The Time Traveler's Boyfriend (2 page)

I wince. This is a little game Adam has been playing very recently called You Don’t Really Want to Live
With Me. He takes it very seriously. It’s all part of larger game called You Don’t Really Want to Marry Me. I’m not very fond of this game.

Here’s the deal with me and Adam: we’ve been dating over a year. Granted, that’s not a huge amount of time. But I’m not twenty years old here. I’m thirty-six and, as he noted, I’ve got a birthday coming up in a few months. If I had a baby now, I’d already be advanced maternal age. And I’m not having a baby now. I’m not even married. I’m not even
engaged
.

Adam is even older than I am. He’s thirty-eight. And he’s not a
young
thirty-eight, either. I like to think I could pass for thirty or even younger, but Adam can’t. He looks thirty-eight. Hell, he looks forty, even forty-five, easy. Not because he’s fat or out of shape or balding, because he isn’t any of those things. He’s slim and muscular in his upper body, and he’s got all his hair, but he’s got almost as much gray in his hair as he’s got brown, and he’s got more lines on his face than he ought to, especially around his eyes. Not that it’s a bad thing in terms of his looks. He’s one of those guys like Sean Connery who is just going to get more attractive as he gets older. When he’s seventy, he’s probably going to have hot young forty-year-olds chasing him down, while I’ll be a little old lady with a hump on my back.

His looks initially seemed like a sign of maturity to me, a sign that he was the sort of guy who was ready for a commitment. And we fit so well together, me and Adam. More than I thought we would when I first met him at a mutual friend’s dinner party. He treated me like a queen, and I mistakenly got the idea in my head that if I brought up marriage, he’d jump at the idea (figuratively). But he didn’t. He got quiet, just like every other freaking guy did. And that’s why he fights me every time I want to wash a goddamn plate.

And it stinks because Adam is the first guy that I’ve really seen myself growing old with. I can just see us at seventy years old, me still bringing him my futuristic computer when I’ve got a virus and he needs to get rid of it. And then I fix the buttons on his shirt with one of my arthritic hands, and bat away the hot young forty-year-olds with the other.

“I wouldn’t hate living with you,” I insist, for what feels like the trillionth time. “I’m practically living here already. Why don’t we make it official so I don’t have to feel like a nomad?”

He raises his eyebrows at me. “You feel like a nomad?”

“I’m carrying around panties in my purse, Adam,” I say. I’m half tempted to dig them out and shake them in his face. “You think I enjoy that?”

“I gave you a drawer to use,” he mumbles, his eyes lowered.

Yes, he gave me a drawer. One drawer. And he lets me keep a travel bottle of shampoo and one of conditioner in his shower, because I told him his combo shampoo plus conditioner makes my hair feel like straw. And he used to let me keep a toothbrush on his sink until he insisted that I start using his electric toothbrush (with my own head), explaining it was better for my teeth.

But I don’t want a freaking drawer or a toothbrush on his sink. I want a ring. Of course, I’m not going to say that to him now. We’ve had this conversation before and I know where it’s headed, and it’s not in the direction of the nearest jewelry store. There’s no point in pushing him when he’s clearly not ready. “I love you,” I say instead. “I just want to be with you.”

“I love you too, Claudia,” he says. “But …”

Adam leans forward in his wheelchair, rubbing his knees, looking really uncomfortable. He told me once before the reason why he had trouble settling down, but I can’t accept it. We’re
right
for each other. I don’t want to be one of those awful “ultimatum women” so I won’t do that to him. But how long am I supposed to wait patiently for him to be ready?

“Don’t be mad,” Adam pleads with me.

“I’m not,” I say. Well, I am. But I’m trying not to be. When I was in my twenties, I always pitied those women who made relationships all about pushing for commitment, yet here I am, close to doing it myself. It’s something I vowed I’d never do. And I won’t.

“Sit down on the couch,” Adam says. “I’ll go get you the foot massager and give you a back rub.”

