Relative History, Part 4 / ?
By: C. Leuch
The work table in the center of the Batcave, normally pristine, was covered with various tools and electronic devices. In the center of it all was CJ, hunched over the device that Diane gave him, poking at various locations on it with a metallic probe. He had been inspecting, probing, zapping, dismantling, and otherwise trying to reverse engineer it for the better part of four hours, and he thought that he might finally be making some progress. It wasn’t the type of work that would generally be considered spectator friendly, but he hadn’t been alone. In the comfortable high-back chair in front of the computer sat Matt Owens, with Laura perched on his lap, her head resting on his shoulder. “So Candy and Rachel enter into a deal with each other to try to make Lauren go crazy. You know, start moving things to confuse her or giving misleading answers to questions, then they start spreading these rumors about her – real brutal stuff,” Matt said.
CJ gave a disgusted grunt, then put down his probe and picked up a voltmeter. “So did it work?”
“Oh yeah, by the end of the episode everyone was giving her these looks, talking about her, and she started to lose it.”
“Why are women so horrible to each other?” CJ asked, giving a glance toward Laura before returning to his work. She just rolled her eyes and went about nuzzling Matt’s neck.
“But THEN, believe it or not, Cody takes pity on Lauren, because he’s oblivious to everything that’s going on, and he ends up giving her the rose.”
CJ stopped what he was doing and looked at Matt, incredulous. “No way! I didn’t think Lauren would make it past the first week, and now she has a rose?!”
Laura sat up. “The fact that you two girls sit around and discuss The Bachelor…I mean, don’t you have better things to do?” she said.
“Well, yes, I DO have better things to do, that’s why Matt watches the show and tells me about it,” CJ said with a smirk, then started working on the device again.
“Girls?” Matt said, tightening his arms around her. “I’m all man and can prove it. In fact, I have proven it, several times and on several continents.” Laura sat up and gave him a look that tried to convey how adorable she thought he was, despite how easily his masculinity was threatened.
“I tease because I love you,” she said.
“And I love you because you tease,” he replied. Without any more discussion, she leaned over to kiss him properly. It was CJ’s turn to roll his eyes at the spectacle of it all, though he was well aware that he and Jenny were just as bad at that age. As the kiss reached into several long moments, CJ cleared his throat, bringing their attention.
“If you’re done, I think I’ve got this thing more or less figured out.”
Laura gave a reluctant sigh, looked longingly at Matt, then turned toward CJ. “And? What can it do?”
“See for yourself,” CJ said, then pushed a button on the device, causing a shimmery circle to appear in the air. All lingering passion between Laura and Matt evaporated in an instant, and Laura sprang out of his lap, walking in a wide circle around the porthole.
“Where does it go?” she asked, tentatively reaching a hand toward it, which CJ quickly swatted away.
“I’m not sure,” CJ answered. “There are some sort of coordinates coded into this thing, but I can’t tell if they’re relative or absolute. Does it go a set distance from its current location or to fixed position in space? Are the coordinates in degrees / minutes / seconds? Feet? Meters? Furlongs?” Matt snorted at that. “And, last but not least, will it bring us back to where it came from?”
“So let’s go look,” Laura said, gesturing toward it.
CJ held up a finger. “Rule number one is that nobody else goes through this thing until we figure out how it managed to transport Jon 28 years into the past. I don’t care if you are invulnerable and can fly – I kinda need you around.”
“Aww,” said Laura.
“So what gets used as a guinea pig instead?” Matt asked, rising from the chair and moving so that he was behind CJ.
“I’m glad you asked,” CJ said with a smile. He reached toward the workbench and grabbed a hollow ball with an electronic device taped inside it. With a push of his finger, he activated the device and a little light came on. At the bank of computers, one of the monitor screens changed to a map view with a red dot over Wayne Manor. “I have a transponder inside this ball. I’m going to toss it through the porthole, and Laura’s going to go get it.”
She folded her arms over her chest. “So, what, you’re training me to play fetch?” CJ just grinned. Laura sighed. “Yeah, I know, who else is going to do it?”
