“Yours is a supervillain and everything,” Jon sulks.
“I’m not—could everyone stop calling me that?”
“You are a supervillain,” Jon yells from the front. “Certified. By me.”
August grins at me, and the moniker is almost worth it just for that. “You have had a bit of a villain moment.”
“Just snuffing out millions of lives, yeah,” the asshole mutters.
“It would be nice to move on from the topic now,” I suggest.
But Asshole August turns to me, anyway. “What I don’t get is, why did you do it? I still can’t wrap my head around it. You say you have empathy. You must have foreseen what would happen.”
What can I tell them? This time, the plain and shitty truth. “I didn’t. I didn’t think it all the way through. Not to this extent. I hate to tell you how many scientific advancements come about that way.”
“Not in my world, they don’t,” he grumbles.
“You and your perfect bloody world.” I slide a little deeper into my seat. “Look, I was just really depressed. That’s all I can tell you. A friend died, my best friend, and I wasn’t sleeping well, and I was down. And I was working a lot, and I just thought… what if I slipped through? What if she didn’t die in the next world? What if I could visit her, be friends with her? What would that be like? And you know, what would that be like for all of us who have ever lost someone?”
The gentle pressure from August’s foot against mine catches me somewhere between wanting to disappear and wanting to go through it all again, just to feel that. “I did a terrible thing. I know. And since then, I’ve devoted every waking moment to trying to undo it. It’s not like I’d do it a second time if I could turn back the clock.”
August’s eyebrows rise a little, and I’m pretty sure the thought occurs to us both: what we’d lose if I could actually master time travel. I’d be resetting the clock on all of it. On us.We’d never meet. Everything he’s been to me, whatever I might have been to him, would be wiped. We’d go back to August minus August. Incomplete Augusts.
“Then again, maybe I would do it again.” His smile widens, even if stays a little melancholy. “Maybe I’d go real supervillain and destroy every universe there is just to be close to you.”
The corner of his mouth rises higher in the most satisfying way I’ve ever seen.
I take the opportunity to lean forward and place a hand on his knee. “Billions of them. One word from you, and I’d take them all.”
He drops his hand, his little finger toying with mine. “It’s really nice in theory. But in reality, I’m going to need you to put them back.” Just as fast as my face falls, his hand scoops mine up. “Then we’ll talk. About what happens next.”
I’m not expecting to be alive this time tomorrow. Truly. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind of talking. Of thinking about any possible future. We’re still so far apart. He’s clinging onto this sinking raft, and I’ve already drowned.
He sounds so sure when he says, “We’re going to figure this out. I’m not losing any of it. None of the people, none of the worlds. And especially not you.”
At my pull of his hand, he eases forward, and his lips find mine. A small kiss, a gentle one, that brings my hand to his jaw to hold him close long enough to steal another. He raises his chin slowly to break the kiss. “You’re going to fix this. I know you can do it.”
And I know then that I’ll give it everything I’ve got. All the weariness, the years of hopelessness and apathy… It all goes now. I’ll try.
Unfortunately, the poignancy of the exchange is broken apart by the asshole. “Do you live in a constant state of denial, August?”
August leans back with a chuckle. “I try to, yeah.” He stretches his leg out onto mine, his ankle resting on my knee. “But not in this case. August’s brilliant. With two of you, this can’t go wrong.”
“Three,” I tell him. He gives me another of his enchanting smiles.
“And also me!” Jon calls from the front. “August’s former love interest. Did you know that, August? Augusts tend to like me.”
I glare at him in the rearview mirror, only to catch Asshole August cracking his first ever smile.
Whatever the fuck is wrong with him.
But my gaze finds my own August, and it fills me up to know he only has eyes for me.
If he wants to destroy this world by keeping me around a bit longer, who am I to stop him?
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
GOOD AUGUST
