A small wave of déjà vu, as if I’m on a boat.
“I’m very tired,” I attempt, trying my best to stay friendly. “Can we have whatever this conversation is in the morning?”
“Do I make you nervous, Cassie?” Derek smiles at me.
“Yes,” I admit this time.
“I don’t mean to, you know. I just want you to be comfortable here, Cassandra. My casa is your casa, after all. Or, I should say, your Casa-ndra. Ha ha.”
Oh, look, he obnoxiously extended it. I look desperately for an escape route, but there isn’t one because this bedroom is supposed to be it.
“So, are you dating someone?” Derek reaches toward me and picks a ball of lint off my dressing gown; I flinch and jump away. “Do I know him? He’s a lucky guy, whoever he is. You’re quite the catch, if I do say so, Cassandra Dankworth.”
My tongue finally unsticks.
“Leave,” I say, holding the door open. “Now.”
“Whoa.” Derek blinks. “That’s a bit rude. Why are you freaking out? I was just being friendly. You’re reading it all wrong, taking it the wrong way. I didn’t mean anything weird by it or anything.”
I hesitate, studying him carefully. His colors and his words and his face don’t match, and it’s incredibly confusing. Last time he said I was reading it all wrong, taking it the wrong way, and I do it so often—destroy so many relationships, romantic and otherwise—that I believed him. I’m still not sure, it’s all very confusing, but the inconsistency is suddenly making me doubt both of us.
“Sorry,” I say uncertainly. “It’s just... I’m tired, Derek. It’s been a long evening. I really need to go back to bed.”
“No worries.” He looks at my bed, then stands up and sways slightly. “Look. Cards on the table. I know you have a bit of a crush on me, Cassie. It’s really obvious. You can’t meet my eyes, you talk nonsense when I’m around, go red constantly, scurry out of a room if I’m in it. It’s really cute. Nothing to be embarrassed about. If I wasn’t with Sal, then... Well, who knows?” He smiles, sadly. “But I am with Sal. I love Sal. That’s the thing. It’s a no-go between us. I came here tonight to tell you that.”
Is that a thing people do? Come into other people’s rooms at midnight to finger their belongings and declare love for someone else? It doesn’t seem very logical, but people aren’t very logical, so how the hell am I supposed to know?
“I can’t meet anyone’s eyes,” I point out. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“But you’re looking at me now,” Derek points out triumphantly, as if he’s caught me out in a lie. “So that’s clearly not true.”
“Because now all I can feel is shock.”
Hope blossoms abruptly. This might be my chance to set the narrative back on the right path. I just have to take it slowly, carefully: step through the crackling undergrowth one cautious foot at a time like a tiny animal evading a hungry tiger.
With all the energy I have left, I make unblinking eyeball contact.
“I am so sorry that I have given you the wrong impression,” I say as clearly and as loudly as I can. “But there has been a bit of a miscommunication. I do not fancy you, Derek. I do not find you physically, mentally or emotionally attractive. If anything, you repulse me. Sexually, but also on a much deeper, more spiritual level. Even if Sal wasn’t so nice, even if I didn’t live with you both, I would never want to be involved with you in any way. Ever. Even with all the infinite chances that time might give me.”
It’s not very “friendly,” admittedly, but it should at least clear the situation up. A Bit of a Miscommunication should be the title for my autobiography.
“Gotcha.” Derek winks. “Loud and clear.”
I stare at him. “Why did you just wink?”
“No reason.” He grins at me. “I hear you. That’s all I’m saying.”
“It doesn’t feel like you do hear me.” I hesitate, frowning. “That wink feels like it’s communicating something else entirely.”
“Nope.” Derek stretches. “You don’t fancy me. I don’t fancy you. We’re on exactly the same page, Cassie. So we’re all good.”
He finally ambles out of my bedroom, then leans drunkenly on the door frame.
We stare at each other.
Derek is still grinning and it’s nice that he’s taken the rejection so well, but I can’t help feeling that it’s because he hasn’t taken it at all. I’m not sure I can tell him he repulses me again, though: twice would feel a bit cruel.