Matt bit his lip to stop himself from saying something that would put him in the doghouse for a very long time, and looked at CJ, who got the joke even without Matt saying anything. It was scary how much alike they thought sometimes. It was a bit of an odd feeling for CJ – he’d never had a friend who seemed to understand him so well, who had the same sense of humor and similar view of the world, even though they were quite different in terms of skill sets and knowledge base. Jenny, of course, understood him, too, but…she felt more like his other half, and what they shared went way beyond friendship. Matt felt more like a brother that he didn’t feel animosity toward. It was probably for the best, then, that he actually would be, by law anyway, his brother in the near future.
CJ gave Matt a wink, then tossed the ball up into the air a couple times as he suppressed a chuckle. After a few moments, he gave it a soft underhand toss and it disappeared through the porthole. Almost before it had left his hand, the computer screen shifted, centered on an area well west of Gotham.
“You know what to do,” CJ said to Laura with a wave of his hand. “Give me a call once you get there.“ She studied the computer monitor for a long second, then disappeared in a blur. A couple seconds later, his phone started ringing. CJ answered it quickly and put it on speaker.
“Well, this isn’t some evil lair,” Laura said. “I’m in the mountains, in a pretty isolated location. There’s nothing here except trees and…hey!”
“What?” CJ asked.
“I just got beaned by something. What the heck?” There was the sound of shuffling as she searched for the item.
“Don’t tell me what it is,” CJ said, then gestured at Matt to bring him a couple items on the far end of the work bench. Matt held up a marker and a more solid plastic ball, the type of mini-basketball that often came with playsets made for toddlers. CJ set the phone on the work bench and wrote a random number and letter combination on the ball before having Matt take a picture of it on his phone. He then covered the phone receiver with his hand. “How’s your spitball?” CJ asked Matt, handing him the ball.
“I was more of a curveball, slider kind of guy,” Matt said, turning the ball over in his hands.
CJ waved at the pothole. “Put a little mustard on it and toss it through.” As Matt wound up and zipped the ball through the porthole, CJ removed his hand from the receiver. “You find what hit you?” he asked Laura.
“It looks like a toy ball,” she said. “And that’s your handwriting on it.”
CJ felt the goosebumps start to rise on his arms. “Tell me what it says.” Matt brought up the picture he took of the ball as Laura read the exact sequence of letters and numbers off to him. “Thanks. You can bring that stuff back now.” He ended the call, then looked at Matt. They both smiled knowingly.
“It went back in time,” Matt said, and CJ raised his eyebrows. “Wow.”
Laura appeared at that moment. “So you mean to tell me that you threw this after you heard me get hit by it?” As both CJ and Matt nodded, her eyes got wide. “But how?”
CJ reached over and deactivated the porthole, pulling up a stool and settling onto it. “I think it has to do with velocity,” he said, absently grabbing the marker he had recently used and tapping it against the table surface. “The first time, it was just a light toss, but even then it was almost as if it arrived a split second before I threw it. The second time we put a little more juice on it, and it arrived, oh, a minute or two before we threw it.”
“So we know how Jon got sent back,” Laura said.
“But that’s about all we do know. The problem is that we don’t have any kind of hold on the actual numbers involved, and we won’t unless I do a whole lot more work. I think I can work out how the coordinates translate to where we found the transponder, but the time thing?” He sighed and reached for the device. “I have no idea what kind of speed that ball had either time we threw it, or how quick Jon was moving when he went though. And even if I did know, there’s no saying that there’s a linear relationship between the velocity of the object and the distance back in time that it goes. For all we know, it could be an exponential or logarithmic relationship, and to find out we would have to do a lot of testing and a lot of math.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, drawing concerned gazes from Laura and Matt. At that moment, an alarm went off on CJ’s phone.
CJ gave a small frown as he looked at the screen. “Justice League meeting tonight,” he said, swiping away the meeting notice. “They’re just going to have to get by without me for one night. I need to work on this…” He brought up his messaging app and started composing a text to his dad to let him know.
“Hold on a second,” Laura said. “Justice League?” Laura asked.
“I didn’t come up with the name,” he said, pausing his typing and looking up at her. “It’s basically a guy’s night…with spandex.”
“But…the Justice League?” Laura repeated.
