“Cassie, please put your phone down. I’m trying to talk to you about something.”
Blinking, I look up from the Wikipedia entry on vaquitas. Apparently they are a form of porpoise and the world’s rarest marine mammal, and they’re almost surreally cute: like a child tried to draw a dolphin, and then finished it with a little smiley face. Which I appreciate isn’t really relevant right now, but I was hoping additional information might trigger some kind of memory and it doesn’t.
“Hey.” Will takes one of my hands and holds it. “Cassie, the thing is, I’ve had such a great time with you, I really have, but we’ve only just met...”
There are only logically two explanations I can see.
One: that Will wasn’t offered the job in the first timeline, but something, somewhere, shifted that reality. Maybe he picked up the phone when he didn’t originally; maybe something I did broke another cameraman’s leg, and he’s the replacement. Except that means the impact of my time hopping has spiraled out of control, and way, way out of my reach. In which case, what else could I be responsible for? What tiny decision have I made—to clean up a coffee spill, to rewind a TV show—that could have changed somebody else’s life immeasurably? The scope of it is too massive: I can’t even think about it.
The other, only slightly more reassuring explanation is that Will was offered exactly the same opportunity on our first run, but he turned it down to spend more time with me and didn’t let me know.
Which is incredibly sweet and absolutely gutting in equal measure.
Mainly because this time he’s decided not to bother.
“I don’t feel very good,” I say abruptly, standing up and knocking over the water jug for the third bloody time. “I think I’ll go home now, please.”
Lap dripping, I lurch abruptly from the table.
Except, now I don’t know if I’m back in the old loop or if I’m creating a new, different one, and if it’s me that’s making it repeat. I just know that everything I’ve done over the last few weeks—every hop, every effort, every tiny tweak or edit—has been for literally nothing. Worse than nothing. All I’ve done is speed up my dumping.
“Okay.” Will grabs a handful of sopping napkins. “Sure.”
As I stagger outside, I can’t help noticing that he didn’t ask me to stay, didn’t ask if we could finish our meal; he didn’t seem particularly surprised or upset. Will can change. Will doesn’t have a destiny, or a fate, or a predestined life already laid out for him. Will is capable of breaking the pattern and striking out on a different path.
It’s only me who keeps constantly repeating.
Breathing hard, I stand outside the shipping container with my thumbs held tightly in my fists.
“Cassandra?” Will emerges behind me and I realize with a pang that he doesn’t even know me well enough yet to call me Cass. “I’ve paid. I’m so sorry this has upset you so much. But this is only our fourth date, so I thought...”
This time his only is justified: it’s only been thirty-one dates in my world.
“Can we go home?” Swallowing, I look up and down the street, scrabbling to gather my thoughts. I don’t understand. This isn’t how time works. It can’t be. It doesn’t have wormholes that just zoom you forward or backward like a giant, cosmic game of snakes and ladders.
“Home?” Will frowns. “To...your house?”
“Oh. Sorry.” I shake my head in confusion, realizing I’ve accidentally slipped back into our old script and now it makes no narrative sense. “It’s just... I live nearby. Unless you don’t want to? That’s fine too. Obviously.”
Something gentle in Will’s face shifts. “Of course I want to, Cassie.”
A tiny flicker of hope lights inside me.
Maybe I’m “reading it all wrong” after all. Maybe I’m just jumping ahead again, making assumptions, preparing for my own heartbreak, planning for rejection. Creating a schedule for a future that isn’t going to happen. Will hasn’t actually broken up with me. He hasn’t even hinted that he’s going to. All he has done is take a job five thousand miles away that he didn’t take the first time round.
“Are you sure?” I study his face, trying to read it. “Really?”
“Yes.” Will nods, kisses my cheek. “Let’s go back to yours. We can talk about it there.”
