Roseanne
We spend a blissful week acting like newlyweds. She goes to work, and I putter around the house, putting our meager belongings away, going to the store every five minutes for mundane things like trash cans and spatulas, the sort of stuff that doesn't seem important until you discover it's missing.
I've also tried to time travel a bit, without success. I know Lisa doesn't want me to—she's too worried about what happened to her grandmother. Every night she comes up with some new way to find Eleanor's address: she tells me we should check my dad's will, go to the state department, search my parents' computer. But it seems like it would be so much easier if I could just go back and find Lily myself, and it's frustrating when I come up empty, time and time again.
For the most part though, we exist in a happy little bubble, and it's easy enough to shrug off my fears. We cook together, shop together, sitout on a picnic blanket under the stars each night to eat our dinner. We could have gotten plastic chairs until the real dining chairs arrive, but I sort of like our little tradition. I like that there is no TV, that we aren't on our phones, that I get her full attention and she gets mine. And then we go to bed, where we do a lot of things, but we don't have sex.
Which is getting more difficult to deal with by the day.
It shouldn't be. We should be fine just as we are. But I miss it, desperately...not with Jaehyun, but with Lisa. I miss something I don't even remember having and she does too. Each night I see the toll her restraint takes, the way her teeth clench as she tries not to head in directions we can't go.
We are in bed and she is above me, separated only by the paper-thin fabric of my boy shorts, and she's got her eyes squeezed shut, wanting the feeling of being pressed against me and tortured by it all the same.
"Maybe we should," I whisper. I'm not sure if it's logic or desperation speaking.
Her eyes open, a hazy brown, with that drugged look they get when she's in this exact position. "What?" she says.
"Maybe we should just do it," I whisper. "We have no idea what will happen this time and I'm on the pill. So maybe we should."
She is hard as steel against me the second the words emerge, and then a sort of panic comes over her face. "God, Roseanne," she groans, pushing harder against the fabric, burying her face into my shoulder. "Do not say that to me right now." Her leg swings off me, and in a flash she's gone, nothing but a blur walking straight out the bedroom door.
I guess my timing could have been better, but I don't feel like it was a mistake. I'm no longer sure what I believe in, but I know being with Lisa makes me happier than anything in my life ever has, and every step we've taken together has only improved things. It's just hard to imagine sex would be any different. It's hard to imagine something so good could end up going bad.
Lisa returns a minute later, and lies down beside me. "I'm sorry I left like that."
"Why did you?"
She laughs unhappily and pushes her bangs off her forehead. "Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to stop every time? Suggesting it might be okay at that moment, when my defenses are down...could have been disastrous. I had to get out of here because it was the only way to make sure I didn't lose it entirely. I mean, what were you thinking?"
"What I'm thinking is that we don't know everything," I reply quietly. "And that we are supposed to be together, and there is obviously something driving this. Fate or history or something else. Maybe it knows more than we do."
