Chapter 10 Bad August #2
That’s the funny thing. He has no comprehension of how similar we are because, unlike me, he’s never met another one of us.
But I can see that to him, we must be worlds apart.
Even if I know he’s put milk and one teaspoon of sugar in my tea, just like I take it, without having to ask.
“This is why I like you,” I tell him, with perfect honesty.
“I’m the scientist, yet you’re the one doing the science.
Asking all the right questions. See, you are clever. ”
I also like you because I can make you blush like that.
He spills a bit of tea when his hand brushes mine, and I’m annoyed at the mess for interrupting the moment.
It’s given him an excuse to turn away again, and he’s taken it, sinking his head low as he grabs a cloth.
“I’d love to know how it happened. How we went in different directions after foster care.
You know, I thought about enrolling in university.
And then life just got in the way. And I wonder now, seeing you, if I had… ”
I step back for him to clean up the few drops that splashed down on his linoleum. “It’s a good thing you didn’t.”
He pauses to look up at me. “You don’t know that.” A few seconds later, when he throws the cloth back in the sink, he does it with a sharp motion, like I’ve annoyed him. “You don’t know much about me. Not if you thought I was a quantum physicist like you.”
My laugh, when it tumbles out, is more bitter than I’d intended for it to be. “You know that I’m here, trapped in your reality, where I shouldn’t be. Not the other way around. So you know things didn’t pan out perfectly for me.”
On a shrug, “It doesn’t sound all bad. Time travelling, hopping worlds.”
I want to tell him it’s a thousand times worse than he can imagine.
That he’s the first comfort I’ve found in years.
But if I tell him that—if I tell him the truth—he stops being a comfort, and he starts hating me.
So I shut the thought down, shut the conversation down, and throw out a recklessly flirtatious, “It’s certainly not all bad from where I’m standing. ”
God, that smile. Now he’s all flustered. Now he’s spilled his tea, and he’s back at the sink for his cloth, and truly, it’s all I can do to not walk over there and put my hand on his, soak up the mess, use it as an excuse to get close to him, then…
Before I know it, the whole scene’s playing out in my head. I have him bent over that sink, my hands grasping the abs I just know he has, while I work out years of frustration on his firm, perfect ass.
Fuck.
I think I need to sit down.
The armchair looks like the smartest choice. I barely trust myself to sit on the couch next to him.
The plan really wasn’t to come over here and try to fuck myself, but…
He’s coming over. I need to not stare at him. I need to talk about something other than how he’s so much better looking than me. “So what happened next?”
“I’m sorry?” He looks even more bewildered than I feel.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” He spits the words out fast, almost defensively, and just when I’m beginning to feel like shit for flirting with him, he lets out a huge laugh, and says, “Oh! Oh, you mean after foster care? Oh. Sorry. I was thinking about… something else.” His long eyelashes blink fast, and he throws a quick look at the sink.
Is he still pink from when I touched him?
Or is it something else? Is he thinking the same thing I was?
“After that…” A slightly trembling hand thrusts his hair back.
“Um. I finally received the life insurance payment. Then I moved out. On my own.”
I wrestle my eyes away from the raise of his sweater that hair thrust has caused. “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. I did the same. Did you move to Kentish Town?”
“Yeah.” That delectable smile. “Yeah. We got that great flat, right? On Cathcart Street?”
I chuckle at the absurd description ‘great’. “That flat was tiny and damp and rat-infested.”
“It was,” he laughs out. “How good was it? To have a place of our own.”
Some distant memory comes back with his words. I was proud. I was relieved. I was scared, but I knew it wasn’t going to be worse than what I’d been through already. Not ever again.
Yet I got out of there as soon as I could.
It was six months, and he’s talking about it like it’s a core memory. “I moved to the university campus after that. Student housing. I moved there six months later…”
My trailing off is supposed to lead him to tell me he did the same, but it takes him a while. Why won’t he look at me now? It’s like the patterns on the linoleum beneath our feet are suddenly fascinating. “I didn’t go.”
He says it so quietly I can hardly hear him.
That same protective something from last night flares up.
I hear myself reply, “That’s okay.” It’s odd that I feel the need to say it, but he seems so shy about telling me what happened.
But I’m him, so I don’t know why he should be.
