Chapter 10: Cold

"Hello, my love.
It's getting cold on this island."

Jo put down the receiver of her phone before sliding over to send off another email. This is exactly what she needed right now. Sure, the situation wasn't ideal with exploding experiments and the theft of the D.E.D. device screwing up everyone's life. But it kept her mind in the right place, meaning not waiting for her other timeline boyfriend to appear as a figment of her traitorous brainwaves. And it certainly didn't mean listening to him spout any more exaggerations of things she apparently thought she wanted to hear from him.

Yes, she missed her Zane. Yes, she'd been working through that by sleeping with this reality's version of him. Yes, that had made her feelings for the man even more confusing and weird. But thanks to the malfunction at Henry and Grace's party, she was starting to see the truth of the situation.

She needed to let him go.

It wasn't just the heartbreak she felt when she found out about him and Zoe, although that hadn't helped matters. Just thinking about how he'd been playing both of them made her furious and also despondent. But if not Zoe, it'd be someone else he'd turn to when things between them became too complicated. Hell, they'd already gone past complicated so it had been only a matter of time. Seeing him pick up Zoe for their 'date' had been awkward enough, especially after her hallucination convinced her the two were breaking things off. What would happen when she started seeing them, or anyone else with him, making out at Café Diem or holding hands down Main Street? It would kill her to watch him fall in love with someone else.

The real issue was what she'd learned the last couple of days having dealt with the imagined version of him. When she thought the Zane in her head was the real Zane and he confessed that he wanted her over Zoe, she allowed herself to want it too. She'd been dodging his subtle propositions for weeks yet a few profound words while looking at her like she was the only woman in the world had her yearning to fall into his arms again. And then it all turned out to be a big lie anyway.

The problem was that she could never get back the Zane she knew. The more she obsessed about it, the more perverted his memory would become and their love deserved better than that.

And what about these hallucinations? Fargo had suggested there was something she was trying to work out through them beyond simply manifesting the man she loved. Maybe dealing with this idealized version of him was to force her to analyze why she hesitated when he proposed to her. She thought it was the fear of screwing things up with him. However, what if it was because deep down, she realized they really weren't compatible?

Even though her Zane had been less hard-edged than the man in this timeline, he was still the kind of guy with a penchant for finding trouble and a tendency to buck authority. He loved to push the envelope and take risks even if it sometimes ended with him in the infirmary. Jo was the exact opposite. She believed in rules and order and putting the safety of others above all else. Zane was a loner with enough charm to talk his way out of anything. Jo believed in being a part of a family and a community in a way she knew both Zanes had never been comfortable fully embracing.

She lived a contrast of guns and girly things, the thrill of being a badass with the satisfaction of feeling feminine and beautiful at the end of the day. It wasn't until she'd come to Eureka that she had felt comfortable being more than a soldier, more than the brawn who had to be one of the boys by suppressing the woman in her. Zane, on the other hand, was all play. Well, he was mostly play with a fair amount of genius in between. Zane was confident and endearingly sure of himself. He loved outsmarting people and using that big brain of his to make the brilliant ideas in his head come to life.

They didn't have a lot in common but, before, they'd found lots of ways to combine their interests, through friendly video game competition or long hikes in the mountains, for example. They hung out a lot too, eating together or talking or watching television. And as the Zane in this timeline proved, their spark was never in question. Now she was second-guessing everything about their relationship and these things didn't feel like enough. The more she thought about it, the more insecure she became.

And the more time she spent with the Zane in this timeline, the more she worried about becoming too attached. As it was, the last time they'd been together, after the trouble with a town-full of perverted, emotional robots, she'd vowed to end things right then. The way he'd held her and teased her during the night she spent with him had been too … well, it made her think foolish thoughts. With all she'd been through the last few months, she couldn't afford to be foolish. So she'd given him her 'maybe we should cool it' speech and semi-meant it that time.

