“Go ahead.” I nod calmly, barely glancing up.
Will sits down and pulls out his battered old laptop, and I have to resist a sudden, overwhelming urge to warn him that he’s going to spill an entire mug of black coffee on it in about three weeks’ time and lose a lot of very important files. Although he’ll also take this disaster in his stride so beautifully, and with such great humor and graciousness, it’ll make me fall for him just a little bit more.
Conscientiously, I return to fake-reading my book.
That sense of déjà vu is back: a familiar clatter of cups behind the counter, a door being slammed, the delivery of my mint tea, a baby starting to cry. It’s all exactly as it was the first time again, as if time has a preferred route—a mild-voiced but bossy GPS—and our detour is now over. All I have to do is exactly what I did the first time round, which means that in five, four, three, two, one—
“Wow.” Will looks up from his computer. “That’s quite some book for a Wednesday evening.”
With a delay to suggest I’m engrossed, I look up. “Is it?”
“The Iliad?” Will grins widely, and I notice the sweet gap between his front teeth, just as I did the first time round. “That’s more Thursday or Friday reading material, surely.”
“Not at all.” I smile back. “I try to save later in the week for other books written by a member of the Simpson family.”
“I’ve heard Bart’s version of King Lear is extraordinary.”
“Not a patch on Paradise Lost by Maggie.”
We both laugh and I feel it: something warm and rosy and pink, reaching across the table between us like fingertips. Apparently the obscene strength of my long-term memory is “kind of creepy”—and the weakness of my short-term memory “extremely irritating”—but I am abruptly grateful for the ability to remember this entire conversation, word for word.
It means I have a preapproved script to follow: one I already know works.
“You’ve traveled a lot,” I say, precisely on cue.
Will looks up again in surprise, so I point at the battered stickers plastered all over his doomed laptop. Thailand. Australia. The Philippines. Iceland. I did make this observation last time too, but I feel a lot more confident in the assertion now I know the story behind every single one of them.
“Not really.” Will beams, and something in my stomach abruptly glows. “I just like pretty and painfully stylish strangers in coffee shops to think I do. Sadly, my I’m A Very Interesting Person sticker fell off last week.”
I stare at him with round eyes.
Umm, he was supposed to say, I have, yes, mostly for work, what about you? And then I say, No, actually, I haven’t left England for a decade, and he says, Oh, that’s such a shame, why not? and I say, I’ve had nobody to go with and also the sun gives me painful hives and immediately regret it.
I cannot believe Will Baker has gone off script already.
“I...” What sticker? What’s he talking about? “Me? Am I the pretty stranger?”
“Yes.” Will scratches his head. “Sorry. That was a joke, and also a desperate attempt to flirt with you. I’ve been out of the dating game quite a while. Can you tell?”
“Yes,” I confirm. “That was bloody awful.”
Will bursts out laughing and I feel my entire body relax in relief.
“Can I start again?” He assesses me with a slightly different expression on his face, but I have absolutely no idea what it could be. “My official answer is yes, I travel a lot. Mostly for work. What about you?”
“Umm.” I decide to correct this thread immediately. “Not so much. My job is...mainly London-centric.”
“What do you do? Is it around here?”
“A PR agency just around the corner. What about you?”
I don’t think we talk enough, as a species, about how ridiculously difficult it is to make basic conversation. People act like it should be fun, but it isn’t. It’s like playing tennis, and you have to stay permanently perched on the balls of your feet just to work out where the ball is coming from and where it’s supposed to go next. Is it their turn? My turn? Will I get there fast enough? Have I missed my shot? Did I just interrupt theirs? Am I hogging the ball? Is this a gentle back-and-forth rally, just to waste time, or would they prefer one of us to just smack it into the corner?
It’s exhausting even when I don’t know all the answers already.
“Nope.” Will bites into his cupcake and the cherry drops on the floor. “Ah, sod it. That was the best bit.” He picks it up and pops it in his mouth, and I guess his food hygiene habits haven’t improved in this strand of the universe either. “I have a client based in Soho, but my studio is actually in Clerkenwell. I’m having to buy T-shirts on the run because I don’t have time to do laundry.”
Will grabs his khaki satchel and pulls out the paper Zara bag from earlier.
Blimey: he didn’t do this last time either.
“Why am I showing a stranger with clearly amazing fashion sense the rubbish clothes I just bought?” He grimaces. “Sorry again. It’s been a long week.”
“I want to see them.” I’m weirdly touched by the casual domesticity of this gesture: the incredible intimacy of it, as if somehow we are already a couple and he genuinely cares what I think. “Show me.”
It’s becoming rapidly clear that I can stick to the script as much as I like, but Will isn’t going to. He functions on an almost entirely ad hoc, momentary basis, saying and doing what he feels at any given moment, with no respect at all for the pencil drafts of his alternative existences.
This is going to be a lot trickier than I originally thought.
“You’re going to rue the day you let me sit opposite you.” Will reaches into the bag and pulls out blue, red and black T-shirts. “They’re just plain, but this one’s got a little logo, so...”
I start laughing in earnest now, because I’ve been teasing him about this T-shirt for months: he wears it when he “doesn’t think he’ll be taking off his jumper,” yet inevitably ends up taking off his jumper.
“Turn it over.”
Will does as he’s told and stares in horror at the giant Mickey Mouse emblazoned proudly across the back. “Oh, for the love of—Why would they put that on an adult man’s T-shirt? I can’t wear that now, can I?”
“Yet something tells me you will,” I accurately predict.
“Yeah, I totally will,” he admits with a dry laugh, looking delighted. “You got me in one. Shit. No wonder I’m still single.”
No wonder I’m still single.
And, just like that, we’re back to the original script. Will dropped that information and left it sitting there like gum the first time round too: knowing it would stick. Except last time, I wasn’t sure what it meant. Was he hitting on me? Alerting me to his dating availability? Was it simply an exchange of irrelevant data, the way conversation so often is? What if he was generally commiserating with me on his marital status because I looked like a person used to being alone for long periods of time too?
Last time, this one sentence sent me into a spiral of anxiety and embarrassment and white-hot confusion.
This time, I can feel the meaning: wedged in my shoe.
“Well,” I say, finally making direct eye contact with an almost Herculean strength, like lifting a boar above my head. “Now you know, maybe you can work out why I’m still single too.”
Will grins widely, meeting my eyes, and I cannot believe how much easier flirting is when you’ve already rehearsed it once before.
“Well, why don’t we—”
His phone starts ringing at exactly the right time and a spoon behind me clinks and a bag hits the floor and it’s happening again, just as it did in our original timeline. We’re back on the same path again. Maybe destiny isn’t such a stupid human concept after all.
“Hold that thought,” Will tells me a second time, picking up his phone.
Behind the counter, the coffee machine hisses and bright yellow runs through me in a line, like a trickle of paint. I know what’s going to happen next, because it already has. For possibly the first time in three decades, I’m not weighed down by trying to read someone’s colors and their facial expression and their body language and their tone and their words and also look out for jokes and sarcasm and flirting and secret insults and what is implied and what is left unspoken and somehow simultaneously filter out the chatter around me and the milk frother and the sensation of the chair under my bum and the movement of my fingers and position of my own feet and the breeze on my face and the sound of the doorbell ringing and the sound of my own heart and breath and the muscles in my own face.
For just a few seconds of my life I get to just be present, and it is joyful.
Will glances at me, frowns and mouths you okay?
I smile and nod.