I blink. “Do we? I don’t think I do.”
“Well, I definitely do.” Will smiles wryly. “I forget that it’s not me looking through the lens, and sometimes it’s actually...a polar bear.”
Even more confused, I try to piece together what he’s trying to say.
“I still don’t think I understand,” I admit finally. “What does this have to do with my paint chips? I’m so sorry. If you could just run it by me again, a little more slowly, I’ll try harder. It takes me longer to process things than ideally I’d like it to.”
“I thought you weren’t interested in me, Cassie.” Will turns to face me properly, legs bunched up on my bed. “At all. I saw things through my lens. In my eyes, we had a couple of really lovely dates, then we slept together.”
“Yes.” I nod. So far, so accurate. “True.”
“I asked if you wanted sex again, and you said absolutely not and fell asleep.” Will grimaces slightly. “So I was a bit hurt, my ego was bruised, but I thought grow the hell up, William, get over your ego, let the poor girl go to sleep. But when I woke up the next morning, you were gone. No note. No text. Nothing. You didn’t text later in the morning, and I was too embarrassed to. But I swallowed my pride and texted again days later, and you seemed disinterested. A little cold, if anything. You didn’t even remember discussing the exhibition date. Then you canceled it at the last minute, no mention of rearranging, and I thought, well. That’s that, then.”
I feel my mouth go suddenly dry. “But—”
My memories are landing on top of each other now: jumbled up, in a strange order. I remember every single thing that happened, but they all seem equally real, equally solid, happening simultaneously. Panicking, I scan my memories and try to piece the right timeline together. To undo screaming at Barry about my mug, I must have also deleted the text I sent after Will and I slept together, explaining that I had to leave early for work. I never sent it again—I was too humiliated by my behavior to remember—and I was too emotional and distracted to leave a proper excuse after running away from the exhibition, which made me look disinterested and cold.
Time is fragile; for every sweep of the broom, there are consequences.
“I left a coffee?” I finish lamely. “On your bedside table?”
“Look, it’s okay.” Will takes both my hands. “Honestly. This happens. You like someone, and they’re not as into it. Nobody’s fault. It’s just... I’m starting to realize I may have read you wrong. You’re...very difficult to read, Cassie. Your face is so beautiful, but a lot of the time you look far away. Detached. I make jokes, and you stare at me as if I’m the most irritating person you’ve ever met. A lot of the time when I’m talking, you look bored. I can see you thinking, assessing, judging, and I guess it just felt a bit like you were weighing me up and...finding me lacking. I mean, when you laugh—the entire room lights up. You make me feel like I’ve won the lottery. But in between...it’s like you’re somewhere else.”
“People in shops always think I work there,” I say abruptly.
Will blinks. “Sorry?”
“When I’m in shops. Any shop at all. Everyone always thinks I work there. Even if I’m not wearing anything that looks even faintly like a uniform, people will be like, excuse me, could you get me this in a size up, or could you tell me where the toilets are. Every single time I go into a shop.”
Will frowns. “I’m not sure I...”
“There’s something distant and frozen in my face,” I conclude. “I don’t look like a normal customer. A normal person. I look like I’ve worked somewhere for five decades and I’m about to hand in my notice. I look like I want to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Even when I don’t. Even when all my focus is matching the shade of a pair of red trousers to an orange shirt, and I’m enjoying it immensely. That’s just my face.”
“I see.” Will nods. “Yes, I’m starting to realize that.”
I’ve been so obsessed with chopping up time and stitching it back together, it didn’t occur to me that the final version wouldn’t be sewn together properly: that when I eventually tried it on, the hem would unravel, the collar peel away, the arms fall off. In trying so hard to connect with Will, I forgot to make sure that the narrative I left did too. All the mistakes, the errors—the bits of myself I was too scared to leave behind—were pulled out before they could do any damage.
Mistakes were flaws in my tapestry, so I ripped them all out.
“I’m never bored with you,” I say, and my voice sounds so calm and flat when my insides are ridged with storms. “I’m amazed by you, Will. You are...spectacular to me. But I find being around people so hard. Any people. There’s all this noise and light and color and sensation, all the time, and I don’t know how to read tone or emotions or jokes or sarcasm or flirting. It’s like all the things that everyone else can do automatically, I have to do manually. And I get overwhelmed. Constantly. That’s the face you’re seeing, Will. It’s me, trying to process everything at once.”
It’s true that I hate dirt and dog hair and lateness and mess and loud noises and crowds and being wet or muddy—and, truthfully, a lot of those things seem to come with Will—but it’s not a judgment. If I could choose, I’d roll around in mud and laugh easily and be covered in puppies and take the world in my stride, but I can’t—I have never been able to—and the judgment I feel about that has always been for me.
“Yes.” Will looks around my bedroom. “That all makes more sense to me now.”
There’s a long silence, and I can feel it: the end, like the knot at the bottom of a piece of string.
“I thought this was done,” Will says desperately. “She just... We had this instant... We’re just really similar, it was an immediate connection, and I think we want the same things. You’re spectacular to me too, Cassie, but when I’m honest with myself and I look into the future, I’m just not sure that we’re—”
With the tip of my finger, I gently trace the circular face of my old blue watch and wait for the world to collapse around me. And—as I wait—I think about how time, as it grows old, may teach all things, but that even when it doesn’t get a chance to, the lessons are probably there just the same.
“I love you,” I say, because now I know there won’t be another chance.
Then I close my eyes.
“You’re spectacular to me too, Cassie, but when I’m honest with myself and I look into the future, I’m just not sure that we’re—”
“You met someone else,” I say calmly.
“Yes.” Will nods. “I met someone else.”
30
“Cassandra.”
I’m not time traveling again.
“Cassandra.”
Ever.
“Cassandra,” Barry says a third time. “Are you listening?”
Once Will had kissed my cheek and gone—taking both socks with him—I spent the entire weekend sobbing in a ball on my bed and realized I’m now very much done. It’s too hard. Too painful. The experiment is over. Time travel is not for me. Thank you for the kind gift but please give it to someone else: I will not be navigating time and space any further.
Frankly, all I’ve done is make things considerably worse.
“Do you think she has a problem with her hearing? Like, physically? Do you think we should send her to get checked?”
Blinking, I attempt to drag myself back to the here and now.
“Sorry.” My boss still appears to be waiting for an answer. “I missed all that. Are you firing me again?”
In Barry’s defense, without time travel at least this time it’ll stick.
“Again?” He lifts his eyebrows. “Cassandra, if I fire someone, they tend to stay fired. No, I’m not firing you. We called you into the office to congratulate you, if you could just pay attention for thirty consecutive seconds in a row.”
“Synonyms,” I murmur, now truly thrown. “Consecutive and row. You don’t need to use both, Barry. Wait—you keep saying we. Who’s we?”
Confused, I spin round and spot Jack: tucked in the corner with his fingertips propped on the arms of the armchair like a tanned spider. Has he been here the whole time? How long has he been staring at me like that? My ability to block the entire world out is truly extraordinary and may need to be studied by science.
“Hello, Jack,” I say politely. “Why are you here?”
My emphasis accidentally goes on you instead of here and I watch his eyes narrow in familiar irritation.
“I won’t make any bones about it, Cassandra,” Jack says, standing up and walking to perch on the desk next to Barry like two head boys in a school office, getting ready to offer me a hallway monitor gig. “I originally arrived at the agency this morning to make an official complaint about you. It came to my attention over the weekend that the SharkSkin campaign looks absolutely nothing like the campaign I believe we agreed upon.”