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 spilledhistea, 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. Iwasproud. 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’slike 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?
