Chapter 4: The Full Story

Denise noticed a slight change in Thomas as she stroked him. He suddenly seemed distant. His erection didn’t flag, but his mind was clearly elsewhere.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. Her hand stopped moving and she looked intently into his eyes. When he didn’t respond she let go of his member and scrambled onto his lap. She was sitting squarely in front of him, holding his face in her two hands.

“Thomas? Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

Thomas smiled weakly and leaned forward to kiss Denise. She quickly kissed his lips, then pushed his head back.

“You’re not going to kiss your way out this one. What’s going on?”

Thomas shifted his weight which caused Denise to slide off his lap. She sat next to him expectantly waiting for a response. He stood and went to the bathroom to retrieve a towel. Denise noticed that he no longer had an erection.

“I’ll be right back,” he said as he wrapped a towel around his waist and left the room. A minute later he returned with a bag of popcorn and two sodas. He put a soda on Denise’s side of the bed. He then dropped the towel on a chair, put the soda on his nightstand, and got back in bed, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Denise.

“You’re stalling,” said Denise when he offered her popcorn from the opened bag.

“I am,” answered Thomas with a small grin.

Denise whacked him on the arm.

“Get on with it! The last time you were this hesitant to tell me something was at Cindi’s wedding ... oh, no ... this has something do with the hard-on the universe has against you, doesn’t it? What happened?”

Thomas offered the popcorn to Denise a second time. She scowled at him and motioned that she expected an answer.

Thomas chewed and swallowed. “Yes,” was all he said before taking another bite.

“Damn it, eat later, tell me!”

Thomas finished his current mouthful and took a long drink of soda.

“Like I told you at the wedding, this may get weird, but I’ll tell you.”

Denise waited silently.

“Before I say anything, remember that I love you and nothing I tell you will change that fact.”

Denise said, “You’re kind of scaring me, but yeah, I know that. I know you found me in bed with a groomsman at Cindi’s wedding and didn’t break up with me on the spot because of the fucking ‘universe.’ If you can accept that, then I can accept whatever you have to say.”

Thomas nodded then finished his soda.

“Last year, as seniors we didn’t talk at all in school the first semester. It wasn’t until you needed help in trigonometry and you noticed that I was doing well in the class that you asked for help.”

“I remember,” she said.

“Well, my understanding of trig, and my better grades across all of my classes, did not happen until Thanksgiving.”

“OK, so that’s when you got your ‘special knowledge’ as you said?”

Thomas took a deep breath. “Sort of, yes.”

Denise looked confused.

“The night before Thanksgiving I went to bed a confused senior whose only goal was to get through high school and out of my house. I was constantly at war with my mom and Tammy.”

“Really? But you get along with them great,” said Denise.

Thomas continued without answering Denise.

“In some other cosmic timeline, I also went to bed as a depressed man in his fifties that was dreading spending Thanksgiving day alone. Hours after going to sleep, that fifty-something year old man, me, almost forty years in the future, awoke in my eighteen year old body.”

Denise’s head crooked a bit and her mouth dropped open as she tried to parse what Thomas said.

“So my ‘special knowledge’ isn’t a one-time brain dump of random information given to me by the universe. It is because I’ve already lived a life into middle-age before coming back in time and starting over in my teenage body.”

Thomas felt like he was weightless. Telling someone his true secret was such a relief. He eagerly waited for Denise to respond and hoped she was true to her early comment of accepting anything. If she balked in any way he knew he would be absolutely crushed.

Denise’s first words after learning Thomas’s secret made him chuckle. She didn’t ask about who would become president, or who would win the Super Bowl, or what had happened in the future.

“If you have the mind and experience of a fifty year old, and the body of an eighteen year old, then why did you choose me?”

He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her tight. He said, “Because you are the most beautiful, smart, and loving girl in the world. Because my first time through high school I had a severe crush on you, but you were out of my league and we never once spoke. In this timeline, after I came to your house the first night, I was on cloud nine. I could not believe I was with Denise Hoffman. Since then we’ve faced more challenges than most couples that have been married for twenty years ever have to deal with and we’ve come through each one stronger.”

Denise screwed up her face. “OK, sure, but you still continued to fuck Ms. Tutterbom, not to mention Mrs. Willow.”

Thomas held up his hands. “I did. I was a newly minted eighteen year old with a constant hard-on and an insatiable libido. And, to be fair, Mrs. Willow was after we broke up.”

“Yeah, details.” Denise had a thought. She was silently mouthing something and she tried to figure something out. “I guess Mrs. Willow’s age would be about your mental age, huh?”

“From what she said, I think we would be about a year different in age, yes. But she would have been born in the 30s. I was born in the 60s and am redoing my life so we’re kind of the same age, but not really.”

“Either way, I thought it was odd when you told me that you had sex with her, but now it makes much more sense.”

She paused, then said, “This is really fucked up, you know? I mean, hearing the universe wanted to punish you was hard to figure out, but to hear that you’re really fifty years old?”