The foot massager. It’s another thing Adam invented for me. It used to be a foot bath, but he rigged it up with mechanical brushes to give me an actual foot massage that’s better than anything I’ve ever experienced in a spa. He made it in less than a week, after I told him how much I love foot massages. Then he rubs my neck and back when my feet sit in the bath. His hands are so strong—he gives great massages that basically drain all the tension out of my body.

I just wish I had met him before The Bitch ruined him for good.

CHAPTER TWO

This is how I found out about The Bitch:

Adam and I had been going out for about three months. We were double dating with my friend Nancy and her husband Duke, who had worked with Adam for years and also apparently played poker with him every other Friday night. We were sitting at a restaurant while Nancy fretted over the new babysitter, checking her phone every two minutes to make sure she hadn’t missed an emergency call, and Duke kept telling her over and over again to calm down. At one point, Duke said to Adam, “Never have kids.” Adam laughed and Duke added, “I’m telling you, you’re probably lucky it took you so long to get over that girl.”

Adam’s eyes widened, but Duke didn’t elaborate and I pretended like I didn’t hear. It was still way too early in our relationship to reveal my jealous side.

But I’m only human. I couldn’t help but wonder: who was “that girl”?

Over the next several months, I’d keep hearing more and more tidbits about
that girl
, and each time, I tried to ignore it. But the more I heard, the more I realized how important
that girl
was in his life. “She was all Adam could talk about for probably a year, maybe longer,” his friend Drew told me. “He thought she was The One. He kept talking about inventing something for her that would convince her to come back to him, even though we kept telling him she was never coming back.” I got the sense that even as recently as a couple of years ago, he’d still been talking about her.

Her name was Jessica. Actually, I’m not sure if that was her real name, but I knew this really mean girl in high school named Jessica, so that’s what I’ve been calling her secretly in my head. Since I’ll surely never meet her, for all intents and purposes, it’s become her name. My Jessica had red curls, so I picture The Bitch as having long, red curls going down her back and perfect porcelain skin. In my head, she’s beautiful. And in real life, I’m pretty sure she was beautiful, too.

It was Adam’s older sister Kim, briefly in town from Akron, Ohio, where he grew up, who eventually spilled the dirt while the two of us were out having lunch together. It took two glasses of wine and about a dozen hints from me to get the whole story out of her.

“It was a few years after Adam got hurt,” she told me. “It was his first relationship after his injury, so he was really vulnerable, you know? He thought he was in love, that he’d found the girl of his dreams. He was completely insane over her. We were all pretty skeptical, to say the least.”

The girl of his dreams. Not exactly the kind of thing you want to hear about one of your boyfriend’s exes. “So what happened?”

“She dumped him,” Kim said. “Completely broke his heart. He was never the same after that. In a lot of ways.”

“Like what?”

“He’d always been pretty practical about relationships,” she said. “Very down to earth. But when it came to this girl, it was like he’d lost his freaking mind. He kept talking about how he was going to get her back, even though I told him she had no interest in coming back. It took years before he was even willing to date any other women.”

Kim saw the look on my face and blanched. “I shouldn’t have told you that,” she said. She glanced regretfully at her wine glass. “Adam made me swear I wouldn’t.”

“It’s okay,” I said, even though I had a huge lump in my throat.

“Don’t worry, Claudia,” she said, patting my hand. “He’s definitely over her by now. And he really likes you.”

Yes, he really likes me. But he isn’t “completely insane” over me. At least, I don’t think he is—if he were, I assume he’d want to marry me or at least live with me. Honestly, I don’t think any man has been “completely insane” over me in my entire life. I’m not even sure what that’s like. Obviously, I don’t have Jessica’s feminine wiles.

So here I am, over ten years later, trying to compete with a girl who has become, in his mind, the ideal of perfection. I’ve asked him about her, and he swears it’s not true, that he hates her, that she contributed to wrecking his life, but I can tell he still loves her. This Bitch broke his heart, but he’s still stuck on her.

