Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BAD AUGUST
ACTUALLY LIKES GOOD AUGUST QUITE A BIT
Look at him. He’s so pretty. He’s so sweet. He clearly doesn’t understand a line of these calculations, but he’s here with me, swallowing his pride down to try to help me.
I like him so much.
And I hate this so much.
Last night, I thought a fling with him might be fun. But now… now everything’s changed.
Every second I spend with him, I’m finding it harder and harder to keep my hands off him. Then, when he said he likes me…
This cannot happen.
He’s too sweet, and he’s too fragile, and god help me, he has no idea he’s about to die—in two weeks, maybe less. That every second he spends with me is one of his last.
Would he be here if he knew? If he had any idea I’d done this to him? That I’m lying to him?
The way he looks at me, the way he trusts me so easily and so completely… How can I betray that?
But then, what good would it do for him to spend the last days of his existence in a panic? Or feeling like I’d let him down?
He’s as good as dead, and I need to accept that and stop this ridiculous pining before it goes any further.
Hopefully, his seeing the way I live will help. He seemed to have the idea that I’m brilliant, clever, put together—a success in some way. Well, now he sees what a complete fuckup I am. And who’d want that?
“So, I know this is all a bit of a mess.” I’m referring to the maths, but I could be referring to myself, the room, all of it. “I’ll tell you what happ—” I catch myself “—what I think happened. That’s what I’ve got written down here, more or less.”
He nods, eyes alert, looking like I’m about to make him sit his high school finals.
“Do you want to take your coat off?”
“Hmm? Yeah. Mmm.” He looks around for somewhere to put it, but there really isn’t anywhere.
I don’t tend to keep clothes, because I can’t, so it’s not like I have a coat rack or a wardrobe.
In fact, I only stole my shirt this morning in the hopes it would impress him. God, he hasn’t even seen it yet.
Immediately, I rip my sweater off, casually trying to track the movement of his eyes.
He runs them over every inch of my shirt.
It’s a deep auburn, black stripes, very professorly.
I was worried I might be a little overdressed.
August could wear a sack and look amazing with his physique, but I have to try a little harder.
Still, if his gaze lingering around my belt is anything to go by, it was the right choice. “You look hot, August.”
“What? Me?” He’s so cute when he blushes.
“Yeah, you.” I need to stop this. “Your coat?”
And I can’t even help it. I’m already across the small room, wrapping my fingers around the lapels of his coat.
Though I’d give my right arm to pull him closer with them, I behave, and instead ease it down over his shoulders.
His built shoulders. Over his big arms. “Jesus. How many hours do you spend each week building these muscles?”
He colours even deeper, adding a bashful smile that’s killing me. “Uh… I don’t know. A few.”
“A few…” I bet he knows exactly how many.
He crosses his arms over his chest, rubbing his biceps as if it would be possible to hide them. Christ, the way I’d kill to see them in the flesh… “Will you be too hot in that hoodie?”
“I’ll…” He passes his eyes over it, lips pressing together. “I’ll see.”
“Okay.” I lay his coat across the desk, then take my place by blackboard number one.
It’s warm down here in this stuffy room. Now I wish I hadn’t worn long sleeves. Sweat’s hardly going to impress him.
Undoing a cuff, I work neat folds over my forearm, commencing with, “I’ll explain it all in a nutshell. I promise it’s not as complicated as it looks.” I glance up to see if he’s listening, but for whatever reason, his eyes are locked onto my wrist.
Shit. Does he know I stole this shirt? Is that why he’s staring? How could he know?
Run distraction.
“I was working in the lab, upstairs in my universe’s version of Imperial College, when all this went down. I’d been working on… uh…” Better start at the beginning. “How much do you know about the Big Bang?”
I’m just finishing the second sleeve when I ask the question, and get zero response.
“August?”
“What? Huh?” His eyes fly up to meet mine. Pink-cheeked, his mouth drops open. “Hmm?”
“The Big Bang, August. How much do you know?”
“I know, um…” He raises a hand to his temple, looking flustered.
Damn, I’d like to make him more flustered.
“Well, okay, I know…”
“Take your time. This isn’t a test. I just want to know where we stand so I can explain it properly.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Some touch of determination takes him, and he seems to physically shake off his nervousness. He pulls his hoodie over his head and throws it down on the mattress, coming to stand dead in the centre of the room facing the boards.
