Chapter 27 Bad August
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
BAD AUGUST
EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THORN
It must be a spectacular sunrise out there, because the room is bathed in a thousand shades of red and orange, like I’ve never seen before. It casts everything in a glorious glow, a shining mockery of my life and what I’m about to do.
Because for all that, August is all I see.
The whole night, we lay with our arms wrapped around each other. Sleep was fleeting, snaps and gasps, because I didn’t want to miss anything. This is the only time the two of us will ever be happy together. It’s the only time we’ll ever be together at all.
I’ve spent hours meditating on what’s right. Do you tell someone the truth when you know it will hurt them? Would it hurt him more to never know why I’m doing this?
I can’t stand the thought of him wondering whether I chose to leave him. Doubting himself. Thinking he wasn’t enough.
Equally, I hate the weight of what I’m about to put on him.
Maybe if I didn’t tell him, he’d move on and forget me. Maybe I’d become nothing more than a terrible memory, some prick who used him and left. Maybe he’d find consolation in the arms of someone else. Someone who would love him the way I could.
Impossible.
No one could love him that way.
No one would have this black hole swirling and churning in their gut, like it’s swallowing their insides whole, at the thought of upsetting him.
He’s a part of me. And I can’t stand to leave him.
His eyelashes are long, his smile slight, his face perfectly at peace in the scarlet dawn. Arms stretched over his head, body long and lean, he’s a man who knows he’s safe and adored. Like he always should be.
But it’s time.
I’m quiet, skirting the bed. Not a sound as I find my clothes, slip back into them. I’m careful not to scuff a shoe or crunch any of the items we tossed off the bed last night.
The first sound to reach him is the click of his handcuffs closing.
His eyelids flutter, blink, then open properly. The room in red, the restraints on his wrists… then me, sitting here on the side of his bed.
He pulls his arms, trying the cuffs, then stares at me, bewildered.
I lean in, kiss him goodbye.
But he smiles. “You’re the best thing I could have woken up to.” He arches forward, takes another kiss, kicks the sheet off his naked body, and wraps a leg around me. “I have been dying all night to fuck you again.”
It’s painfully tempting. But I already feel like a sack of dried shit, and I’m not going to do this to him. “August… Listen. Um.” I pull the sheet up a little, letting it settle softly across his midline. “All that stuff I said last night about not developing feelings…”
He watches me, waiting, bated breath.
“I’ve developed them. I have strong and undeniable feelings for you.”
“Yes!” he cries, his grin delicious. “Sex worked!”
Even given the gravity of the situation, a smile catches me off guard. “It was very dishonest of you to manipulate me like that.”
“And what are you going to do about it?” He kicks the sheet back down, exposing his gorgeous body in full, his dick ready for me, and close to impossible to resist.
I make myself grab the sheet, but this time I pull it right up to his chin, settling a hand across his throat to hold it there. “I’m sorry.”
His face falls slowly as the realisation settles. He shuffles a little way up the bed to sit up as much as he can.
I hate this. I hate it so much.
I force out the words: “I’m leaving.”
“You’re not.” That simple denial of reality sums up our whole short relationship.
Impossible.
Not real.
Words that show he takes my full meaning, but refuses to believe it.
“I don’t want to go.”
“Then don’t.” His tone’s turned sharp, tipped with anger and fear, but not half so much as his eyes that I can’t bear to look into.
Dropping mine to the white sheets, I make my request softly. “Listen to me. I have things to tell you.”
“No.” I can hear the tears in his voice, and when I make myself look up, his cheeks are already wet, just the same as mine. I move a little closer to him, as close as I can be this last time, and hold his gaze. “I’ve been misleading you. This whole time. About everything.”
“Misleading me?” The words eke out of him with the clear stain of betrayal.
“Not about how much I want you. Or about how I want to be with you. August, you need to believe me, that’s the only true thing in my life. In this world. In all the worlds, the way I feel about you is all that’s solid and true. Believe that. And know it’s why I’m doing this.”
“You don’t walk out on people you care about,” he whispers. “You know that. You know that better than anyone.”
The sting of abandonment redoubles on both of us.
