Page 62 of Love and Other Paradoxes

what is to come—

but this, this:

there is nothing after this

if this is love

then douse me in it:

set me aflame, set me spinning

out in the universe,

bearing

only the memory

that we were this:

a once-burning thing,

so bright it kept them staring

long after it all went dark.

A pause, a breath; her eyes closing, her head dipping, as the theatre detonated with applause.

Not the polite golf clap that had greeted the other poems: this was real, a thunder of roars and whistles, two hundred people’s delight and wonder and surprise, and it was all for him. But he barely heard it. As the words of the poem sank through him, his mind went wild with images: lights cutting through smoke, the sea crashing against a winter beach, the taste of tangerines and honey.You’ve known it, haven’t you?Love, the burn and pull of it, the feeling of being caught in a moment you never wanted to leave—but it wasn’t his night with Diana that he was remembering. It was Esi: her hands, her mouth, her smile, her laugh. Her kiss.

The shaking, stomach-churning uncertainty that had filled him all day transmuted into perfect clarity. He loved Esi. He wanted to be with her, even if it was temporary, even if it was doomed. He wanted to taste every moment they could possibly have before it was over.

Chapter Twenty-Two

He was still reeling with the revelation when Diana swept offstage, pulling him into her arms. “Hear that?” she said breathlessly in his ear. “That’s for us, my love. You and me.” She was trembling, her breath hot on his skin. “I know a secret storeroom backstage. Let’s go and celebrate.” She kissed his neck.

He disentangled her arms from him and stepped back. He had a second to register her dismay, another second to take it back, explain it away before it was too late. Both passed. “I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”

He rushed out onto the stage and down the steps, causing a commotion in the audience as he ran up the aisle towards the exit. He pushed through the glass door of the lobby out into the frigid night. He ran on, turning down Sidney Street, scattering smug Valentine’s couples in his wake. He pelted across the frosted grass of Parker’s Piece and crossed Gonville Place without waiting for the lights. Ahead of him was Mill Road and the coffee shop and Esi, and every moment he spent without her was another moment wasted.

He wasn’t sure what happened. One second he was striding across the road. The next, he was on the ground, ears ringing, a searing pain in his leg.

He sat up, lightheaded. Nearby, a cyclist was swearing. Joe watched through the stars floating in his vision as they got back on their bike and wobbled hastily away.

Well, he thought.At least that’s over.He rolled up the ruin of his jeans to examine the blood running down his left leg. The wound looked deep enough to scar. But something wasn’t right. He felt it in his gut, a wrongness he couldn’t yet define.

He scooted backwards to the pavement, yelling in pain, and fumbledMeant to Beout of his pocket. In the fuzzy light of the streetlamp, he turned to the page with the photographs. There he was, grinning and dishevelled, bandages swathing his right leg.

He was trying to reason his way out—maybe I’m supposed to have two accidents, this is Cambridge, bikes crash into people every day—when he saw it. In the bottom right-hand corner, a detail he hadn’t noticed: a date, stamped on the photograph by the camera that had taken it. 13.02.06.

The thirteenth of February. Yesterday. But that photo had never been taken. The accident it documented had never happened. Here, on the printed page, was definitive proof that the past had changed.

Ringing filled his ears, like the fire alarm from this morning was still happening. What came through it, strangely, was the voice of Dr. Lewis.Attention to detail has never been your strong suit.He stared blindly at the last picture, the one of him and Diana as thirtysomethings, still looking newly in love. He had never bothered to read the caption. What could it say that wasn’t already clear from the way they were gazing at each other? Now, his hands shaking so badly he almost couldn’t focus, he read it.Greene and Dartnell on 22nd May 2018, it said.The day they first met.

He stared across the road into the empty darkness. “We’re not supposed to meet for another twelve years.”

It all fell into place. Vera starting to follow him after she saw him outside Diana’s rooms. The look on her face when she’d caught them together. The time travellers’ absence, stark as the silence from a broken clock. He had unwritten his future, his glorious, perfect future, and now it was gone forever.

Horror filled him, tinged at the edges with self-loathing. The truth had been right there in the book, hidden behind the questions he should have asked as soon as he read it. Why was there no photograph of him and Diana together as students? Why did the Introduction skip over their university years as if they were irrelevant to their love story? He had read that they had both studied here, and his assumptions had done the rest: that Cambridge was where successful people met, that his future had to start right now. Dr. Lewis again, speaking in his ear.You have a tendency to make leaps of logic that aren’t justified by the evidence.He stared down at the book, searching for an excuse, a way that this could not be all his fault. His eyes landed on Diana in her first-year dress, her arm around Esi’s mum.

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