We don’t speak the whole way back and all I want is to loop time so we never actually get there, but I’m too scared to do it now in case I screw everything up even more than I have already. All the way home, something blue is arching out of him, and I know most people think blue is sadness, but this isn’t.
It feels like Will is waiting for something.
“I’m sorry,” I say, automatically taking off my white Friday jumpsuit and hanging it carefully on the hook. That was a mistake: now I’m randomly standing here in my underwear. “I don’t know why I ran out like that. I’m not quite sure what is going on with me.”
There’s a silence as Will gazes around my bedroom. I frown—what on earth is he doing?—then realize with a sense of vertigo that he’s never actually been here before: this is the first time Will has ever stayed with me.
“I like it in here,” he says finally, studying my shelf. “It’s cozy. Like a cocoon.”
“Thank you.” I throw on a T-shirt and perch warily on my bed.
With respect, touching nothing, Will continues to perambulate slowly, gazing with interest at my beautiful clothes, at my books, at my plants, at my collections. It’s strange how it’s almost exactly the same journey Derek took, just a couple of days ago, but I don’t feel invaded or sullied this time: I feel seen.
With a small smile, Will picks up the color chart next to my bed.
He points at it. “Is this it?”
“Yes.” I nod, embarrassed. “It’s one of them, anyway. I have many.”
Will sits quietly down on the bed next to me and opens it, staring at it for a few seconds, peering closely at each of the little rectangles. “I just see colors,” he says finally. “I thought maybe I might see what you were talking about, but to me, it’s just paint chips, something you pick up at a decorating shop.”
“I know.” Everything has gone very quiet. “I’m a bit odd sometimes.”
“You’re not odd.” Will points at it, curious. “So this one, here. This...pale green. What does that feel like to you?”
I lean toward the color and feel a very specific wave of joy.
I’m not entirely sure what it is, though. That’s the thing I’ve never really understood about emotions. We’re given unhelpful words for them—sad, happy, angry, scared, disgusted—but they’re not accurate and there never seems to be anywhere near enough of them. How could there be? Emotions aren’t binary or finite: they change, shift, run into each other like colored water. They are layered, three-dimensional and twisted; they don’t arrive in order, one by one, labeled neatly. They lie on top of each other, twisting like kaleidoscopes, like prisms, like spinning bird feathers lit with their own iridescence.
And then a therapist says How do you feel, Cassandra? and you’re supposed to somehow know, just like that.
As if grappling for a rainbow you can feel in your hands.
“Well.” I close my eyes and try to identify the feeling. “That particular pale green feels similar to the way I felt when I was about three years old and I got up in the morning before anyone else was awake, and I managed to open the back door for the first time on my own and it was cold and bright, but everything was whitened with frost and a wood pigeon was making that very particular sound and I walked into the grass and my feet got wet, I saw a frog, and then my mum said Good morning, baby—how did you get outside on your own, you clever little monkey? from her bedroom window, and I realized she wasn’t asleep, she was there, she had been watching me the whole time. That’s what that green sort of feels like.”
Will is watching my face. “You remember being three that clearly?”
“Three.” I shrug. “Two, maybe. I remember pretty much everything, almost like it’s all kind of happening now. It gets...confusing.”
I suppose time doesn’t mean anything when you remember everything.
My throat suddenly hurts and the lights flicker.
Carefully, I fold up the color card and put it back on my bedside table: all the colors are contained and organized so neatly in straight lines. I wish my colors were too. I try so hard to make them.
“Shit,” Will says suddenly, rubbing his hand over the stubble on his face with a crackly sound. “I’ve screwed up, Cassie. I’m so sorry. I think...maybe I’ve been reading you wrong this entire time.”
I blink at him, not understanding. Reading people wrong is my job.
“In what way?”
“I didn’t quite...get you.” He gazes around my room again. “I think I was measuring you by me. I was assuming we’re the same, because that’s what humans do, isn’t it? Automatically. Without thinking. We see everyone through our own lens and assume it’s the only possible way of being.”