How am I supposed to compete with that?

I can’t, that’s how. Once a woman ruins a guy, it’s pretty hard to un-ruin him. I’m beginning to worry that the only thing to do at this point is to move on because Adam will never be able to.

CHAPTER
THREE

Two days later, at about ten a.m., I start seeing zigzags of light in front of six-year-old Jayden McNamara’s face as he struggles to read from our book about a fox and a turtle that become friends. This is the most god-awful, boring book on the planet, but unfortunately for me, I don’t get to decide what my first graders get to read. Basically, the principal hands me a book about foxes and turtles and says, “This is what the children will be reading, Claudia.”

“Greg was the best …” Jayden hesitates, stuck on the next word. The word is “fox.” This is a book about a fox and a turtle and the kid somehow can’t read the word “fox.” I think I have completely failed as a teacher. “
Fff … friend?”

“It’s ‘fox,’ you idiot,” Olivia Richards pipes up, shaking her French-braided pigtails. Now the zigzag of light is over Olivia’s face.

“Olivia!” I snap. “Don’t use words like that to speak to your classmates!” Even though I’d been thinking the same thing, I still have to give Olivia a time-out in the corner. First grade is so unfair.

As Jayden starts reading again, I feel the first jab of throbbing pain in my left temple. Within a minute, it feels like someone has started to play the bongo drums in the left side of my head. The lights in the room seem horribly bright. And somehow, Jayden’s reading skills have deteriorated further.

“Good job,” I manage to say as he finally (finally!) reaches the end of the paragraph.

I know I have to call on someone else to read now, so I pick Jack Anderson, who is a pretty good reader and
will probably not need much help. Because right now, I’m in the middle of a full-on migraine attack and the thought of another kid struggling to read a three-letter word makes me want to hop out the window.

I started getting migraine headaches back in my mid-twenties. They had the usual triggers: chocolate, my period, first graders who couldn’t read the word “fox.” They used to be pretty intense, forcing me to call in sick more than once and hide in my dark bedroom for hours on end. A neurologist started me on a medication that helped a little but never relieved them entirely. But in the last year, since I’ve been with Adam, the migraines have decreased significantly in frequency, going from once a week to maybe every other month.

This is a bad one. By lunch period, I feel like I’m going to die and/or vomit. While the kids are down in the cafeteria, I go to the assistant principal Carla Prentice’s office and tell her that I’m going to have to call out sick. Carla is sitting in her office, peering at her ancient desktop computer, her reading glasses riding low on her nose. She gives me a funny look. “Are you hungover, Claudia?”

“It’s a migraine,” I explain, unable to even muster up any indignation. If I were
hungover, I definitely wouldn’t have waited till lunchtime to call out.

Carla looks skeptical. Carla is one of those schoolmarm types who never got married and cares
way
too much about work. What scares me is that sometimes when I look at her, it’s like I’m looking twenty years into my future. I’m definitely evolving in that direction. It freaks me out enough that I undo the top button on my white blouse.

“Fine,” Carla says. “Hopefully, you’ll be recovered by tomorrow.”

I nod, knowing I have a surefire remedy.

I don’t even bother attempting to take the subway home because I know from experience how miserable that journey can be in the middle of a migraine attack. I hail a taxi, sucking up the twenty-dollar charge, and shut my eyes till I get back to Adam’s house.

It’s Thursday, which means Adam will be working from home today. Believe it or not, he doesn’t earn a living through his inventing. He actually has a full-time job as a computer programmer, although he won a considerable amount of money in a lawsuit following his accident. He probably doesn’t have to work, but like me, I know he enjoys his job.

When Adam opens the door to his brownstone, I can’t help but get the feeling that I’ve interrupted something important. I’ve gotten this feeling before, notably when I walked in on a previous boyfriend and the woman he was cheating on me with. Yes, that really happened. But I know Adam would definitely never do that. He does sort of look like he’s just been in bed, but that’s Adam’s usual. The only reason his shirt isn’t buttoned incorrectly is that he’s wearing a gray and brown T-shirt, which doesn’t have buttons.

