The Shangri-La Spa
Chapter 3
Unaware that she was the discussion of more than one lunch table in the cafeteria, Jo walked along the hallways towards the Shangri-La spa rubbing her right shoulder. She hadn't been able to manage time away from her schedule to enjoy the treatments that the spa offered in several months. Every time she scheduled something, a lab blew up or a scientist went missing. As she neared the spa doors the hallways was empty, but her mind was wandering in half a dozen different directions and she didn't notice. Needing an outlet for her frustrations she wondered if Andy would consider downloading a kick boxing program and sparring with her. She would have to remember to ask S.A.R.A.H. about it.
She was so occupied in her thoughts that she didn't notice that there wasn't anyone to greet her until she saw the typed note on the desk. Seeing her name she picked it up and read:
Miss Lupo, we are sorry that there is no one available to greet you. Please change in the locker room and proceed to treatment room #4. Our massage therapist will be with you shortly.
Jo shrugged, thinking nothing of it, and went into the women's locker room to change.
Zane watched through the security feeds that he'd tapped into, as Jo emerged from the locker room into the hallway and walked towards her assigned room. He sat in the room next door to #4 and listened as her footsteps softly echoed outside of his room until she entered hers. He waited a few minutes, giving her time to settled, and then he exited his room, and went next door. He knocked lightly and hearing her say, "Come in," he quickly entered the dimly lit room. Once inside he activated a small device that he'd installed onto the door handle and the light flashed from green to red indicating that it was working.
Turning to face the room he smiled in triumph. It had taken all of 30 minutes to send emails out rescheduling the appointments for everyone who was scheduled to be in the spa that afternoon. He'd created a duplicate mailbox so that the emails couldn't be traced, and then sent an email notice to the spa staff telling them that there would be a standard sweep for radiation of that area and that all personnel were to vacate the spa that afternoon. It had worked like a charm. 15 minutes prior to his arrival when he'd tapped into the security feed he noted that the place was deserted. He'd placed the security monitors in that area on a feedback loop so that they would never record that he and Jo were even there. He had her to himself for the next hour at least, longer he mused if she wouldn't cooperate. He supposed he could trigger some false bio-hazard readings if need be, but he decided that he'd hold that in reserve. For now he'd enabled a voice activated security lock on the door, with one minor modification. He'd added a pass phrase that he'd have to say before the lock would disengage. Jo wouldn't be able to leave until he was ready to let her go.
He stood with his back to the door as he watched her. Soft and relaxing music was playing that featured some sort of rainforest sounds. That and the low lighting combined to create a very tranquil mood. For now, he thought to himself.
She lay face down on the massage table her body covered with by a large white sheet. She'd let down her hair, and it shielded him from her view. Perfect, he thought as he grinned.
Still on the table, she rolled her right shoulder, "Can you please work on my shoulders," she asked thinking he was the massage therapist.
Zane's smile was mischievous as he walked around the outside of the room to the table that held the bottles of various massage oil. In the spirit of cooperation he thought he may as well help to make her feel relaxed. He silently rolled down the sheet to bare the top of her back, admiring the shape of her shoulders. He poured some oil into his hands, allowing the self-heating gel adjusting to his body temperature, and he stood next to the side of the table and began to knead the oil into her shoulders.
She sighed as he found a particularly large knot and began to apply more pressure until she began to relax under his hands. He kept up the massage, telling himself that he'd start talking to her in just a couple more minutes, but the longer he worked the harder it began to figure out just how he was going to bring up the fact that he was there. He kneaded the muscles at the base of her neck, and smoothed her hair out of his way, trying to focus on what he wanted to say. Deciding that it was best to just get it over with, he cleared his throat and said, "There's too much tension in your neck. You should really consider doing yoga to relieve your stress." He felt her muscles bunch beneath his hands but he kept massaging her shoulder blades as though nothing was the matter.
"Zane," she asked in disbelief as she lifted her head slightly, just enough to confirm that it was really him. "Are you crazy?"
"Me? I'm not the one with knots the size of walnuts in my back," he said as he gave her back a slight push back down onto the table. "If this is any indication your hamstrings are going to take all of my energy to loosen."
As he tried to rub her shoulders again she shrugged him off and swung off the opposite side of the table dragging the sheet with her and wrapping it around her body. "What are you doing," she asked incredulously.
