Lost and Found (ONC2024)

Chapter 10

Jude

If I hadn't been doing this time travel thing for the past year, I would have thought it was a weird, fucked up dream, but I knew better than that. It happened and it was real. While in 1971, I purposely pinched Percy's waist hard enough to leave fingerprints, and I did other things he'd still feel when he woke up. If he'd told me to stop, I would have stopped, but he didn't tell me to stop. He moaned and groaned, and his orgasm was just as intense as it was earlier in my bed.

Percy and I didn't just have one intense sexual encounter in a tent enhanced by psychedelic drugs. We had multiple encounters. In the middle of the night, we raided the hippies' snacks and had another fuck in front of the fizzling campfire. Acting like hippie nudists, we ran through the grassy meadow hand-in-hand like two actors in an old TV show.

After thoroughly exhausting ourselves, we crashed outside before the crack of dawn. It was the best trip I'd ever had.

I opened my eyes, expecting to find Percy lying beside me. Instead, his side of the bed was cold, yet his scent still lingered in the air. My life kept getting more and more fucked up by the day, and now I fucked up Percy's life, too. I gave him this affliction, if that's what you wanted to call it.

Where the hell was Percy? I came back, but he didn't?

I wandered around my apartment, searching for traces of Percy. I wondered if he freaked out and left. I started to think he was a phony like everyone else. He lied when he professed his love for me. We barely knew each other. How could he love me? However, a part of me felt like we'd known each other our entire lives. As I made these assumptions, I spotted Percy's duffle bag on the floor by the couch where he left it earlier. His car keys were on the coffee table. He didn't leave. He wasn't a phony. He just hadn't come back.

"Percy!" I called to him. He had to be around here somewhere. I'd returned in weird spots before. On my way back to my bedroom, I stopped in the bathroom, checking beside the toilet and in the shower. The bathroom was empty. Frantic, I returned to the bedroom and crawled on the floor, searching for him. Maybe he landed under the bed.

Nope.

I froze as I heard retching coming from somewhere in the apartment. After a few seconds, I jumped to my feet and rushed to the bathroom where I found Percy hunched over the toilet, puking his guts out. I remembered puking my guts out, too, the first time I traveled. Beside him, I knelt on the floor, thinking of a way to comfort him.

"Go away," he coughed, pushing me away from him. "Get the fuck away from me!"

"I'm sorry, Percy. I don't know how this happened."

"There's something toxic in you and you gave it to me." He flushed the toilet and wiped his mouth with the back of his arm. Sitting on the floor, he leaned against the wall, staring at the ceiling. "Did you drug me, Jude? I feel hung over."

"I didn't drug you. The hippies shared their joint, and the hippie woman gave us the mushrooms. You're right. There's something toxic in me. It's like a virus and I gave it to you." Pacing back and forth in the bathroom, I pulled at my hair, consumed with anxiety and unrelenting feelings of hopelessness, fear, and guilt. "We need to find those fucking doctors."

Percy staggered to his feet and stood in front of the mirror. He turned sideways, tracing the bruises on his waist. "What happened to me?" he asked, examining the bruises. "These look like fingerprints."

"Sorry. I did that."

"Damn. I'm a mess. It looks like I've been rolling around in the grass."

"That's because we did roll around in the grass."