Page 32 of What If It's You?

You could breakanypromise. I knew that better than most. Why couldn’t Ollie see that? How big a leap it was from “happy now” to “together forever” to achild? Even the word made me want to scurry backward, away from the cliff’s edge, but somehow he was ready to just leap into oblivion…why? How?

He was being naïve. Wasn’t thinking through the risks. I was the spreadsheeter between the two of us, clearly he’d never even considered the cost-benefit analysis of the proposition, probably hadn’t even realized he should be thinking about the risk—and it was ahugerisk, children were the biggest gamble you could possibly take, you couldn’t count them in the cosmic tally the same way you counted lost job opportunities or the likelihood of turning a profit on real estate—at all.

Unless…was I the asshole here, too? I didn’t want it to be true, but hadn’t I been lusting after Drew just hours ago? Barely managed to resist the pull of his clean scent and his warmth and the feel of his frankly impressive erection pressing into my thigh?

Maybe the problem wasn’t that Ollie hadn’t accurately weighed the risks in general. Maybe it was that he was blinded to the fact that the real risk here, the one element that he should know better than to trust…was me.

By late morning, the apartment was sparkling; I’d scoured the sinks, the counters, even the tiled floors in my effort to dispel the anxiety track playing on loop in my head:What if you’re wrong…again?

When I’d inexplicably found myself back in this world—the world where Ibelonged—I’d been so massively relieved that the enormity of that emotion briefly blocked my doubts from view. But I kept replaying the conversation with Ollie about kids—the way he watched me, like he was looking for something and was disappointed to find it wasn’t there; his blithe lack of concern with pretty much the biggest, scariest choice anyone could make—and the more I went over it, the more ground in my worry became, a patch of grime that no amount of scrubbing could eradicate. When I was with Drew, I couldn’t stop thinking of Ollie, couldn’t help but wonder whether the dream life I’d built in that world had wisps of nightmare threaded through it. But now that I was back here, sparring not over whose turn it was to make dinner, but overwhether we were ready for children,I was starting to wonder whether I’d been hung up on the wrong things.

Was it a me problem? Was I just wired for dissatisfaction? And even if it wasn’t…how could I possibly decide between lives that looked so fundamentally different, between partners who both had so much to offer…and both left me vaguely unsettled, unsure whether this habit or that difference of opinion was just one of the things you had to accept, proof that no relationship could ever be perfect, or whether this was the red flag I should heed,or else.

I’d been so eager to get back here, I somehow forgot why I’d left this world in the first place.

When I ran out of things to clean, I cracked open a new romance. As a reader, obviously—I had empirical evidence that it wasn’t worth the effort as a writer. When I made it to the second chapter for the third time and still couldn’t remember any of what I’d read on the preceding pages, I threw it aside and went to check on Ollie. Again.

This time he looked over, sensing me hovering in the doorway.

“Lo, for god’s sake, what do you need?” He pulled his headphones down, clicking his mouse before turning away from the pair of monitors mounted above his desk, the surface of which was dominated by a MIDI keyboard. When we’d first moved in together, we’d planned for this to be primarily a guest bedroom, with a single practice amp and Ollie’s electric guitar, the one he used most often, tucked into the corner for when he wanted to “noodle around.” Over the years, though—during which he’d played multiple different instruments in countless different bands, recording and mixing demos for the most promising projects in his spare time—the gear had multiplied, colonizing the corner, then spreading further, various percussion instruments popping up like mushrooms. Now the pullout couch cowered against the wall that connected to our bedroom, Ollie’s studio slash practice space slash listening room the clear evolutionary winner.

“Nothing, I just…” I frowned at the screens over his shoulder. The smaller one showed the familiar rainbow stripes of the program he used for tracking and mixing songs—Logic, I think it was called. But the larger one above it…“Sorry, are you…playing a video game?”

Ollie stiffened, then turned back to the screen, quickly clicking at the mouse until all that showed was his desktop background.

“If you need alone time for gaming, you can just say that,” I said tentatively. It was weird that he was trying to characterize it as work. Clearly the gulf between what our jobs demanded of us was a sorer point than I’d previously realized.

“I wasn’t gaming,” he bit out. “It was just…inspiration.”

“Okaaay…”

“Did you need something, Lo?”

To check that you were still here.

But he was, and I was, and I’d run out of things to dust and organize. And really, what was the point in getting back to my real life if I was going to suddenly abandon the vast majority of it to hole up in our charmingly run-down apartment, slowly annoying my partner into leaving?

More importantly, how was I ever going to sort out what had happened to mehere?

“I just wanted to let you know I’m heading in to the office.”

“Oh, okay.” Ollie’s shoulders lowered and he shook his head once, eyes closed. “Later.”

I could tell from the way his body was already twisting away that Ollie thought I was being a little ridiculous, and why wouldn’t he? Only one of us seemed to think I’d vacated the premises yesterday.

“I love you,” I said, the words simultaneously fragile and heavy in a way they hadn’t been in longer than I could remember, a Fabergé egg of emotion.

“Love you too,” he replied, but he didn’t turn back.

After the morning’s experience on the train platform, I opted to walk in, arriving right around lunchtime. Luckily, the person I most wanted to see was sitting in the cafeteria when I walked in, at our usual table. His gentle blue eyes lit up when he spotted me.

“Laurel, hey. I was wondering if you were gonna show up.” Drew’s smile was warm as I dropped my tote on the seat across from him. “Pro tip, skip the saag paneer, it’s really bland today for some reason.”

“Good looking out.” I smiled back at him, the familiarity of the interaction unknotting my stomach a bit. He didn’tlookas if he knew I’d been hopping between worlds recently.

I hurriedly filled a plate and returned to the table, picking at a piece of perfectly fluffy naan while everyone chatted about weekend plans and work headaches. After fifteenish minutes, the pair of Lightning engineers Drew had been sitting with said their goodbyes, but Drew lingered. I couldn’t help but notice his plate had been sitting empty for a long time.

You’ve always known he has a thing for you.Guilt gripped me at the thought. Had the very fact of our friendship been selfish of me? Iknew logically that Drew was an adult, that I wasn’t leading him on, wasn’t responsible for his emotions, but I couldn’t shake the sense that I’d somehow wronged him simply by tapping back into my old—real—life. The fact that I no longer felt so certain it was therightlife only upped the intensity.

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