“I just want to understand where our timelines split,” I try to reassure him.
“Mmm. Yeah, okay.” The way one edge of his lips lifts is both sweet and vulnerable. “You lived in the flat for six months? When exactly was it you decided to leave? Because I had planned to go to university. I, um… I enrolled and everything.”
I lean in a little closer. “In what?”
“Astronomy.”
My heart sparks. “Fuck. Me too.”
He leans in closer still. “But you’re a quantum physicist.”
“Same thing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Truly, it is. I’ll explain later. But what I need to know now is what stopped you. What happened? Was there an accident? Did something go wrong with the life insurance? Because I could never have afforded university if not for that.”
“No. No, that all came through. Even if it took a while. No.” His hands run along his thighs, and his foot’s tapping slightly. What doesn’t he want to tell me?
“It’s your life. I’m not here to judge you.”
He lets out a nervous laugh. “Oh, I think you would judge me. Because I judge me. Daily.”
“August, I don’t care. You must understand there are infinite possibilities for what you did next.
Every August in every reality hasn’t made every choice we’ve made.
And I don’t know for sure, obviously, but it seems to me you’re probably one of the most similar Augusts to me that there could be.
” I do know. You are. “Just speaking logically, it seems like you’ve made almost all the same decisions I have.
So why this? Why this one moment that set us on different paths? We need to discuss this. For science.”
His Adam’s apple works as he takes a long, no doubt evasive sip of tea, then his fingers grip the cup so tight I can see them turning pale. “Do you think it really matters? It’s all in the past.”
Maybe it doesn’t. But maybe it does, because this is the closest I’ve ever been to my reality, and given our time slip yesterday, it’s clear that us being together in this world is having more of an effect here than it ever has before in any other reality.
So I push him. “You said last night you want to do science with me?”
Now it’s his lips that press together, white, and I could swear they have a slight tremble when he stammers out, “I-I-I was tired. It was late.”
“You don’t want to do science with me?”
“I do. Yep. Um. Science. With you.”
Why is he so flustered right now? “Okay, well, let’s do science. What did you do? You enrolled in the degree, you probably paid a deposit on your student housing when you did that, because I had to. Yet you stayed in Kentish Town?”
“I did. I stayed… kind of. Another six months or so.”
“In that flat?”
“Yeah. On and off. I kept it. But I sort of… I went…” He licks his lips. “Travelling!” He lands on the final word loudly, like he’s just found the missing piece of a puzzle. Or the perfect lie.
I press him. “Travelling?”
“Yeah.”
“Travelling where?”
That knee tapping. “Everywhere.”
“Everywhere?”
“Yeah. Everywhere. Around the world. I went… I’ve been to a lot of places. I was travelling.”
It’s like pulling teeth. “Okay, but what made you do that? What was the one deciding factor? What was the single event that split our fates in two?”
His eyes are so wide when he finally looks up that I don’t think I want the answer. His nervousness is contagious, and whatever this is, I just know this is going to be a big fucking problem.
We both jump when a loud door-knock booms through the flat.
He’s swearing under his breath, rambling out something about how it can only be his landlady, and he doesn’t want to upset her, and how she cannot be allowed to see me, so he thinks I should hide behind the armchair.
“I’m not hiding!”
“Just duck down,” he begs under his breath. “For one minute. Please.”
“Just don’t answer,” I hiss back.
“I can’t not answer. What if she needs me?” He’s already halfway across the room, like she’s got a remote control on him, and his hand is swishing about the place as if that’s going to make me disappear.
Truly, I’m right on the verge of doing it, dropping behind the couch like I’m his secret teenage crush, but then he pushes the handle, the door swings open, and August’s frantic but welcoming smile drops. The atmosphere pulls taut, and he stands there, saying nothing.
There’s a hand on his waist.
A man’s hand.
It closes over his hip like it’s a natural motion. Like August’s hip belongs to that hand, whoever the fuck’s hand that is.
The harsh taste of bile assaults my throat. I had no idea it could make me this sick to see him touched like that, and even though he takes a step back, slipping out of the hand’s reach, it doesn’t make me feel any better.
I’m locked on, every second crawling by in slow motion, like I’m on the edge of a black hole.
Then in walks—and believe me, I know how outlandish this sounds—in walks Jon Bon fucking Jovi.