Then she had planned to sabotage them, purposely and cleanly before she screwed things up when it mattered; the way it had mattered in the other timeline. Perhaps he'd done them both a favor by beating her to the punch and fooling around with Zoe. Not that it made him less of an asshole for it.

It still hurt like hell to see the light in Zoe's eyes when she talked about him, albeit not in terrible detail to Jo whom she assumed still hated the man beyond reason. When they'd been at Café Diem talking about Zoe's love life—before she knew that it was Zane making her glow with happiness—it had felt like a bit of the normalcy she craved following the chaos of Founders' Day. And then that was taken from her too. It sucked that she couldn't share any of this loss with her surrogate sister who had always been there for her when things got tough.

Jo sighed. She'd spent the last several minutes doing exactly what she was trying to force herself not to do—dwell on the disaster that was her personal life. Sooner or later, she'd have to reconcile this situation in her mind because she couldn't go on like this.

The phone rang and she turned to answer it, anxious for a status report on the D.E.D. search so she could focus. After a tense conversation with Thompson, her second-in-command, she hung up the phone and swiveled to her desk to send Fargo and Carter a message on her PDA. She inwardly cursed her startled reaction to seeing the last person she cared to talk to standing in front of her desk.

Unlike the other times, the sight of the hallucination her brain refused to purge made her furious.

"Will you stop doing that," she said around clenched teeth. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself down. She didn't have time to sit here and essentially fight with herself while there was so much that needed to be done about the latest Global catastrophe.

"Doing what?" His denial was equally annoying and she rolled her eyes in response. "I just need to talk you about something." He reached around to his back pocket and she prayed that he wasn't going to reenact his proposal right in the middle of her office. If so, she would absolutely lose it.

She went on the offensive hoping he'd go away on his own. "Oh, what is it now? You wanna tell me how nice my ass looks when I'm holding a gun?"

"Well … " he replied, grinning at the mental picture he was conjuring, no doubt. "I mean you do have a nice ass."

He was impossible. If she needed to confront him in order to get rid of him, then he was going to get a piece of her mind right now so she could get back to her miserable life. "You want to have it out? Okay." She stood up and squared her shoulders. If she was going to do this, she was going to do it with some backbone. "The truth is, I have been romanticizing our relationship this entire time. And, you know, there was a reason I hesitated and now I know what it is."

Zane seemed confused; and also annoyed. "Romanticizing? Relationship? Oh, you mean all the sex we've been having that you started and then put a stop to a few weeks ago." His tone was light enough but Jo knew better. He was upset. "I wouldn't say there's anything romantic about that." His bitterness only made Jo more determined to resolve things inside her head, although this was a new tactic for the hallucination to take. She had been internalizing a lot of conflicting feelings over the whole situation and it made sense that the version of him in her head would pick up on that. That must mean her confrontation was working, right?

She continued, ignoring his change in mood. "You and I? We don't fit. So I'm over it. I'm over us."

Jo was anything but over it. However, this was the first step in what was going to be a long but important process for her—the process of moving on.

She reached up and fingered the chain around her neck that held the last bit of her Zane she'd been clinging to for months. "If you want to hang out with Zoe—" she began, choking back a bit of emotion at what she was about to verbalize, "—go ahead. I'm done."

The hallucination pinned her with an expression of confusion and disappointment that broke her heart. That made two of them.

And then that look of confusion turned to anger. She hadn't been expecting that.

"What the fuck, Lupo? You knock on my door and throw yourself at me; you stick up for me with Mansfield and keep me from going back to prison; you pretend to trust me and make me start feeling all kinds of crazy, confusing things and now you're going off about how you're over it?"

Jo frowned. She really wasn't so fond of her hallucination yelling at her like this, although she supposed it was a lot better than what Allison, Fargo and Carter were going through. It was such a change from how overly-sweet he'd been to her throughout this weird ordeal. "Why are you yelling? I'm just trying to clear the air here."

