What to Get the Girl who has Everything

In the darkness, he lay wide awake. Even though he was exhausted mentally from thinking, explaining and thinking even harder, he couldn’t sleep. Just staring at the ceiling, he felt the minutes tick away into hours. In the darkness he wasn’t sure how long it was. He could check his watch but he preferred not to know. His preference would have been to sleep, to drift away and wake up in his own bed, maybe from Isabella bouncing on the mattress, and be relieved to find out that this was all some horrible nightmare. Yes, that would have been his preference.

The darkness was a good runner up though. In the darkness, it was wasn’t a guest room, it was just a room, and it could be any room. He didn’t have to see all the tiny imperfections that made the room wrong and different. But all of his other senses still worked. He could smell that the room was different, feel that the cotton around his body wasn’t the silk sheets of his own bed, and hear. From the second floor, he could hear everything so much more clearly than his bedroom on the third. He heard the clatter and chatter of dinner below, then, later, the moans of Leah coming from above, and, now, footsteps coming down the hall.

Light penetrated the room as the door was inched open. Just enough for Heather to poke her head inside.

“Logan,” she whispered.

He didn’t reply at first. If he’d been at home and his Heather had come to his room in the night, he would have leapt out of bed to find out what was wrong. But here in this place, with this Heather, he wasn’t sure quite what to do. His instinct was still to help her. So, when she called out again, he didn’t hesitate.

“Logan, are you awake?”

“Yes, I am,” he said, sitting up. The duvet slipped down to his waist, revealing his toned, bare chest and stomach. “I can’t sleep actually.”

“Sorry, I just wanted to…I thought you might be lonely.”

She opened the door a little wider, and he saw her. She’d wiped away her make-up and brushed her hair, and she was dressed in a long blue t-shirt. The sleeves were short, hardly covering her shoulders, but it covered the rest of her upper half, all the way down to her thigh. It was obvious by the two nubs protruding through the cotton that she wasn’t wearing a bra. It was less clear whether she was wearing any other underwear, but she wasn’t wearing any more outer layers. The silky skin of her long bare legs shining in the light from the hallway demonstrated that.

“I am lonely. A bit,” he confessed. “But that’s to be expected, isn’t it?”

She crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, beside his stretched-out legs.

“Why don’t you tell me about your world?” Heather suggested. “What was it Victoria called it? Earth-1? What’s it like on Earth-1?”

“You really want to know about an alternative dimension version of yourself?”

“I don’t know. I never really thought about it before. My life was just my life, you know, and I was happy with it. I have a great family, especially daddy, amazing friends, I live in this house and I never really thought about wanting anything else until you came along. I know that sounds privileged, but I didn’t realize how big this house was until you told me about this whole other family that could live here…but don’t.” Instead of brightening his mood, Heather was bumming herself out. “Your version of Heather, her life just sounds so much richer than mine.”

“The rich girl wants to be richer?” Logan joshed.

“Oh, shut. up.”

Her hand flung out, almost by instinct, and playfully slapped his torso. She expected his body to move more than it did, but it barely budged. As a result, her hand lingered, not pushing or slapping, just touching. Her fingertips tingled against his naked chest. She could feel his muscles, sense his strength. Even he could feel the electricity sparking between them. He wondered if this was what it was like for those couples that fell in love after being separated at birth. For all he knew, in this dimension, just because they shared the same last name, might not mean that they shared the same DNA.

Making his move would be easy. Beyond easy. Her hand was right there, and all he had to do was grab it and pull her in, kiss her and let the closeness of their bodies do the rest. He could do it. But he didn’t. He wasn’t afraid of the rejection. Even he, Logan Ravers, got rejected once in every thirty third blue moon. But if Heather wasn’t open to it, then he was risking everything. The roof over his head, the people working on getting him back home, and his only friend in this crazy new world. And when he didn’t make his move quick enough, she withdrew her hand.

“You know what I meant.”

“I do,” he said with a smirk. “When I was little and they used to tease me about my name and about my money, it wasn’t those possessions that kept me going. There were times that I would have wished it all away to make them stop; I would have preferred to be poor than to be bullied. Of course, now I’m a little bit older, I understand it wasn’t really about the money. I wasn’t the problem. But what kept me going until I understood that was you. You, and Sharon, Ashley and Victoria. You all kept me sane and gave me some semblance of happiness until I met Charlie and Dustin, friends of my own. Everyone of you kept me fighting until I got strong, until I could return the favor and protect you.”

He took a deep breath.