It’s not as though our parents had any choice but to die. Yet we still feel it. The hopelessness of someone being ripped away. Gone forever, just like that. The way we put that blame onto their corpses and their memory, whether it’s logical or not.
I try to calm him, reframe it. “Do you remember when I got here? And I told you about the coffee? That it was overflowing?”
“Yes. But you said you would fix it.” The accusation sparks crystal clear in his tone.
“I tried to.”
“Try harder!” he shouts.
“I can’t. I’ve done everything. And the thing is… The thing that I didn’t want to tell you…” It’s a short moment of relative peace when my eyes close on the scene, before I force myself to meet his heartbreak head on. “August, you said last night you wouldn’t want to know if you were going to die.”
He stops fighting the cuffs, stares at me, wide-eyed.
“You’re not going to,” I tell him quickly. “Because I’m not going to let that happen. But as long as I’m here, your reality gets worse.”
“I know.” He yanks at the chains, curling his legs to face me. “You already told me that. And you were working on it—we were working on it. Why is anything changing? Why today?”
“I lied.” There it is. Two small words, out in the open. A gateway to all the horror of the things I’ve done. The person I really am. “A portal will open for me, and I will move on. Only…” Here it comes. “The portal doesn’t open until I’m the last thing left alive.”
Horror dawns in his eyes, scanning me, as though desperate for a sign I’m lying.
“You’ve seen it happening around us. You’ve slipped through time with me, you’ve felt the fabric of this world pulling apart.”
“I haven’t. Not like you’re talking about.”
“It’s getting worse, and it’s happening fast, and you can see that.”
“We have time,” he protests. “We can fix this. Unchain me, I’ll help you—”
“We never had time, August. It’s moving on without us. You and me, we can’t be in the same place without destroying this world.”
“No. That’s bullshit. It can’t be that bad.”
I drop a finger over his lips to quiet him, so different to the last time I did it.
“I just wanted to be near you. You bring me so much peace. So much happiness. Just by being close to me. That was selfish. But I am selfish. I’ve been a horrible person, more horrible than you know.
I don’t deserve you, and I don’t deserve the…
” I want to say love. I do. I don’t know the word for it if it’s not love.
So I only tell him, “You’re too good for me.
And I want you to know what I’ve done. All of it.
So you’ll understand why I’m doing this.
And what an awful person you’re wasting your time with. ”
“I don’t care.” He pulls away from the headboard, locking a leg around me, trying to hold me to him.
“I don’t care if it was your maths or your formula that did it.
I don’t care if you haven’t told me all the details.
August, I don’t care. I don’t care. You’re good.
You’re good, and I won’t ever believe otherwise. ”
I drop my hand to his leg, wanting more than anything to throw my arms around him, to cry against his chest.
But it’s all false, whatever affection he might show me now. He won’t want me soon.
“What I’ve done, it’s so much worse than anything you can imagine.
I want to prepare you. But there’s nothing I can say that will do that.
So…” I have to get it out quickly, before my need for his approval gets the better of me.
“When I came to you, when I met you in the street, that wasn’t the first time I’d jumped worlds.
I lied to you from that very first day.”
His breath catches, dancing on his open lips, soundless.
“I’ve done it before, countless times. Hundreds of times. I’ve been living in this loop for years. But it’s not a loop, not really. It’s a new universe every time.”
He doesn’t say a word.
“I have three weeks. Each time I hop worlds, it’s three weeks.
I search, and I try to find the answer, the way to get back.
I’ve done everything. I’ve done it over, and over, and over.
I’ve found other quantum physicists. I’ve pleaded my case, begged them, held guns to their heads and made them work for me.
I’ve been all over the world. I’ve met so many people. And I’ve destroyed them all.”
His head shakes, my vision of him obscured by my tears flowing fast and free.
“Every time, it’s the same. I come here, I search, and I try, then three weeks later, it’s all fallen apart.
The world dies. Everything breaks. It must start in some distant part of the universe, and it falls away, piece by piece until one day, the final day, the portal opens.
And I go through. Then it starts again. I leave chaos in my wake. I leave death everywhere I set foot.”