CJ looked down at his screen, then turned the phone off without finishing his message. He was never one to pass up the opportunity to tell a good story. “So a bunch of years ago, Dad and Bruce decided that it would be fun to get together every now and then to BS and discuss the cases they’d been working on. When they would meet another hero from another community, one of them, usually Dad, would invite them to BS and discuss cases, too, and the other guys would meet new heroes and invite them, too. Eventually the gatherings became pretty large. Then someone suggested that a group that included some of the most powerful and recognizable beings on the planet deserved an appropriately epic name, and the Justice League was born. So now, once a month, we all get together without our wives, play cards, sometimes grill out….”
“Who is ‘we’?” Laura asked. “Because I know it doesn’t include me.”
“Barry Flash, Wally Flash, Green Lantern, other Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Jon… Dad and Bruce, of course…”
Matt got a faraway look on his face as CJ listed off a few more names, then he snapped his fingers, interrupting the discussion. “Flash!” he said excitedly, then looked at CJ.
“What about him?” Laura asked.
“Remember that time we went through my comics and you helped me separate fact from fiction?” she nodded. “The cosmic treadmill…”
“Was based on a real device,” Laura finished, an enthusiastic look on her face. She and Matt looked at CJ, who suddenly knew where they were going.
“So we could theoretically send someone back to get Jon without having to do continuous testing in this stupid thing,” CJ said, pointing to the device.
“And it should have a counterpoint in the past that can be used to get back,” Laura said.
CJ pointed at Matt. “You, sir, are a genius.”
“You, sir, should look in a mirror,” Matt said back.
Laura rolled her eyes. “Oh, get a room you two.”
CJ smirked. “Can’t. Apparently I have a meeting to get to.”
“So do you guys seriously go in costume?” Matt asked. “Because if you did, I want a picture.”
“Capes allow too many opportunities to cheat at cards. So, no, we don’t meet in costume. Besides, most of these guys have neighbors. We meet in their back yards in costume and we blow the whole ‘secret identity’ thing.”
“Are sidekicks allowed?” Matt asked, looking at Laura, who was not amused by the comment.
“Yeah, what the heck,” he said to Matt then turned to Laura. “You can come, too.”
“Why do I get the impression that you need a ride?” Laura asked. CJ shrugged.
“Dunno. But it’s here this time. Come on, let’s go upstairs so those guys won’t have to suffer Bruce alone.” With that, CJ ushered Laura and Matt up the long staircase out of the cave.
***
It was dark in Kansas when Jon returned to his grandparents’ farm, though the moon provided enough illumination that enhanced vision wasn’t necessary to navigate. The stars painted a much more radiant portrait in the night sky here than it did back in Metropolis, and he took a moment to appreciate the view before proceeding toward the bright lights of the house. He knocked on the door and called out a greeting before entering.
“Come on in, honey,” Martha replied from the kitchen. As Jon strode through the house to her location, he noticed that she had found his phone. She gave a sniff and ran the back of her hand across her eyes, trying to act nonchalant as he approached. He wasn’t fooled, though, and a pang of sympathy and guilt stabbed through him.
“Grandma?” he said, drawing a sideways glance from her.
“It will take me some time to get used to that. There’s no way I’m old enough to be anyone’s grandma.” That brought a smile to her face, which helped soften his mood.
“Well not yet, anyway,” he said, sitting down next to her. “So what are you doing?”
She gestured with his phone. “Oh, I wanted to see those photos you showed me again, and then I indulged in the other photos you have on this thing, and, well…” she looked momentarily embarrassed as she handed him the phone. “After a while, I think I got a little lost in it all.”
Jon took it and opened the photo gallery, noticing that she had been in the middle of the photos he had taken last Christmas. “I think you just need the right guide,” he said, scrolling through a couple of photos before bringing up the list of videos. “There’s a story behind all these, and I like to think I’m pretty good at telling stories. Of course, a video is worth a thousand words.” With that he opened the video of the kids opening Christmas presents at the family gathering. Christmas was one of the few times throughout the year that the whole family was able to get together, and it was always an epic party. Martha watched in rapt attention without saying a word for a long minute, then as the camera panned across the room, Jon started pointing out who everyone was, and the spell seemed to be broken.
“Where was this taken?” she asked, as the video image stopped on Lois and Clark.
“Well, we used to have Christmas at Mom and Dad’s, but the family has outgrown the dining room there, so we moved it to CJ’s place in Gotham City.”
“But it looks like a hotel ball room,” Martha said. The room was probably overkill for them, but it was used so seldom that CJ had thought that it deserved a little love and attention. Besides, if the kids got too excited, it left plenty of room for them to run around, which Adam had started doing in the video.