"It's part of my parole- community service hours. Just 500 more and I'll be a free man. You wouldn't want me to have to go back to prison, would you," he asked in a mocking tone.
Jo didn't answer, just wrapped the sheet more tightly around her as she walked towards the door, muttering under her breath at what an idiot he was. She grabbed the door handle to open it, but the door wouldn't budge. She looked more closely and saw the small device on the handle that was blinking red. "You modified a Section Three security lock," she said aghast. She whirled back to face him, her eyes blazing. "Unlock it, now."
"Sorry Jo, no can do," he said smirking while he leaned against the table. "Its voice activated and there's nothing that you can do to get me to say it before I'm good and ready."
Furious, she started to step towards him.
"If you tell me that you have a gun on you somewhere under there I think that I'm going to have a new favorite fantasy," he said as he crossed his arms over his chest.
Jo set her jaw and calculated whether or not she could get him in a chokehold without losing her grip on her sheet.
He watched her face smiling as though he knew exactly what she was thinking. "You know, I almost hope that you do decide to tackle me. I'm sure that you'd manage to pin me, but I'd enjoy it so much more than you would."
She hung her head as the anger swiftly left her. "Can't you just leave it alone," she asked wearily.
Zane got up from the table and closed the distance between them until he was just a foot away. "No," he said with an attempt at a smile, but the smile didn't quite reach his eyes. His gaze lingered on her mouth for a moment longer before he turned quickly on his heels and paced the length of the room.
Struggling to focus he ran his fingers through his hair and tried to figure out how he was going to approach this to get her to talk to him. He turned to face her and pointed to the walls. "All offices and hallways in GD are monitored in some way," he began, "and unless you engage sonic protocols you never know if someone may be listening or recording. Sonic protocols don't always work either because Mansfield is notified anytime anyone engages them. This room and the other treatment rooms aren't monitored. No cameras and no microphones."
Jo looked at him, confused. "So if I make you scream, no one will come running?"
"No," he said, "so when you give me some answers about what's going on, they'll stay here between us."
"It stays with us," she muttered sarcastically, "until you decide that you want to use it as blackmail."
"I'm not trying to blackmail you," he promised. "Fargo maybe, but not you."
She hesitated clearly uncomfortable and looked away.
He pressed the advantage that her silence offered and tried to logically build his case. "You trusted me before," he said quietly approaching her cautiously. "You believed me when no one else would. If you were wrong about me then you could have lost your job, so why can't you trust me again now?"
She stood against the door, unwilling to look at him and her dark hair hung down acted as a curtain hiding some of her face from his view. He took another step towards her and she looked up at him, her eyes filled with sadness as opposed to the fierceness that he was so used to. She looked small and vulnerable and he paused in his tracks.
"If I tell you this I could lose my freedom," she said quietly.
"Just yours," he asked.
"Don't ask me," she warned him.
"What can I do to get you to trust me," he asked her.
She said nothing, only looked away from him again.
"How about if I tell you what I already believe I know- hypothetically speaking," when she started to interrupt.
He hopped up onto the table and gestured for her to join him. She sat down warily but kept several feet between them.
"Three months ago you were normal, or everything else was. You barely spoke to me, only called me Donovan when you did, and you loathe me. Then one day I'm sitting in Carter's jail cell like normal and you come rushing in. You tell me that you think too much sometimes and that your answer is yes, and that you'll marry me. "
She looked down at her hands a slight blush spreading across her cheeks.
"I thought that maybe you'd been a victim of another experiment gone wrong, or that you'd found out about the betting pool."
That got her attention and she looked up. "What betting pool?"
"Vince keeps the occasional bet on things around Eureka," he hedged.
"Yeah, I know about that," she corrected. "I've had $50 on 100 to 1 odds of Allison and Carter ever getting together for like three years."
"Yeah," he asked with a surprised grin.
"They have odds on us," she asked softly.
"Yeah," he confirmed sheepishly. "Because of what happened when I first arrived in town."
At her blank look, he explained. "I asked you out after the whole chicken fiasco. You turned me down and we got into a bit of a heated fight, and someone offered odds on when we'd have our first date. That sort of thing is another reason why you should tell me what's going on. Everyone in town knows about that…with about 5 exceptions it seems."
