Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
BAD AUGUST
IN THESE ARMS
It takes a long time for me to let go of him. I’d happily stay here like this forever, even awkwardly balanced on a too-small desk, hoping somewhere in the back of my mind that we haven’t stained the varnish.
We’re closer to the next world now, undoubtedly.
I have no idea what it’s like outside this room, but I’m genuinely impressed that August’s friends aren’t back already, banging on the door and asking where their portal is.
Yet I know we did something. It’s not just that strange glow we created—the charged particles—whatever we’re doing to the fabric of existence around us.
I can feel something more. An energy shift.
It scares me that we can do this—that I’m letting him do it.
He’s loving in a way I’ve never experienced, and I’m addicted to him.
I can’t stop myself any more than I could halt the explosion of a supernova.
But I’m terrified he’s going to wake up one morning, see what we’ve done, and hate me for it.
It’s not in August to destroy. It’s not in him to turn a cold eye on a scene the way I’ve done, over and over. The August I’ve come to know will probably turn this all inward.
But I’m in too deep, and I’m never leaving him again. Not unless he asks me to. Not unless that grim day comes when he finds himself riddled with guilt, and all my love is no longer enough.
I’ll leave that for him to decide.
It takes us a while to get things looking decent, several furtive trips to the bathroom upstairs. But we do, then we sit and we wait. And wait.
I’m pleased they’d think we need three hours.
August’s stretched out on the floor, head on my lap, staring up at the ceiling. I could look at him all day. He’s precious. Even if his features are mine, they’re not. His expressions are all his own, his moods, the way they shift his features in ways they’d never shift mine.
My fingers find a tendril of his hair to toy with, and he smiles up at me. I’d give immortality a thousand times over for one more day of this peace.
I lean down and kiss his forehead. He catches me on the way back up, pulls me down for one against his lips. “What are you thinking about?”
“I’m thinking that you can’t possibly realise what you’ve done.”
“Yeah, I do.” Words so casually spoken. “I’ve chosen you.”
My heart’s somewhere between gold-plated and dropped on the butcher’s shop floor.
Then he jokes, “I hope we don’t decide to part ways next week. That would be awkward.”
His head tilts towards me with my laugh. “I don’t think that’s very likely to happen.”
The distance returns to his eyes, fixed on the crack we put in the wall. “So, if we get through to the next world, and there is no particle accelerator again, we wipe it out too?”
“And maybe the next. And on and on until there isn’t a thing left. In theory. Not until we reach the end of the line.”
“What’s that?”
“I have no idea. Maybe Shashi’s fledgling universe. Maybe… Who knows?”
“Then we keep on, like you’ve always done.”
“No. It’s not like that anymore.” Wide eyes, that vulnerability that compels me while I wish he never had to feel it again. I clarify, “Now this is all I want. Time with you. I don’t want it to stop.”
He pulls me in for another kiss. “We’re not going to stop. Not until we find the one perfect reality, where everything aligns. It has to be out there.”
I try not to let it show, the way my heart sinks. “That’s what you’re gunning for?”
“Is that terrible? I want Shashi’s prediction to be true, of course I do.
And she’s a cosmologist, she knows better than I ever could.
I want all those things put back. For all those people, and especially for you.
I can’t imagine what you’ve had to deal with.
” He rolls over, cheek on my thigh, fiddling with a button on my shirt. “But there’s a part of me that hopes…”
His words are quiet. I prompt him with the movement of his hair away from his eyes.
“If we couldn’t put it back, and if we were stuck, and if it wasn’t anyone’s fault…
and it was just the universe. Fate.” He laughs, the blush back in his cheeks.
“I guess I’ve gone dark.” His face turns up a little to catch the drift of my fingers.
“But that’s the thing. I am you. This is your brain.
You are who I could have become at any time if another wrong thing happened in my life.
For all we know, there’s a million of us who have destroyed a million universes each already, and I’m just a time bomb waiting to go off. ”
The thought strikes me as almost comical, this utter sweetheart imagining he could go dark. “I don’t think that’s you.”
He catches my gaze. “Not a slayer?”
“Not you. You’re the guy who tried to condemn yourself for the rest of your life to buy your last world a few more hours.”
“And you’re the guy who wouldn’t let me go.”
“That’s right. Never again.”
“I won’t let you go either.” His hand reaches up for me, his eyes as earnest as I’ve ever seen them. “That means we have no choice. We slay worlds. And whatever comes, we face it together. Alright? Chaos all the way.”
“Chaos all the way.”
But the funny thing is, not once in my whole life have I ever felt so far from chaos as I do right now.