“It’s Wayne Manor,” Jon said, causing Martha’s eyebrows to raise in surprise. “And that,” he said, pointing to the screen, “is Bruce Wayne.”
“And your brother lives there?” Martha asked, so Jon proceeded to tell her the story of CJ Kent’s untimely death and the birth of Sam Wayne. It also required explaining the situation with their powers, and the fact that CJ couldn’t fly. At some point during the story, Jonathan walked in, pulled over a chair and sat next to Martha, his eyes glued to the video.
“I admit, I had that Batman pegged as a lawless thug,” Jonathan said with a shake of his head. “But if he could do something like that for your brother, he’s a saint in my book.”
“Well, I’m not going to tell you that you’re wrong about him being a vigilante, at least at this point in time,” Jon said. “But age and perspective can do a lot to a person. It’s still a few more years until Dad officially meets him, and more time yet until Gotham starts to turn around a bit. Having someone like Superman showing him that there are other ways to do things, that hope can be just as strong of a force for change as fear, had to have affected him, too.”
“He looks like a doting grandfather,” Martha said, smiling at the screen. Bruce had intercepted Adam, who was running in large circles with an action figure thrust above his head, coaxing him back to the family and ultimately into helping his young cousins figure out one of their new toys.
“And don’t think that Dad doesn’t let him hear about that,” Jon said with a smile. “Seriously, though, I think my brother and his family are probably the best thing that’s ever happened to Bruce.”
“Having a family can give you an all new perspective,” Martha said, looking at Jon knowingly. On the screen, the phone had been passed to CJ who had turned the view back to Jon for a moment before turning it toward Jenny, who was holding her droopy-looking one-year-old daughter. Little Kate was a doll, her hair so light it was almost blonde, gathered into two petite pigtails with a used bow from a present centered between them. Her little dress was an iridescent red, though lunch had left its mark. As much as Jen liked to dress her up in the cutest available fashion, Kate seemed to take delight in making her dresses dirty and roughhousing with her brother. She was already showing flashes of a strong personality, and Jon could see that she was destined to be a tomboy, much to her parents’ consternation.
“Looks like this is too much excitement for our little princess,” CJ said off camera, causing Jenny to smile gently and nod knowingly. “Turns out all you need to make her fall asleep is the assembled Kent family,” he quipped.
“So what are you saying?” Clark asked.
“That you’ve been telling the same stories too often,” Bruce Wayne chimed in dryly.
CJ laughed. “I’m just saying that she’s normally a creature of the night,” CJ said. “Which is probably inevitable, given her DNA. But inexplicably she goes right to sleep around you guys.” The camera panned to Clark, whose eyes held a twinkle as he gave a duck of the head.
“So, Clark, do you do bedtime stories?” Jenny asked, causing Clark to laugh.
“I think he could still recite ‘The Cat in the Hat’ from memory,” Lois said from beside him, placing her hand in his and intertwining fingers.
“I still have awkward dreams where everything is spoken in Dr. Seuss,” he said, drawing chuckles from around the room.
“I think she’s more the ‘Goodnight Moon’ type anyway.” Jen said.
“Probably just as well,” CJ said. “If you’re here every night the kids might start to wonder how it is that their grandparents from Metropolis are able to keep showing up Gotham. We have another dozen years or so before they can start getting suspicious about your travel habits and tendency to disappear.”
“With your luck Adam will have it all figured out in Kindergarten, shortly after he starts reading the comics,” Jenny said, which seemed to have the effect of silencing CJ. Jon seemed to recall a look of horror on his face at the thought, which caused him the snicker involuntarily with the memory.
Laura snuck up behind her father and gave him a hug. “Your stories could never be boring, Daddy,” she said.
As Jon and his grandparents watched the video in silence, it occurred to Jon how lucky he was, how lucky his whole family was, and it all started with the two people seated next to him. Their love for a boy who fell from the sky, their values, guidance, good humor, and patience passed down through the generations to create the family that he saw. Everyone in that video owed a debt of thanks to the Kents, and if his impromptu trip to the past served no other purpose, it at least allowed him to show them the future that they created.
“Before I walked up your drive, did you ever think that the future would look like this?” Jon asked quietly.