She ignored him, and asked, "What are the odds?"
"1000 to 1," he said with a wry smile.
Jo just stared at him. "We really didn't like each other, did we," she asked sadly.
"When you talked about that whole marriage thing that day, I just thought that you were mocking me, and I didn't think anything more of it."
"A couple of days later you're still acting different. You're quieter and I catch you looking at me funny. Later when I crashed the jet cycle, you tell me that you believe that I didn't do it, and you help prove it. But you know when I really first realized that something was wrong," he said to her as he got off the table and moved to stand in front of her. "It was in the NLWP's lab right before the rage took over, and you said my name. You have never called me Zane. It's always Donovan, has been for two years." He smirked, "You were still a bad ass, the little zombie incident proved that that hadn't changed, but then I started to catch you looking at me more often," he said as he leaned in and placed his palms on the table on either side of where she sat, caging her in place. "You're looking at me like I'm the one whose acting differently and you're trying to figure out why. "
"You start talking to me, which in itself is a novel concept, and asking for my help, which you never do. It's like you already know what I'm capable of, and expect me to be able to do. Then just when I start to get used to that, you start to pull away again, making me wonder just what it was that I did this time. When we do finally talk we have one of the most bizarre conversations of my life which you end by throwing a ring at me." He reached under his shirt collar and fished out a chain from around his neck on which a small golden ring was looped.
Jo stared at it, and then looked away, but Zane touched her chin with his hand and lifted her face until she looked at him again. "I keep wanting to call my mother and ask if she still has hers, or if the same object from two different universes will collide and only one can exist at a time."
Jo blinked and swallowed hard.
"You are from a different universe," he told her matter-of-factly. "One in which we," he said as he gestured between them, "were dating. More than dating if I had given you this ring," he stated.
Her silence is the only confirmation that he needed.
"You're not here alone," he said, "but I'm not interested in them right now."
"I don't think that however you got here, that you came willingly," he said. "Not unless the proposal was really bad," he joked.
Jo shook her head and closed her eyes for a long minute.
"It's kind of nice to know that I don't screw it up everywhere," he joked halfheartedly.
"So -what," he prodded. "You were forced to jump to a different universe?"
Jo swallowed and looked Zane in the eye for a long moment before relenting. "Hypothetically," she began.
"If you want," he offered.
"If a group of people were to be transported back in time through a device that connected those two times, and then leave with an additional person returning to their own time on the very same day that they left, they would find that there were slight changes to the future that they knew."
Zane stayed quiet in the hopes that she'd continue.
"Like, if I was the deputy sheriff when I left and the Head of GD Security when I got back," she hedged.
"And you and I," he asked.
She licked her lips unconsciously and looked down at her hands which she gripped tightly together. "Hypothetically, we would have been dating for about two years. On the morning that we went back in time you proposed." She hesitated. "I wasn't expecting it and didn't answer right away. You got mad and stormed off. I was trying to call you when all of a sudden it was 1947."
"and the device that did it?" he asked.
"If such a device exists, it would be broken beyond repair," she said quietly.
"So if you went back to the past and then came forward again it's not a different universe, it's just differences within that universe.
"Something like that," she said. "Even if we wanted to, we can't change them back. So we either get used to our new hypothetical lives, or leave."
He frowned. "What do you mean, leave? Leave Eureka? Is that what happened to Grant?"
Jo shrugged. "Hypothetically, if you were to do a search there wouldn't be any mention of a Dr. Trevor Grant ever existing before Eureka."
"He's the one who came forward then." Zane said thoughtfully as he stared off into space, mentally connecting the dots.
"Look, you don't have to worry about any of this," she said trying to stop the conversation. "If I can't handle it then I'll leave and it won't be a big deal anymore. You just have to promise me that you'll leave the others out of this."
Zane turned back to face her, frowning once more. "What do you mean you're going to leave," he asked, leaning in and caging her with his arms.
"Look it's hard for me to be here," she said suddenly angry. "The way things are is the way that they're going to stay, and bottom line I have to get used to that."
"Things don't have to stay the same Jo," he told her. She looked up at him confused and he quickly leaned forward and covered her mouth with his.
One more chapter to go!
