“How do you know she ‘made time’?” David asked, tossing another faulty battery away.
“You know how Ziya is. She’s always booked up at least two weeks in advance. No way she just happened to have tonight free.”
David nodded sagely. “So she’s trying to winyouback.”
“I really feel like you’re not listening to me.”
“I am, only just barely. Say something that requires a little more mental stimulation and I’ll listen more.” David grabbed a handful of batteries from the box and held them out to her. “In the meantime, pass these to me as I check them.”
Amie accepted the batteries and set them down on the table, passing one back.
“There’s just a lot of pressure for this to go well,” she continued. “And I’ve seen it go badly. People say, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ I can give a play-by-play. I just don’t want to mess it up.”
She paused as he dropped a battery into the bag and held out his hand for another one.
“I was kind of … not great this morning.”
David glanced up as she passed him a battery. “ ‘Not great’ how?”
“Like …” Amie looked up at the ceiling as if it held answers. “… a complete mess? I was jumpy and panicky. I could barely talkto people. Spilled tea on myself, stepped in dog poop. It was like I had such a cemented idea of how things were supposed to go that I couldn’t handle it when they were different.”
Amie looked back down. “On one hand, I think it’d be good for me to live my life normally to try to move past the whole … time thing. But on the other hand, I don’t want to risk ruining this friend date by getting back out there too soon. I could barely hold a conversation with the barista at Eons.”
“You’re not having trouble holding a conversation with me.”Thump.“Battery.”
Amie scowled. “It’s pretty easy when all the other person says to you is ‘Battery.’ ” She passed him one. “I think it’s because you’d always have me start our conversations in the time loop, so we’d never talk about the same things. I don’t have these expectations for how our conversations are supposed to go. Iknowhow this date is supposed to go. So what if I freak out if it isn’t the way I expect it to be?”
She stared at David as he put a new battery into the voltmeter, frowned at the screen, then held out an open palm as he extracted and dropped the offending battery.
After a few seconds of his palm remaining empty, he looked up.
Amie had crossed her arms, raising an eyebrow expectantly.
David dropped the hand. “Would you want to tell her about the time loop?” he asked, sitting back in his chair.
“No!” Amie said immediately, horrified. “God, no. I don’t even know if she’d believe me.”
There were many times during the loop when Amie had been tempted to tell Ziya. But after their disastrous third first friend date, she had been reluctant to say or do anything that might have ruined the evening, even if it was all due to reset in just a few hours.
“I think,” she said, hesitant, “if we were still dating, that she’d believe me. But when you’re broken up, it’s different.”
“Why?”
“It justis.” Amie could feel herself getting frustrated. “Look, maybe I’ll tell her someday, but not at this dinner, so I need a plan B.”
She took a deep breath. “Please.”
David looked up, the ceiling apparently being a popular spot for finding answers.
“What if you went somewhere else?” he asked.
“Like, a different restaurant?”
“Sure.” David looked back down at her. “You said you couldn’t handle it when things didn’t go as you expected them to. But if you’re in a completely different place, you won’t have as many expectations. Takes some of the pressure off.”
Amie tried to ignore the anxiety creeping up the back of her neck. “Yeah. Yeah, that could work.”
“And,” he added, reaching over to grab a battery, “if it gets bad, you can just leave.”