“That’s why it’s so tough to be here. To see the people who are the true riches of my life forgetting who I am is worse than anything I could ever have imagined Dylan Bennett doing to me.”

“Well he hasn’t won yet.”

Heather was on her feet with her hands clenched into fists. It wasn’t just her voice, he could see it in her electric eyes that she was all fired up. For the first time since he’d arrived her resolution and determination had taken over her confusion.

“We’ve got the best minds of our generation working on this. Gavin will figure out how to build that machine, just like your Connor did, and with Victoria doing research, he’ll have it done like that,” she said and snapped her fingers for effect. “We’ll send you back and you can kick Dylan Bennett’s ass again, and this time you can give him one from me. In fact, I hope he comes here too, so I can give it to him personally.”

“He won’t,” Logan told her with a chuckle. “He’s not too bright but he has no reason to follow me. He’s finally gotten what he’s always wanted. He’s probably enjoying himself, chasing after you girls, tormenting Connor again, doing all the petty sins I stopped him from committing. Not that he’ll get anywhere, of course,” Logan added when he saw the horrified look on his cousin’s face. “He blames me for a lot of his problems, but he’s incapable of self-reflection. Without me around, you’d still shoot him down, but there’s no way that he’ll think he’s the problem.”

“The only person that would even sink that low is Sharon.”

“Maybe your Sharon, but not mine. She wouldn’t touch him if he was the last man on Earth, not after what he did to me all those years back.”

“Wow, even your Sharon sounds superior to ours. She has actual standards.” Heather let out a light laugh, careful not to wake her father sleeping just upstairs. “You two sound…close. Have you ever…”

He raised an eyebrow even though he knew perfectly well what she meant. But he had never told his Heather about his relationship with Sharon, how they’d taken each other’s V-cards, or the subsequent relationship, or the on again off again fuckbuddy sessions. It was the only real secret that he kept from his cousin, but perhaps he could tell this version of Heather as a kind of cathartic release.

“We have. Many, many times. She was my first, and we’ve learned a lot together along the way,” Logan explained to his cousin, while trying to ignore the erection forming in his boxers as he remembered Sharon lying beneath him, legs spread and moaning for her ‘King’. “But she’s by far not the only one. We’re not in a relationship, you see, we realized early on we weren’t cut out for that, at least not with each other. And yet we still keep coming back to the well.”

“Wow, you sound like a real player,” she flicked her hair and smiled. “I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised, you do have Ravers genes. I bet you’ve already made the rounds on all your friends and sampled more than a few of their…riches.”

He laughed at Heather’s word play, but shook his head.

“No, actually, you forbade me from hooking up with your friends. That technically includes Sharon too though, so I can’t say I’ve really been all that good at keeping it.”

“I actually forbade you?” She waited for him to nod in confirmation. “Holy shit. Are you really that dangerous?”

“Sharon once it explained it to me, based on something you, I mean, my-you, confided to her. If I hooked up with one of our friends, and it got serious and we started dating, it’d be like you were losing a friend to me. When I had no friends of my own, you shared yours, but if one of them became my girlfriend, I’d become more important to them. You and I wouldn’t be equal in their eyes any more, so it’d be like you were losing something.”

“Earth-1 me sounds pretty wise. You should listen to her,” Heather grinned.

“She is. I don’t like to tell her that too much because it’ll over-inflate her head, but she really is.”

“I’m kinda sad though. You had that whole life, full of ups and downs, while I’ll never know the woman who managed to capture uncle Daniel’s heart, or Isabella who I could teach and guide.” Heather sighed as she looked to Logan again. “What’s she like?”

“She’s the sweetest thing. So full of energy and pure excitement,” Logan told her, while his heart ached to think of the little sister he left behind. “Honestly, she reminds me of you. And I mean that in every way possible, so you can imagine how worried I am what the future might bring.”

“Well, who knows what the future might bring,” Heather mused. “This morning neither one of us would have imagined the situation were in right now. All we can do is make the best of it while it’s happening, right? So while you’re here, I’ll try to help you feel a little less lonely, and maybe you can make my life a little richer.”

“Okay,” he agreed readily. “It’s a deal.”

“Fantastic. Now…” she stifled a yawn with the back of her hand as she stood up from the bed. “I really should get some sleep.”

“Thanks for keeping me company for a bit.” He yawned too. Maybe it was just a reflex, but he was beginning to feel tired too. “If you have any more questions, we can talk again tomorrow.”

But Heather shook her head while hovered by the door. Her tight teen body basked in the warm glow of the hallway light.

“Maybe. But first, I have school.”