Whatever I interrupted, Adam doesn’t say anything about it. When he sees me standing there, my fingers simultaneously shielding my eyes and massaging my temples, his brow creases in concern. “Migraine?” he asks.

I nod.

“Come here, you.” He takes my hand and pulls me into his lap. He wheels me slowly in the direction of his bedroom, being careful about running over the imperfections in the floorboards. I was dating Adam for about a month when I was at his house and suffered my first migraine. I told him I was going to go home, but he insisted that I stay, saying he was going to take care of me. “I used to know someone who got migraines,” he told me. “I’ll fix you right up.” He set me up in his bed, shut off all the lights in his house, and turned on music at low volume. Mozart. He transferred into bed next to me and held me tightly against his warm body.

It was amazingly effective. So every time I get a migraine these days, I don’t bother with the
Imitrex. I go straight to his house and he takes care of me.

I feel Adam’s footplate bump gently against the side of his bed. “Time to get out,” he whispers in my ear. I crawl into bed, and he goes around, shutting off all the lights. I squeeze my eyes shut, and I feel the bed move as Adam transfers in next to me. His body feels warm and safe next to mine and I feel the pain beginning to ebb. And as the pain disappears, I fall into a deep sleep.

***

After a migraine, I can sometimes sleep for, like, twenty hours straight. I guess my body expends a lot of energy creating all that pain.

After this particular migraine, I wake up at two in the morning. Adam isn’t in bed next to me, which is a little odd considering the time. But I guess he could be making up for the time he lost working thanks to me. Adam is a chronic insomniac, so it’s not entirely unusual for him to be awake at two a.m. if he hasn’t taken a sleeping pill. And sometimes even if he
has
taken a sleeping pill.

I’m actually starving by now, because I didn’t eat lunch or dinner. At least maybe I’ll lose a pound or two from this. I’m on what Adam calls a “perpetual diet.” I’m ten pounds overweight (okay, more like twenty if I’m being completely honest), and I’m constantly on a mission to shed them. It’s just depressing to know that I’m two pants sizes larger than I was ten years ago. Unfortunately, it seems like those extra pounds have permanently fused themselves to my bones. No amount of salad or diet soda is enough to get rid of them.

Dating Adam hasn’t helped the diet situation. He has a woman who does his shopping for him (and cleans, although his place always seems kind of naturally cluttered), so his fridge is usually stocked. And my boyfriend is actually a really amazing cook, especially considering most men I’ve dated have trouble making anything more sophisticated than TV dinners.

When Adam and I had been going out for about a month, he invited me to his house for a dinner of chicken
marsala. I didn’t have high hopes, so I was shocked when I took my first bite. “This is really good!” I exclaimed.

“Shocking, huh?” he said, although I could tell he was pleased.

“How’d you make it?” I asked. He’d recently told me about being an inventor, and I imagined some sort of machine that you feed raw ingredients into and it goes through a series of pulleys and frying pans and eventually spits out a full meal. I’m pretty sure every inventor I’ve ever seen in movies has had one of those.

“I coated the chicken in flour and salt and pepper and oregano,” he explained. “And I simmered it in the frying pan in oil, butter, and
marsala wine.” Apparently, there were no pulleys involved. “Why? How do you make it?”

And that’s when I had to confess that I am completely hopeless in the kitchen. But he took it well. “Don’t worry,” he said, grinning at me. “Only one of us needs to be able to cook, right?”

As I think about that night, I start actually getting a little hungry for chicken marsala, although that’s probably too much to hope for. Still, if Adam is awake, I know he’ll insist on fixing me something good to eat. Rubbing my eyes, I stumble in the direction of his kitchen, but when I pass through the living room on the way to the kitchen, I notice that Adam’s computer isn’t on and he’s not here at all. I assumed he had to be at his computer working if he was anywhere, but he’s not. So where the hell is he? It’s two in the morning, after all.

