Page 28 of Intersect

I roll my eyes. “Wished ill upon is a ridiculously broad term. I’m guessing I wished ill upon plenty.”

“In ways that led to their deaths?” he asks with a cheeky grin and I swat him with the folder I got from Admissions.

“You’re a terrible human being.”

His smile fades. “Speaking of terrible human beings, have you heard from Jeff?”

I wish he hadn’t brought it up. Discussing Jeff is definitely not how I want to spend the only time I’ll be with Nick until this evening. “He showed up at Caroline’s this morning on his way out of town. Building security finally asked him to leave.”

His jaw grinds. I know he hates the idea of me being confronted by Jeff without him, but the alternative—me with him—is so much worse. Jeff would love to find someone to blame for what’s gone wrong. “When are you picking up your stuff?” he asks with a heavy sigh.

“Tomorrow,” I reply. “He has a meeting in Harrisonburg every Wednesday, so I know he won’t be home.”

His frown deepens. “Wait til I get off work and I’ll go with you. I don’t want you over there without someone, and besides, you’ll need help carrying stuff, right?”

I shake my head. “I don’t think I will and the absolute last thing I need is for him to see you involved in any way. Besides,” I add with a grin, “at least he doesn’t sit around accusing me of killing children.”

He gently pushes me to my back, looking around before he leans down and bites my lower lip. “That’s for comparing me unfavorably to Jeff. And I’m joking about the kid thing, but have you given anymore thought to it?”

“Killing a child?”

He laughs. “No. Time travel. Just try it.”

I squint up at him in the sunlight. “Kiss me again nicely and I’ll consider it.”

I hear his small hum of satisfaction as he leans back to me, pressing his sun-warmed mouth to mine, which opens and begs for him to sink farther, do more. “Please try,” he whispers.

He pulls away, leaving my body thrumming with a desire to skip this time-travel nonsense and yank him back to me. Except if I skip it, we probably have no future. “I have no idea how.”

“Rose said something about fastening on a memory, right? So try that. Lock onto a memory and see if you can move toward it.”

I desperately wish he’d drop it. I probably won’t succeed, and if I do, there’s so much that could go wrong. “What if I wind up somewhere naked?”

“Good point,” he says, his thumb brushing my lip. “Go somewhere you can land naked safely. Like the dock last weekend.”

The sun flickers through the trees overhead and his hair glints gold, his eyes a dusky blue I could never replicate. There are moments, like this one, where I wonder if he can even be real. “Landing on your dock naked seems like the most dangerous thing I could do.”

His mouth curves upward. “True. I promise to behave,” he says with so little sincerity that I’m chuckling as I shut my eyes.

“Fine. If I succeed, do you have any special requests? I was going to offer to go meet you back in the treehouse until I realized how creepy it would be, given that I’m now 28.”

His eyes light up. “I assure you, 16-year-old me would be willing to overlook that fact,” he says. “But if it’s off the table, go buy stock in Apple and Microsoft.”

I arch a brow. “That seems slightly…I don’t know…unethical?”

“Please don’t let your ethics get in the way of us owning a Caribbean island once it’s all figured out,” he says. “But I’d rather just find you on my dock. Naked is preferable. That bikini was easy to remove, so that’s also an acceptable option.”

“Your erection is making it hard for me to think about time travel,” I reply.

He laughs. “I’m not thinking about time travel so much at the moment either.”

I picture that weekend anyway. It feels safe here, with him beside me. I picture him shirtless, those navy swim trunks hanging low. I picture the perfection of his stomach, the small trail of hair just below his belly button that I wanted to trace with my tongue.

My eyes open. He’s watching my face, his eyes dark with want. “It’s not working,” I tell him.

“What were you just picturing?” he asks. He knows. Maybe not the specifics but I can tell just by the look on his face, the twitch of his lips, that he knows where my mind went.

“You in your bathing suit. You have this tiny little trail of hair right here,” I reply, running my finger just above his belt. “I was imagining tracing it. With my tongue.”