“I looked you up,” Derek says, apropos of nothing. “Did you know that Dankworth is one of the rarest surnames in the country? There’s articles about it and everything. Dankworths are on the brink of extinction, apparently.”
He’s studying my face, inordinately pleased with himself.
“Yes,” I say cautiously. “I know.”
“And you are surprisingly absent online, Cassandra,” he continues. “Like, nowhere to be found. No social media accounts. No online profiles. You work in public relations, yet you do not appear to exist on the internet. Which seems strange. As if you’re hiding something. Or from someone.”
I wait, then lose my patience. “Get to the point.”
“I met the hot girl who came here the other day, looking for you,” Derek concludes with yet another wink. “Very pretty. Supercute. So if you’re a secret lesbian, Cassandra, that’s something I could totally support. You know? Like, really get behind. If you catch my drift.”
I have suddenly never been this tired.
Ever.
It would be so easy: to rewind time, hear the knock, not answer the door. But I suddenly don’t want to. I’m getting sick of traveling through time. All it seems to do is carry me to places I don’t want to be.
“Wrong conclusion,” I say in exhaustion. “It’s perfectly possible to fancy men and still not fancy you, Derek.”
And I shut the door in his face.
27
Except—something has gone wrong.
I’m not sure where it is or what has caused it, but I feel it the moment I wake up the next morning like a puncture in a bike tire. Just a tiny hole in time, yet somehow it’s just enough to let all the air out and send everything wobbling in a completely different direction.
At first I think it’s Derek, but when I bump into him in the hallway on the way to work, he eyes me sweatily over a glass of water and says: “Did we tête-à-tête last night, Cassie? It feels like maybe we talked, but I can’t for the life of me—”
He ends the sentence by running to the bathroom and vomiting with the door open, so it’s probably not him.
Then I worry that it’s Sal—that somehow Derek may have said something to her when she got back last night—but she’s in the kitchen, humming and fiddling with some pastry, and when I walk in she brightens.
“Morning! I am making croissants.” She eyes them dubiously, unsure of this statement. “By making, I mean defrosting and twiddling them around, but I still feel quite French and sophisticated nonetheless. Would you like one, Cassie?”
So I’m guessing it’s not her either.
I politely decline—it’s a sweet offer but that’s a lot of handling—and somehow make it to work, still trying to feel the shape of the day with my fingers. What is letting all the air out? But as the day careers forward, it doesn’t seem to be Barry, or Sophie, or Anya, Miyuki or Anton. It’s not Jack or Gareth or the SharkSkin campaign, which is taking an almost bewilderingly better direction.
And I’m not sure how I know it isn’t them—given that the original timeline is rapidly becoming fainter, like a rubbed-out pencil line on a piece of paper—but I can feel it, in my gut: they’re not the perforations I’m looking for.
At eleven thirty on the dot, I text Will:
Hey! So sorry about last night.
How was the exhibition?
I wish I could have made it! Cxx
It’s the same text I sent the first time round, at exactly the same time.
Will doesn’t reply.
I fake-phone a few more journalists and send some more copy-and-paste emails; Barry comments on the predictability of my pink Thursday jumpsuit, yet there’s still no response from Will.
It’s silence so solid I can squeeze it with my fingers.
And as the day hurtles toward an end, I can feel everything flattening, becoming unstable, as if time has leaked out. What has changed? I didn’t go to the exhibition originally, right? I sent precisely the same text the next day. Will replied with No worries! It was great, you were missed! Dinner tomorrow night? xx
Except this time he doesn’t, and the only difference I can find is that in the original timeline, Will and I hadn’t had sex yet. For a brief moment, I worry that this is the difference and this is exactly why you’re supposed to listen to the laws of the internet; then I remember it’s Will and I’m being ridiculous.
He’s a decent man; I do not think I have repelled him with my vagina.
But I still don’t know how to fix it, or what to do to make it all return to its proper pattern, so while I’m walking home, I break yet another internet rule and double-text out of sheer desperation:
Everything OK? X