I hear a loud thump and lift my head. The noise came from Adam’s spare room. The one where he does his inventing. The one that I’ve never been inside in the entire year we’ve been together.

Do you know the story of Bluebeard? It’s a French folktale about a rich guy with a very ugly blue beard. He has this secret room that he forbids his wife to go inside, even though he gives her the key for some reason. Naturally, she goes into the room, and she finds the murdered bodies of all of Bluebeard’s previous wives.

Of course, it’s a little hard not to make a comparison. I
mean, hello? Forbidden room? What is he
doing
in there? Chopping up the bodies of his previous wives?

Nah, that doesn’t seem very likely. After all, Adam doesn’t have any previous wives because he has
commitment issues
.

Still, my heart is pounding as I creep in the direction of the spare room. The door is closed but I see a light coming from underneath. He’s in there all right. But what is he doing?

There’s a thumping noise, following by a loud whooshing sound. For some reason, I shiver and when I look down at my forearm, I see goose bumps standing up on my skin. Seriously, what is going on in there? I don’t hear anything that sounds like he’s with another woman, unless he’s literally
banging
her in there. No, he’s almost definitely doing some kind of work.

I see a flash of bright light under the door and I instinctively take a step back. Adam never shares with me what he’s been working on in there, and I wonder if it’s possible it might be something dangerous. What if he’s working on something radioactive? What if he’s going to set off an atomic bomb or something?

Nah, that doesn’t seem too likely either.

I raise my hand, poised to knock on the door. I’ve never interrupted him in the middle of his work in the room. I can’t imagine he’d be upset, but … maybe he would. Maybe I should just leave him be.

My hunger forgotten, I turn around and go back to bed. But this time I don’t sleep quite so easily.

***

I do eventually drift off around four in the morning, and Adam still hasn’t come back to bed. But to my relief, when my phone alarm goes off at seven the next morning, he’s lying next to me. He’s sound asleep, blowing air softly through his parted lips, his right arm flung across his forehead. I try not to wake him, but I can’t resist giving him a quick kiss. He stirs briefly, murmurs, “Love you,” then gropes for me to give me a kiss of his own before he falls back asleep.

Just as I’m slipping on my shoes and getting ready to go out the door, I hear my cell phone vibrating within my purse. I check the phone and see that it’s my parents calling. After a hesitation, I decide to pick up. “Hi, Mom,” I say, knowing that of my parents, she’s the one who always calls.

“Hello, Claudia,” Mom says. She sounds so bright and chipper since she and my father permanently relocated to Florida last year, although they kept their old apartment so they can still call themselves New Yorkers. It makes me feel old to have parents who are retired and living in Florida, that’s for sure. But they love it there. Dad apparently has a tan and he’s taken up golfing. “Sorry to bother you in the morning …”

“That’s all right,” I say. She often calls in the morning, because she wakes up at six a.m. every morning for some reason now that she lives in Florida. Her entire sleeping schedule has shifted—she and Dad never go to bed any later than nine o’clock.

“I called your cell last night, and you didn’t answer, so I called Adam. He said you had a migraine.” My mother tends to freak out when she can’t reach me, so I gave her Adam’s cell number for emergencies. She tends to overestimate what an emergency is and call him far too often, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

“The migraine is better.”

“Glad to hear it, honey,” Mom says. “And how’s Adam? He sounded tired.”

My parents shocked me by really loving Adam. When I first told my mother I was dating a guy with a disability, she sounded mildly disapproving, so I was definitely worried when we all got together for dinner several months ago. I put it off forever, making up excuses about how Adam had to work or the weather in New York was too crummy. Adam seemed to realize I was avoiding the meeting, and he finally said to me, “Calm down, Claudia. Parents love me.”

It turned out he was right. I thought for sure they’d be angry that I was dating a guy who was disabled, but they really took to him. I think they liked the fact that he’s a little older and more serious than other men I’ve dated. And they could tell how good he was to me.