Free The Time Traveler's Boyfriend by Annabelle Costa Page B

after his injury, Adam met a beautiful girl named Jessica who messed him up big time, and he hasn’t ever recovered from it. You can pay for all the therapy you want, but the best thing would be if he never met The Bitch to begin with. As my mother always said, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
    And that’s how I get the idea.

CHAPTER NINE
     
    My plan is pretty brilliant if I do say so myself.
    Adam’s life got wrecked when he met The Bitch. She found him when he was vulnerable, never having had a relationship since his injury. If he never meets The Bitch, then maybe he won’t be so bitter about relationships now.
    But how do I stop him from meeting The Bitch?
    And this is the brilliant part:
    Really, what young Adam needed was a nice girl to counteract her influence. And fortunately, there was a very nice girl running around New York in the late nineties. Her name was Claudia.
    This is my plan:
    Go back in time again while Adam is asleep. Luckily, the machine seems pretty user-friendly and I’ve watched him work it twice now. I need to find young Adam and young me, introduce them, and watch them fall madly in love. The Bitch will never have a chance. Then I come back to the present, and Adam and I will probably already be married. We’ll probably be living in suburbia and have three beautiful children: two girls and a little boy. And a dog named Spot.
    Brilliant, right?
    There are a few details here and there that I need to work out. First of all, I can’t just go for a few hours, because it’ll take time to even find Adam and my younger self, and then even more time to ensure that they fall in love. I’m thinking … two weeks. How long does it take two people to fall in love anyway? I know the first time Adam laid eyes on me, he was smitten, and when I met him, I felt the same way. So I’d imagine it will be pretty quick. Maybe I’ll even have time to take in a movie or two. Too bad I’ve seen them all.
    If I’m going to the past, when my money and credit cards will be no good, I need a place to crash. Fortunately, my parents have been vacationing in Florida every Christmas holiday for about two or three weeks since I was eighteen, my father’s only vacation the whole year. And they haven’t changed the locks to their Manhattan apartment in over twenty years. So If I plan for December 26 or thereabouts, I can stay at my parents’ apartment without anyone being the wiser.
    Then there’s the question of what year to return to. I know Adam met The Bitch a few years after his injury, so I don’t want to wait too long. Then again, I don’t want to catch him when he’s still recovering. I finally settle on 1999, just over two years after he got hit by the car. The only negative is that it means I’ll probably have to hear that “Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1999” song again. I thought I’d never have to hear that song ever again.
    With my plan about as settled as it can be, I wait until Adam is asleep in bed to put it into place. Adam is naturally a very restless sleeper, but I can tell he took a sleeping pill tonight, because he’s sleeping like the dead. I can hear his deep breathing, an almost-snore, as his chest moves up and down. Adam looks very peaceful when he’s in a drugged sleep. Almost like the young Adam I met in 1997. Watching him sleep makes me even more determined to fix his life.
    I grab a tote bag from Adam’s closet and pack all the clean clothes from the drawer Adam gave me in his dresser. I also grab one of his coats because December in New York is pretty nippy. I’m not going to be the height of fashion on this trip, but that’s okay. I’m going to help foster young love, not to hook up with some dude from 1999.
    I take a handful of change that’s scattered on top of Adam’s dresser (his official place for change). I’ll want to take a bus across town to my parents’ apartment in east midtown. Luckily, they don’t have a doorman, so my keys