We would ensure the safety of the Rawley family as best we could – surely that was why we’d been drawn to this time, to ensure their lineage continued onward. And even if Marshall and I couldn’t physically return to the future, I was still determined to get a message to my family and the Rawleys, a message they could find in the twenty-first century – they had to be made aware of Fallon. We had to find a way to reach them, even if we remained here.

  The way back, I thought, holding the promise of these words in my mind. If return is possible, if there is a way back, we’ll find it.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  In Between

  I KILLED MY MOTHER IN 1864.

  She was the first person I ever killed. She’d been fucking a hired hand in my father’s barn while my father was away fighting the Rebs and I slit her throat with my fishing knife, utilizing the darkness and plain surprise to my advantage. I was a few months from my eleventh year, slightly built for my age, and no one suspected I could use a knife so well. The hired hand, no older than a score or so, younger than Mother by a good decade, could not react fast enough. My blade slipped between his ribs and he fell back on top of Mother, but differently than he’d been on top of her earlier, while I’d spied from the haymow.

  Dredd never guessed the truth. I told him Mother was sick and died in her sleep. I’d buried her under the oak tree out beyond the house by the time Dredd woke that humid morning, a precursor to a sweltering July day. I wanted to tell him what I’d really done, how I’d killed two people without either of them uttering a sound, how I’d hauled their wilted bodies in the wheelbarrow in which our father hauled dead pigs, depositing them into the ground in one hole it had taken me almost until dawn to dig. How the pit was deep but not quite long enough, and the bodies made shapes like the letter C once I’d rolled them in it. How I’d said, Sleep tight, before I’d shoveled the earth back over them.

  But of course I wasn’t stupid enough to let the pride of my accomplishment override basic common sense. Instead, I told Dredd to make a wooden cross for Mother. With the War on, no one made a fuss over one more grave. No one would ever know two bodies filled it, unless I allowed them to know. Fannie Rawley did not discover Mother was dead until she rode over in the flatbed wagon, along with Grant and Miles, to visit, the Wednesday next.

  She said, For the love of all that’s holy, why did you not ride to us with the news, Fallon? You poor boys. Oh, you poor little boys. And she forced us back to the Rawleys’ homestead with her for the remainder of that summer.

  Ma was sick, Dredd kept saying. She was fevered.

  Dredd believed everything I ever told him.

  The first time I leaped it was utterly inadvertent, and I woke with the skin peeling from my face under the blazing midmorning sun. I leaped only a week into the future that time, though it took time to make sense of where I was. Of when I was. The why of it I did not attempt to understand, at least not back then.

  It’s because you’re special, was my first thought. More capable, more intelligent, more powerful than others.

  I had tried for over a decade to manage my leaps, all without success. At times I was only allowed a few minutes before being whisked back to the past. The most I’d been allowed was a full three days in Chicago in 2013, which I used to my extreme advantage. I kept words and numbers and facts catalogued in my mind, the only storage facility I trusted. I made it my sole purpose in life to ensure the Yancy family continued to increase its wealth and subsequent power. I was determined we would never again know the humiliation we’d faced after my father’s public disgrace in 1868.

  But still, I could not leap if I tried to leap, which aggravated me into murderous states of rage. The leaping happened spontaneously and there was no pattern other than that I seemed drawn to the early decades of the twenty-first century. The first time I’d leaped so far through time I’d gaped like a halfwit, overwhelmed by the dazzle of a world far removed from the nineteenth century in which I’d been raised in near-poverty. I would do anything, I understood, to remain in the twenty-first century indeterminately. But it seemed my true purpose was to work at securing my family’s holdings in the place I returned faithfully after every leap, the timeline to which I’d been born in 1853, and where I spent most of my days.

  And I was wildly successful. I learned in my leaps of railroad stocks, gold bonds, silver bonds. Land. Real estate. Stock market dabbling. I retained tidbits from each and every leap, returning with new information every time, aided in part by my descendants. Derrick Yancy was T.K.’s only child. I officially met him in 1993, when I founded Capital Overland as ‘Franklin Yancy.’ Derrick was nine years old then and I was already well-acquainted with his father, T.K., who had learned quickly to trust me, mainly because I knew everything about him and everything which had led to his vast fortune. Together we’d created Franklin, passing him off as an older brother, a son T.K. had fathered before his first marriage. To Derrick I was like a magician, appearing intermittently and at a variety of ages, a man his own father called ‘son.’

  Through T.K., I formed a remote business relationship with Ronald Turnbull; the alliance between our families was old and valuable. Very occasionally I fucked Ron’s whore wife, Christina, a woman addicted to the thrill of power, which I could appreciate. Despite her willingness to spread her skilled legs I was not anxious to see her again, as during my last visit I had disappeared from her private bathroom, still reeking of her perfume; explaining this would be an annoyance, and would require precision. Though she knew everything her husband did, illegal or otherwise, Christina had never guessed the truth about my abilities and I meant to keep it that way. It became quickly obvious why I’d been dragged from the luxury of her downtown condo and deposited back into the nineteenth century.

  Dredd’s cunt wife had gone missing, and though I despised the sharp-eyed bitch, Patricia Biddeford remained necessary to my plans, in that her presence was required in order to produce an heir. Dredd’s purpose was linked to this, of course; he would father this heir and continue the family line. Retrieving Dredd’s wife involved a journey to Howardsville – and how I fucking hated being reduced to travel by horseback when I carried the knowledge of cars and jets – even so, I had never dared passage in an aircraft, uncertain whether I would survive an inadvertent leap while my body was suspended miles above the earth.

  And as it turned out, this latest leap had been my last since the woman
named Ruthann Rawley, a woman whose surname I’d understood to be Davis, fractured my arm in my passenger car. If she had been lying about knowing my time of death, she bore impressive skills; I could not determine if the statement was false, an unplanned act of desperation, or not – she had caught me off guard, a singular rarity. Something in her eyes led me to believe she was serious, and I trusted my own instincts above all else. I recognized she was both misplaced in time and had information I required – which was why I’d let her live.

  But she’s dead now. The moment you force answers from her, she’s fucking dead, I reassured myself, up and pacing for the countless time, keeping my broken arm close to my ribs. It hurt, but I’d borne worse injury; the last man who’d physically harmed me later died in agony, at my hands. Ruthann meant to kill me that night; the intent was unmistakable in her eyes, and it was this act which sent me to Between.

  Several times my leaps led to Between and each of those times occurred when my life was endangered. Between was the name I’d assigned it, a place perhaps best likened to a Catholic’s idea of purgatory, as time seemed not to exist in any form here, a hollow space cloaked in vague shadows. It was like trying to see objects through a fogged window; the more closely I looked, the denser the murk. Sounds were muffled as though plugs dammed up my ears, even that of my own voice. Indeed, all my senses were muted in Between.

  When I returned from what seemed mere minutes in Between, weeks or even months might have passed in the real world – the world outside Between, that is, as I had no idea where Between actually existed. I could walk for miles here and go nowhere; my footfalls made no sound. I had never encountered another person, nor as much as another object. It seemed to be a holding place and I disliked admitting to any weakness – but Between was a disarming void, a prison of sorts. And yet, it offered protection. While in Between, I planned. I paced and I planned, and minutes would tick past on the stopwatch within my head. Departure was unfailingly abrupt and I was anticipating departure at any second.