I click out of the article and go to find more about Tyler himself, hoping that will distract me from the shame flaming my cheeks a brilliant pink.
He has a girlfriend.
The picture of him standing with a petite blonde in front of the Eiffel Tower forces me to take a large swig of wine. They look … well, they look happy, possibly closer to the smug and self-satisfied end of the spectrum but who am I to judge? I scroll through the rest of his Instagram account. Small squares of his life laid out like breadcrumbs.This is me, he says with absolute clarity.I am attractive and clever and not too badly off– judging by the number of trips he seems to take the girlfriend on and the rather nice range of cashmere sweaters he rocked all of last winter.
I feel … I feel like he’s cheating on me. And I know that’s ridiculous on so many levels. We aren’t together. And even if I thought there might have been something there in the world with Decanting Bethany and in the last world with Dancing Panda Notebook Bethany, this isn’t those Tylers. This is a whole new Tyler, in a world I don’t recognize, with a girlfriend he has every right to have.
So why am I sitting here contemplating all the ways to punish him for his treachery?
Chapter Eighteen
I choose not to think about him. About Tyler. About Tyler and his girlfriend. About Tyler and his perfect girlfriend who is everything I’m not. Blonde and gorgeous and absolutely not skipping from one universe to the next, unable to hold on to anything, feeling time slipping beneath her fingers like sand on the beach.
I eat tapas and drink wine.
I swim in the sea and lounge by the pool, my skin growing more and more tanned as the days slide past.
I sleep and read, eventually feeling the worry and stress dissipating into the ether around me.
I sit on the terrace as the sun sets and the stars prick to light and I contemplate the sheer enormity of this universe and every single other one in which another Bethany is living her life, millions of Bethanys just getting by each day as it comes. The only concession I make to my situation is to write the theorem in the notebook inside the suitcase in my room.
I haven’t slipped for three days.
I exist outside of time itself.
Until I go to bed in Spain, the air con on full blast against the still sweltering heat, and wake up in London.
My tan has disappeared, replaced by a sallow face I almost fail to recognize as my own. I suit a tan; pale and interesting is not a good look for me.
In the kitchen I find another reason for my awful complexion. This Bethany is a proper drinker with at least three empty bottles of wine in the recycling – and not good ones, I notice. A pizza box sits on the kitchen counter; so this Bethany likes junk food too. I feel queasy at the sight of congealing cheese on the cardboard, the hint of garlic still on my breath.
I have a shower and clean my teeth, leaving me feeling a bit more human. But I can’t forget the feeling of the sun on my face, the languid motion of the sea as it lapped at my toes. Perhaps this Bethany should just hop on a plane andgo back to Andalusia? But then I remember that you don’t normally get to wake up and be there. You have to pack and get to the airport and make it through security without getting arrested – I have a fear that somehow someone will have hidden something in my suitcase despite it having not left my sight for the entire journey – and then get on the actual plane.
Actually that’s the bit I don’t really mind. There’s something oddly therapeutic about not being able to go anywhere, being trapped in a tiny seat seventeen inches wide, knees tapping the seat in front, and knowing exactly where you need to be for the next few hours while someone brings you drinks and snacks and you can even buy your favourite make-up from a little trolley.
But anyway. There’s no time for holidays, no time to step back. That is done, I shouldn’t even have indulged for the past few days.
Although, with that world’s Tyler having a girlfriend, something tells me he wouldn’t have been particularly receptive to helping me.
I type out the email, using the same wording – thank you, photographic memory – I used before. Last time he instantly recognized I was telling the truth and came running. Hopefully it will have the same response today.
It does. And so by midday I am once again meeting this universe’s Tyler Adams, albeit in a coffee shop down the road from Imperial College.
Or least I’m meant to be meeting him. He’s late. It’s already quarter past and I’m getting anxious now, envisioning a hundred ways he will somehow humiliate me. Has he decided not to come? Is he waiting down the road with a concealedcamera waiting to leap out and surprise me like a bad episode ofPranked?
It’s gone twenty past when a gust of cold air around my legs notifies me of the door opening. And there he is. His face flushed, his chest rising up and down quickly as if he’s been running.
‘Bethany!’ he exclaims and rushes towards me. ‘Oh God. I’m so, so sorry I’m late. Whatever must you have been thinking while I left you waiting?’
‘I …’ I don’t know what to say. I’d prepared a dozen ripostes while I waited for him. Thought of a hundred ways to tell him he was an arsehole. But I wasn’t expecting he was just going to turn up and actually apologize.
‘My sister flew in this morning from Paris and the whole family is scrambling to see her.’
‘Oh,’ I say. Wow, I am being truly verbose this morning.
He places his phone face up on the table and I steal a glance at his lock screen. Her smug blonde face grins back at me from where she’s standing with her arm around his waist.
I feel my heart constrict. He’s dating her in this life too. Fuck.