His grandparents didn’t look at him, but continued to watch the video until it ended a few seconds later, then handed him the phone. “Right after we found Clark, I used to think about the future,” Martha said. “At first I thought about his real parents, and braced myself for a future where he was taken away to wherever he came from. Then, as time went by and our future together became more certain, I allowed myself to think about birthdays and Thanksgivings and teenaged rebellion, maybe a loving girlfriend…standard things. But then, when his powers developed, the thoughts turned darker. And while I still dreamed of a future that held a loving family, for a while even a normal life seemed out of reach. But then he landed in Metropolis, and met Lois. Even then, Superman made sure his life wasn’t ever going to be normal, that the future would be filled with uncertainty and the real possibility that he would be taken from us too soon. Realistically, before you walked down that drive, I thought the future held a laundry list of villains and struggles over the future of Metropolis and the Earth in general, lots of anxiety and questions, but plenty of love. But this,” she said gesturing toward the phone, a tear forming in her eye, “is beyond even my most ambitious dreams.”
“It’s all thanks to you, you know,” he said, and Jonathan put an arm around Martha as she sobbed once, though her smile was in stark contrast to her tears. “If you want to see more, I have a few other videos on here – Eddie and Ellie’s second birthday, their first trip trick-or-treating. And plenty of other photos, too. You deserve to see the future that you helped build…I want that for you. Look through this thing all you want, at least as long as the battery will let you. And when you’re done, you can play all the sudoku that you want.”
Martha nodded and picked up the phone again. Jonathan gave her one more hug, then stood up and clapped Jon on the back once. “What I want to know,” he said, “is what happens in baseball in the next 28 years.”
“Oh, you are in for a treat,” Jon said, rising to follow his grandfather into the living room, leaving Martha to go through the photos in peace, though she occasionally asked questions that ended up launching him into interesting stories. In between the stories he told his grandfather the history of baseball to the best of his recollection – the 1998 home run race, the steroid era and subsequent questioning of everything that came out of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, moneyball, the breaking of baseball curses from the Red Sox to the Cubs, and the fact that the Royals finally broke through and won the world series. “That happened when I was in high school,” Jon said. “I had no idea my Dad was such a closet Royals fan, but when they won he made sure to let everyone know.”
The conversation transitioned to television trends, and as Jon was marveling over the VCR, he heard the distant wail of weather sirens. Jon had been so lost in conversation that he hadn’t even noticed the gathering clouds and distant flashes of light behind the curtains, and he was adept enough at filtering out background noise that the distant roll of thunder went undetected. The tornado siren, though, had been hard to ignore. As Jon stood and trained his senses to the storm outside, his eyes widened as he saw the telltale ridge in the sky, and the swirling winds starting to tilt out of the clouds a couple counties to the west. A tornado was imminent, and it appeared to be very close to a town.
“I have to go help,” he said and tensed his muscles in preparation to take off, but before he could make a move, Jonathan’s hand touched his arm.
“If you do, I would recommend taking one of Clark’s suits. Martha always has a few extra around just in case, and there would be a lot fewer questions if the folks out there believed you were him.”
Jon nodded then turned toward the room that served as his grandmother’s sewing room until the day she died. Sure enough, suits in several states of construction were present throughout the room, though it wasn’t too hard to locate a finished one amongst the others. He changed into it, then paused, tugging at the cape and sighing audibly.
“Everything okay?” Martha called, making her way to the doorway a moment later.
“Every time I wear my dad’s suit, I’m reminded of how much I HATE capes,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. It was especially true tonight, when he would be dealing with wind. As long as he was acting the part of the original Superman, though, there was not much he could do about it.
“You look great,” Martha said with a smile. “So very much like Clark. I’m sure he’s proud of you every day.”
“Yeah, me too,” Jon said softly, forgetting about the cape. “Well, wish me luck,” he said, and with that, he took off to help save western Kansas from the ravages of the storm.
---
Lois sat on Clark’s lap as the news of the nation flashed across the television screen in front of them. They were both in various states of undress, the friendly game of strip poker that they had indulged in shortly after Jon left quickly degrading into more pleasurable pursuits. Clark had lost all track of time and the world in general as he had given his attention to his wife, but now, in the afterglow, the news couldn’t be ignored. Pictures out of Kansas showed Superman stopping several tornadoes and cleaning up the aftermath of others, then saving residents from localized flooding.
