Page 63 of Love and Other Paradoxes

Esi. He seized on the thought of her like a drowning man reaching for a lifebelt. She was the one who had pushed him off his destined path. Worse than that, she had taken his hand and led him further into the wilderness, claiming all the while that she was setting him back on track.

He got to his feet with a roar of agony. He limped his way along Mill Road, the pain in his leg nothing to the torment in his soul. The coffee shop lay ahead of him, the focus of all his rage: love and betrayal drawn together into a vanishing point.

The art in the window had changed. Now, it was a Valentine’s Day display, ringed with coffee bean hearts. Two figures were locked in an embrace under a thin crescent moon. He stopped inhis tracks. A fingernail moon, a breath away from new: the same moon that had looked down on him and Esi in Diana’s garden, on the kiss that was never meant to happen.

He couldn’t think about that right now. He hammered on the door. He waited, then hammered again. Nothing. He was resolved to keep hammering until daybreak when he realised: Esi was trying to be a ghost. Of course she wouldn’t open the door to a random stranger. He got his phone out and texted her with shaking hands.

It’s me. Open the door. We need to talk.

After a moment, she appeared from the back. Her expression was soft, expectant, like she was both terrified and excited to hear what he had to say. He thought of the original reason he had come here, and his heart twisted in his chest.

She unlocked the door. “What are you...” She caught sight of his leg, and her eyes widened in alarm. “Joe, you’re bleeding.”

“Yes, I’m bleeding! I’m bleeding from thewrong leg!” He barely even registered that she had used his first name.

She stepped back. “What are you talking about?”

He barged past her into the darkened coffee shop. “I’m talking about the future,” he said, turning to face her. “I’m talking about what was meant to be, but isn’t going to be anymore. Because ofyou.”

She was silhouetted in the light from the window; he couldn’t see her expression. “What...”

“Pretend not to understand. That’s fine.” He paced towards her, and she turned into the pale light. “You’ve been helping me get together with Diana. Right? That’s what we’ve been trying to make happen since we met.”

“Yes,” she said uncertainly. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

Either she didn’t know, or she was a better actor than he had ever suspected. He refused the first possibility, too angry to let it in. “No. I wanted my future. The one that’s supposed to happen. And in that future, Diana and I don’t meet until we’re thirty-three.”

He saw the thoughts flying across her face, chasing implications. “Wait. You’re saying—you’re saying we’ve changed the future?” Her brow furrowed, then lifted, light coming into her eyes. He saw that joy, and for a terrible, unworthy moment, he hated it.

“Yes. You were right. Are you happy? You get what you want. Congratulations. I just don’t see why you had to fuck up my life in the process.” He hated how the words sounded even as he said them. “Did you hate my poetry that much?”

“No!” Her face was open, desperate. “I didn’t know, okay? I would never have tried to help you get with Diana if I’d known.”

She was telling the truth, and he knew it. But he was a wound-up coil of rage, and that anger needed to get out. “What do you mean? It’s right there in the book!”

“I didn’t read it! I told you, it was a free gift! I’m only here to save my mum. That’s all.” Terror flashed over her face. “Shit. Shit! The whole point was not to make any other changes. If Diana’s future has changed this much, then the effects could be huge—”

He laughed, ecstatic to find a real reason to be angry with her. “Aye, let’s focus on you right now. Never mind that this whole time, I’ve been blithely setting my existence on fire because I thought my future was guaranteed. I nearly threw Diana off a roof because I thought we were both immortal! Fuck, I could have killed her!” He buried his face in his hands. “I could have killed myself.” That last part should have hit harder, but losing his immortality barely registered when weighed against the only future he had ever wanted.

“I never told you your future was fixed. That’s on you.” He could see her mind racing; she was still thinking about how this affected her. “You have to make this right. Break things off with Diana.”

He started laughing. “Oh, I’m way ahead of you. I did that before I even found out.”

Relief flooded her face, until it was replaced by confusion. “What? Why?”

He thought of his previous self, running here in joy and terror to tell Esi he was in love with her. It felt like a vision from another universe. “I...” She was looking at him with strange expectation. He shook his head, sinking down into a chair. “It doesn’t matter now.”

She sat down next to him. “It doesn’t mean it’s over. You can meet her again in the future, when you’re supposed to.”

He kept shaking his head. “Maybe that would have worked four months ago. Maybe it would have even worked two days ago. But not now.” He drew in a breath that turned into an embarrassing sob. “That future’s gone, and it was all I had. I stopped working on my degree. I’m going to fail, and go home with nothing, and everyone’ll know I was never good enough.” He pressed his eye sockets until he saw patterns, spinning out to infinity. “I’m fucked.”

“You’re not fucked.” Tentatively, she touched his shoulder. “You’re stillyou. You still have the talent, the potential. Even if you don’t get back with Diana, you can still have a future.”

She was trying to make him feel better. He didn’t want to feel better. He wanted to set himself on fire. He stood, shaking her off. “I don’t want ‘a future.’ I want my future. Mine. The one with my name on it. The one I had, before you came along and took it away.”

She rose to her feet, slow and deliberate. He had thought he had seen her angry before. He had been wrong. Her real anger didn’tlook like his, hot and blustering. Hers was cold, and it froze him to the heart. “You came in here that day,” she said. “You talked to me. You followed me to town, you stole the book, and you went and talked to Diana. You. No one else.”

His mouth worked silently. “Okay. Fine. I talked to you. But you—you talked back. You couldn’t resist, could you? Oh, here’s that fucking nozz Joseph Greene, let’s make a crack about his poetry. I should have known right then that you didn’t give a fuck about my future—”

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