Page 45 of Parallel

“We’d be happy to drink with you instead,” the guy closest to me says, his tongue sweeping his upper lip as his eyes slide over me. His hand shoots out to pull me by the belt of my dress, and suddenly Nick is between us, gripping the guy’s wrist.

“Remove your hand,” he growls.

I blink in surprise. Nick sounds pissed. And possessive. It’s a new side of him. I can’t claim to dislike it.

The guy takes one look at Nick and releases my belt. “Sorry, mate. Didn’t know she was with you.”

“Well, now you know,” Nick snaps, “so keep your fucking hands to yourself.”

The girl jumps off her barstool, but before I can lunge forward to grab her, one of the band members does it for me. “Let’s at least get a picture,” he says, wrapping an arm around her waist and raising his phone.

For a second, panic flashes across her face, and then she actually ducks her head to avoid being in the shot. “I don’t like having my picture taken,” she says, darting away.

I step around them and cut her off, grabbing her arm, not that it will do any good if she decides to disappear in midair. Her eyes raise to mine. “I can’t help you,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. I really can’t.”

“Please,” I plead. “You don’t have to do anything. We just need someone to explain this.”

Nick comes up behind me, pulling me to his chest and wrapping his hand around my hip. Proprietary, the way I remember from so many of those dreams. The gesture would have shocked me a few days ago, but now it just feels right. All the more reason to figure this out as soon as humanly possible. “Please,” he says. “We’re desperate.”

Her face softens when she looks up at him, in a way it did not for me. She sighs heavily. “I’ll tell you what I can.”

The bar is no place for a delinquent teenager, but neither is the back of Nick’s Jeep, so we walk to a diner across the street, where, under the bright lights, she suddenly looks painfully young, and fragile.

We slide into a red vinyl booth and Nick hands her a menu. “Order something,” he says. “If you’ve been drinking, you need food.”

She asks the waitress for a cheeseburger and a Coke. Despite the outfit and the fact that we just caught her doing shots with a rock band in the back of a seedy bar, she is polite as she gives her order, and there’s an air of privilege about her somehow. I’m guessing she’s a trust-fund kid, the kind with wealthy parents who’ve handed over the child-rearing to their staff.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

There’s a split-second of hesitation. “Rose.”

She’s lying, but it hardly matters. “And how old are you really?”

“Sixteen.”

Another lie, but I’m not sure that really matters either. “What on earth were you thinking tonight?” I ask. I know I shouldn’t be wasting precious seconds lecturing this girl, but I can’t stand the idea of her putting herself in a situation like tonight’s. “Do you have any idea how poorly things could have gone if you’d left with those guys?”

She smirks. “You watched me disappear. An entire army of rock stars couldn’t do anything I didn’t want them to do.”

Nick flinches at the suggestion that she might be a willing party to whatever an army of rock stars want to do. “Do your parents know where you are?” he demands.

She laughs to herself, but the sound is not a happy one. “Sort of.”

“What does sort of mean?”

She looks away. “It means my father knows he can’t do anything to stop me and my mother is dead, so if there’s a heaven, she’s watching my antics from there.”

“Dead?” I whisper, my stomach dropping. “But you’re so…young.”

“A lot of us die,” she replies, carefully aligning her flatware and avoiding my gaze. “There are so many ways a human can die, but for a time traveler, there are twice as many.”

I think, fleetingly, of Dr. Grosbaum. I assumed he was lying to himself about his wife’s disappearance, but what if he wasn’t? How awful would it be to have the love of your life disappear somewhere, leaving you behind, wondering what happened?

“So you’re in this alone,” I say. “With the time traveling.”

“My younger sister can do it, but she was born early and has some…problems. It’s too great a risk.”

“So how do you do it?” I ask.