“Thank God Jon was around to help those people,” Clark said, watching the man who so closely resembled him effortlessly and unquestioningly take on the Superman persona, wearing a suit that was no doubt provided by Martha. “He looks so confident.”
“He looks…Super,” Lois replied, then sighed. “Almost as if he was born to do that.”
Clark gave her a curious glance. “What exactly are you trying to say?”
Lois twisted in his arms so that they were face-to-face. “Well...he’s obviously a genuinely nice and caring person, they type of person that I could certainly see being friends with. But what if, wherever he’s from, we’re not just friends.
“If we’re not friends, that makes us…” Clark’s eyebrows raised as he waited for her to finish the sentence.
“Family,” Lois said. “And he admitted as much. I mean, even a blind person could see the resemblance between you two. He wouldn’t say what the exact nature of your relationship was, which is in and of itself suspicious, but it wouldn’t take much imagination to think you were close relatives of some sort – cousins, maybe.”
“Yeah, I can believe that,” Clark said with a nod and a smile.
“But I think it’s something else. What if – and I know this is probably a stretch – what if he’s not from some parallel universe or dimension? What if he’s from… the future?”
“Making him…?”
“Our son.” Lois’s voice was soft, sincere, and the words hung in the air between them for a few long moments. “It explains a lot. Why else would he go to your parents instead of us for help? And why would they so readily take him in?”
Goosebumps rose on Clark’s arm as he pondered the question and replayed in his mind the interactions that he’d had with Jon since he arrived. There were some things that he had said, when put into a different perspective, could make the whole thing very believable. There were other things that he didn’t say that, if he allowed himself to think about, could be filled in to paint the picture that would back Lois’s assertion. He seemed to speak very deliberately at times and generalized a lot of his answers, but Clark had noticed that certain words or phrases or acronyms had slipped through anyway, things that seemed like gibberish, but meant something to him. Blogging, for example, or social media, whatever that was. But possibly the most damning thing he had said happened earlier in the day, when he had been outside the Daily Plant and asked WHEN he was. That said it all, didn’t it?
“No,” Clark said suddenly.
“No?”
Clark sat up a little straighter and began gesturing as he spoke. “We know time travel is possible – we’ve traveled in time ourselves – but we either were accompanied by H.G. Wells or traveled in his machine when we did. Wells has been nowhere to be found lately-“
“And thank goodness for that,” Lois said.
Clark laughed once, then continued. “And it’s not like you could travel through time by his methods without knowing it. If Jon managed to get here without knowing how or why, then that can’t be it.”
“But who’s to say that there isn’t some other method of travelling through time? One that can be accomplished without you even knowing that you had? Why couldn’t that technology be developed in the next quarter century or so?”
Clark shook his head. “But we’re talking about probabilities, here. We know there are other living Kryptonians, that I wasn’t the only person to make it off the planet before it exploded. Couldn’t a relative of some sort – a cousin, like you speculated – have also escaped? In the spectrum of what’s possible, I’d say that was more probable.” He paused, looked Lois in the eye, then diverted his gaze out the window. “I might look human, but we both know I’m not. My body works so much differently than a human body…how could it be even remotely possible that we could…?”
Lois put her hand on his face and applied pressure until he was looking at her again. “All it takes is a little chemistry,” she said with a sly smile. “And if there’s something we have in spades, it’s chemistry.” The hand that had been on his cheek worked its way around to the back of his head, and she pulled him into a tender kiss. The tension that had been in his body seemed to drain away, and he was at peace again as she pulled apart. “There are infinitely more things, both tangible and intangible, that you share with the human race than not. You are, in fact, the most human person that I’ve ever met. That must count for something.”
He tightened his arms around her and leaned in for another kiss. “Time will tell, I suppose,” he said. “But for now?” He looked at the television, with more pictures of Jon saving the day. Every now and then Jon would give an angry glance back toward his cape, a little detail that Clark couldn’t help but smile at. “I’m just glad we’ve gotten the chance to meet Jon, wherever he’s from. The fact that he exists at all fills me with…hope, I guess.”
“Well, now you know what the rest of the world feels like when we watch you,” Lois said. With that, she twisted back around so that she could lay her head on his shoulder, then reached for the remote and changed the channel on the television.