He glared at her. "Really? You're doing a pretty shitty job of it."

"Look, you're the one that hasn't been acting right, all that stuff about Zoe and then being creepy and romantic with me all day. We had something good together, I'm not going to deny that. But we were never anything like what you've been pretending. We didn't need to be." This wasn't going so well after all. She was just making herself feel worse about losing him.

"Why—"

She cut him off needing to finish this once and for all. "You're not the man I fell in love with. You're just some figment of my imagination that exists because I miss him and regret that he'll never know I wanted to spend my life with him." She pulled the chain from her shirt and gripped the prize it held. "You're not the man who gave me this ring. And neither is the Zane I've been sleeping with since I got here, wanting him to be someone he's not too."

Finally, she unclasped the chain and slipped the ring off before throwing it at him. That seemed like the right thing to do to make this little epiphany feel real to her.

Zane caught the ring and his eyes went wide, both surprised and trying to piece something together in his mind. He looked down at the ring in his hand for several moments and then returned his gaze to her. His stare was hard and uncompromising.

"Lupo, I don't know what the hell you're talking about, although I'm sure I'll figure it out soon enough after some of the stuff I've just dug up." He took a step towards her across the desk. "But you've got about five seconds to explain to me what you're doing with my grandmother's ring."

Now it was Jo's turn to be shocked as she examined the man in front of her—the very real, very pissed off and very non-hallucinatory man in front of her.

Shit.

He seemed like the lover who'd been haunting her all day but … those eyes? They weren't the sexy, playful orbs with which she was so familiar but the steely, dangerous blue of the version she'd come to know in the past few months. She was sure her face reflected her guilt as well as her sadness and fear.

"What's going on?" Zane pressed her. Jo remained silent, not seeing how she was going to get out of this. Grace knowing about their time traveling was one thing but Zane was an entirely different situation. She couldn't tell him outright because he couldn't be trusted. She couldn't lie to him because he'd never let it go now that he had proof something was afoul. This was not going to end well.

She never should have gone over to his place that night and she sure as hell should have never let him get this close to her.

"Hey, Jo. Sorry for interrupting." Carter had entered the room during their silent exchange. Jo didn't even acknowledge him but continued to stare blankly at the furious man across the desk from her. Carter didn't appear to have heard any of what she'd revealed which was the only good thing about the situation. She'd have to tell him soon though.

She saw Carter assess the interaction between her and Zane for a beat then decide to ignore what he saw for the moment. "Umm, Zane, I'm gonna have to take you in for questioning.

"For what?" He tore his eyes away from the ring and aimed his frown at the sheriff.

"For potential collusion and theft of the D.E.D." Carter turned to her. "Sorry, Jo. You done?"

Zane narrowed his eyes at that and turned to her as well. "Yeah, she's done. I didn't do it, but whatever." He reached around again and threw a rolled up enveloped on her desk. "I don't know what's going on with you but I'm hoping you'll at least still do your job. You need to look at this."

Jo had yet to say a word to either man.

Carter grabbed Zane's arm and led him out. "C'mon."

"Fine," she heard him yell as they made their way out of her office and presumably to the town jail. "I'm telling you Carter, it wasn't me."

She moved to sit down before her knees gave out on her. When she finally found her seat, she collapsed face-first into her hands, shoulders slumped over. Because of her, now the threat of the D.E.D theft would be a walk in the park compared to sanctions for time traveling—and concealing any report of it. She and her friends were about to be in a lot of trouble.

The only thing she could count on was that Zane would never go to Mansfield with this information. He hated the man and, more importantly, he'd want to know the details for himself. To what ends, she couldn't imagine. She would have to hope he'd keep his mouth shut long enough for the five of them to think of a way to handle it.

She had screwed up and all because she couldn't shake Zane from her system. If there was ever a sign that she needed to let him go, this was it.

TBC …

AN: Song credit, Koop Island Blues.