Fuck me, what the actual hell is he wearing?
It’s a tight and tiny dark-grey midriff tank top with the logo of the band Slayer on it.
Some touchably soft, thin material, and his body…
Those biceps. His pecs. They’re enormous.
It’s like throwing a handkerchief over Saharan sand dunes.
He’s bulging out everywhere. And then his abs…
holy fuck, yes, the man has abs! He has perfect, deeply cut, undulating, desperately lickable abs, and that gorgeously pathetic excuse for a shirt is doing nothing to cover them.
“So, obviously, the Big Bang is where our universe came from. No one knows what caused it, but there are tonnes of theories. Basically, it blasted into existence very suddenly, and brought with it the few gases that became the building blocks of life. Um… hydrogen, beryllium. I don’t know… Lithium?”
His eyes are on mine, like I’m supposed to say something, but fuck, look at him. He’s like a statue of human perfection. “Slayer?”
“What?” He looks down, then his face cracks into a smile. “Oh. Yeah. I forgot I was wearing that.”
“You like Slayer?”
“Not that much. But I like the shirt.”
“I like the shirt,” I whisper, trying to keep all traces of drool out of it.
Christ, he’s biting his lip. I’m going to die.
“Am I wrong? Not Lithium?”
“Lithium?”
Abs. Abs. Abs. Abs. Abs.
“Oh! Lithium!” Oh, shit. He’s so clever. God, I want him. “Yeah, no, hydrogen, lithium, beryllium, and trace helium.”
“Yes, helium.” He clicks his fingers, and he has the sweetest, most satisfied smile.
He’s really studied this in his own time.
“So that all blasted out of nowhere, as far as anyone knows. The gases swirled about, formed stars, and those stars crushed the particles together, creating all the elements we know, then shot them out as stardust. Oxygen, neon, uranium, the carbon we’re made from—all of it stardust. And dark energy expanded the universe, dark matter filled up the space, and…
that’s about as much as I know. Universe expanding.
Stars bursting into life. Galaxies swirling.
Space, violent and beautiful, creating new worlds every second. ”
He’s dazzling. He’s alive with that same excitement I caught in his eyes last night when we went through the time slip. He’s lost in the magic of space, and I adore this about him.
I miss how I used to feel. Like he does. When it was this magical fantasy, this miracle of nature. “You’re right. About all of it. That’s your universe, that’s how it came to be.”
His nod is softly proud. “Then what about your universe? Is it the same?”
“As far as I know, yeah. We had our own Big Bang, probably the same one. Look at me, and look at you, and you can see we’ve run on parallel timelines, two universes expanding side by side.
So close. So similar. All of it in balance.
That cosmic dance—planets, moons, solar systems—everything in equilibrium in both our existences. ”
He lowers his head slowly, holding my gaze, expectant for the other shoe to drop. “Until?”
And here it comes. How to explain what I’ve done without implicating myself?
“Until someone figured out that maybe all universes don’t run on the same timetable.
Until someone thought, okay, there are these theoretical universes all side by side, overlapping, almost the same, but for a slightly different arrangement of particles that got spat out at the same time.
But then, what if there are others that maybe evolved faster?
What if some of them evolved more slowly?
What if whatever caused that Big Bang didn’t happen everywhere simultaneously all at once?
Our universe’s expansion is slowing, isn’t it? ”
He gives a fast nod, his shyness from earlier having given way to interest. “Yeah, I read that. That’s why some people believed in a Big Crunch, that the universe would expand as far as it could, but then snap back like a rubber band and crunch everything back down, maybe enabling a new Big Bang cycle. ”
My smile reaches deep within. “You’re so smart. It’s such a pleasure to do this with you.”
“Thank you.”
Okay, my bad. But it was worth that blush.
And it’s fact too. With any other August, this might have been hard. But he is delightful in every sense of the word.
Brain, get back to work.
“Um, I was saying…”
Biceps. Biceps. Biceps.
“Big crunch?” he prompts.
I’d like to crunch you…
“Yes!” I clear my throat to make myself feel vaguely professional. “So, if we know the expansion of our particular universe is slowing, a younger universe might be expanding faster, might it not?”
“It might, yeah.”