I THINK I’ve been to John’s flat less than five times, but I’m starting to get used to it. It’s still weird and too much, but I think I kind of love it. It’s probably full of asbestos or something, because it’s the eighties, but I’m trying not to think about that. It’s not like it’s hard anyway, because as John peels off his coat and takes off his leather jacket and looks away while he does, all I can focus on is him. The afternoon light coming through the small window makes him look a bit older. I wonder if he’s putting on a show, or if he’s just trying to extend the little time we have left together.
I think I could come back. But it seems to bring on the seizures. Maybe he’s worth it. Keeping him alive is definitely, definitely worth it.
He walks over to me and takes my coat off me.
I can feel his breath tickling the back of my neck. “So,” he says. “Tell me what’s happened. You said you had a weird week. Are you feeling better?”
“Yeah,” I say. “To be honest, the less I come here, the less the seizures seem to happen. I’m living with my parents now because they’re worried about me, and my brother is all up in my grill about how I’m behaving or whatever, and Levi—”
He raises his eyebrows.
“Well, that’s over,” I say.
He doesn’t say anything for a second before he sighs. “I’m sorry. I know you really liked him.”
I shrug. “Yeah. But there were other things at work too. Like—”
He raises his eyebrows.
“Like you,” I say finally. “I told him about you. Over and over again. I don’t think he ever believed me until the end, you know? And then things kind of just, I don’t know, I guess they came to an end naturally. Because I’m a dick.”
“I don’t think you’re a dick,” he says. “I think you’re the furthest thing from a dick possible.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” he says. “In fact I think you’re the kindest person I’ve ever met.”
I laugh. “That’s ’cause your friends suck. You don’t really have the world’s best measuring stick.”
He shrugs and takes a step towards me. “So what? You’ve never been a dick to me. You have gone out of your way to help me, even when I didn’t deserve it. You’ve basically put everything on the line to come warn me of my future, your health, your relationship, your friends. You don’t even care that I’ve never actually been that nice to you. You’re basically—I don’t know. I don’t even know how to describe what you are. Like—”
He’s looking down at the floor now. I can see he’s blushing, even though he’s trying to keep his face turned away from me. He takes a cigarette out of the carton on his dining room table, then takes a lighter out of his pocket. Lighting up seems to take him a little longer than it usually would, because his hands are shaking almost imperceptibly.
He takes a long drag before he keeps talking.
“Anyway,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about what you said a lot. About how I was going to die?”
I nod. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that a lot too.”
“I was being selfish,” he says. “I’ve only ever really had to worry about me. But you’re coming here and you’re hurting yourself in the process. Honestly, when I saw how you were bleeding and you just said you had to get home because you were sick—when I realized that coming here, to warn me, was something you shouldn’t have had to do and then I basically blew you off, I felt so terrible. Because I shouldn’t have done that. I really shouldn’t have. Seriously, if anyone’s been a dick, it’s me.”
“I don’t think you’re a dick,” I say. “I think you’re just confused.”
“I can be confused and not be a dick, though,” he says. “And I’m not that confused anymore.”
“You’re not?”
“No,” he says. “I mean, yes, about some things, like how you ended up here, or how you can travel through time, or why you—I mean, why you’ve chosen me, I guess, but I’m not confused about how I feel about you.”
He’s not looking at me at all. He takes a long drag and closes his eyes. I don’t want to prompt him. I mean, I do, and I don’t, because if he does say what I think he’s going to say, it should probably just come from him entirely. But I also didn’t know how much I needed to hear it until a second ago when he was telling me he wasn’t confused anymore.
He stubs the cigarette out with his hand, which looks like it hurts, and it’s probably wasteful because he isn’t even finished, before he sets it down on the table.
He brings his hands up to my face and holds it. They are kind of rough and cold, but they’re also perfect. “You can’t keep coming here. You can’t keep hurting yourself because of me.”
That isn’t what I expected to hear.
“John,” I reply, looking at him. “I have to come back. I have to be here until you decide that keeping yourself alive is important. You can’t die when you’re thirty, like, not if you can help it. It’s not an accident, it’s not like you have to be afraid of going in the shower, you either overdose or you kill yourself. I’ve been researching it. You said you wouldn’t—”
His lips on mine stop me from talking. The way he’s kissing me, it’s so soft and warm. It’s sweet. He smells like nicotine and like himself, and I want to grab him and stick my tongue into his mouth, but I don’t. This closed-mouth, deeply soft, extremely vulnerable kiss is more important than anything he’s ever said or done around me.
So I close my eyes and kiss him back, losing myself in his scent and in his mouth.
He moves away from me and bites his lower lip, smiling. “I won’t kill myself,” he says. “I promise.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“And I’ll be really careful when it comes to drugs. I can cut down on them, especially if I know—”
“If you know what?”
“That something new is going to happen,” he says. “That you are going to happen.”
I shake my head. “But I will have already happened.”
He nods. “Yeah, but only in my life. You have to happen so that you can happen to me, I think.”
We both laugh, because that’s a ridiculous sentence and it also makes perfect sense.
“This isn’t fair, though,” I say, closing my eyes. “Because I want to be here. I want to come visit you. I want to—”
“Yeah,” he says. “I know. I want you to be around too.”
“I just wish I got to keep this,” I say. “Like, I wish I got to keep you. I don’t mind coming back, John—I don’t think I can stay away from you.”
He shakes his head. “The last thing I want you to do is hurt yourself.”
I bite down on my lip. “This is so unfair.”
He nods. “So what happens now?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I go home and then… someone writes a letter inviting me to work at Crash, I guess? And then I meet you. That’s when everything changes.”
“Someone?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I still haven’t figured out who does.”
I take my wallet out of my back pocket before I unfold the letter and hand it to him. The paper is yellowed and crinkly, the bends about to come apart.
John smiles when he sees it. “It’s me.”
“What?”
“That’s my handwriting,” he says. “I write this letter. And then I guess you get it thirty years in the future.”
“Oh,” I reply. “But it’s cursive and, like, really pretty.”
He laughs. “God, what do they teach you in school?”
I smile at him. “Not cursive.”
He gives the letter back to me. I fold it and put it in my wallet again. Then I stick it my back pocket. He grabs a notebook from his bookshelf and starts to write.