Time Between Us by Tamara Ireland Stone

He checks his watch. “Are you ready?”
    “Yes.” I nod and try not to look anxious.
    He looks at me for a moment and smiles. Then he closes his eyes. And I watch him become transparent—I can see through him to the photograph of my parents and me on the wall behind his translucent frame—and he’s like that for less than a second before he’s gone. The stool is empty. I walk around to his side of the counter and touch the surface.
    Yep. He has disappeared completely.
    I feel my breathing become shallow as I wait for what seems like more than a minute, never taking my eyes off the stool, and suddenly he’s back. Exactly where he had been. Opaque and solid as he is supposed to be. As if it had never happened. But it did.
    He gulps down both glasses of water, then chugs the coffee.
    “Do you need anything?”
    He shakes his head no, looking down at the tiles.
    “Where did you go?”
    “My room. I counted to sixty and came back.” He looks up and watches me with a tentative expression as he weighs my reaction.
    “What’s with the water and the coffee?” I remember the specificity of his requests last night at the coffeehouse, the water bottles and coffee mugs strewn around his room that night I visited him uninvited.
    “Traveling makes me dehydrated, and caffeine helps with the migraines. I don’t usually experience pain when I travel to a location. It’s the returning that kills me.”
    “Like the night in the park.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Okay, so you can disappear and reappear? That’s it?”
    “You make me sound like a third-rate magician.” He laughs. “That’s not enough for you?”
    “Of course,” I say nervously. “I just meant—”
    “I’m kidding.” He gets serious again. “Actually, that’s just the first thing.”
    “The first thing?”
    “Yeah. I told you. There’s more.”
    I look at him. “How much more?”
    “Two.” He shrugs. “Two more.”
    “Wait a minute,” I say. “The fact that you can disappear is the first of three things?”
    He nods. “I told you. I won’t explain everything today, but I’ll tell you…a lot.”
    “What? You don’t think I can take it?” My heart starts beating fast as I question my own question. Or maybe it’s just that Bennett’s face is so close to mine.
    “If anyone can take it, you can. But it’s still a lot of information to process.” He looks at me like he’s waiting for me to argue with him. Which I’m considering. “Look, today I’ll tell you how I got you out of the bookstore last night. And eventually I’ll tell you the rest. Trust me on the baby-steps thing, okay?”
    He looks determined. Like arguing with him won’t pay off anyway. “Okay.” I straighten up in my chair and give him my full attention. Which takes zero effort. “I’m ready. Start from the beginning.”

    Bennett matches my posture, sitting straight up in his chair too, like we’ve discovered a cure for this magnitude of nervousness. He takes a couple of deep breaths to prepare, and then he begins.
    “One night, when I was ten, I was in my bed reading this book on Greek mythology—I was really into gods and myths when I was a kid—and I thought how cool it would be if I could go there. So I sat up in bed, Star Wars pajamas and all, and I tried to ‘will’ myself there. I closed my eyes and pictured ancient Greece and repeated the date over and over again. And…well, nothing happened. But I started thinking about the next best thing, and it got me thinking: picturing the rows and rows of mythology books at my school library. So I closed my eyes, pictured the library, and focused. And the room felt cold—a lot colder than my bedroom—and when I opened my eyes I was standing in front of a metal bookshelf. That’s when I kinda freaked out. It was dark, and everyone was gone, and I took off running for these big steel doors that led outside. But I stopped. Forced myself to calm down. I closed my eyes, pictured my bedroom, and focused. When I