Page 70 of What If It's You?

I can’t bear to lose you.

I might lose you forever.

I love you I love you I love you.

I hadn’t done the thing I’d crossed worlds to do. Hadn’t had the strength, the will, to sever our bonds to each other, was trying to comfort myself with the fact that there had never been a guarantee it would work, anyway. Every other idea I’d had so far for how to fix this had been wrong, after all, or at least insufficient…why assume this would be the exception?

Ollie was here with me now, so present I could almost feel the satisfying ache of his muscles relaxing as his climax finally released him, but if this time—the time I hadn’t been able to make myself follow through with the plan—was the one guess I’d gotten right, that very closeness might be the thing that split us apart forever.

“You should probably get moving,” Ollie said, voice even, unbothered, the hint of sorrow at the back of it only apparent to me, and only because I was staring straight at him, caught it casting the tiniest shadow over his already dark eyes. I wasn’t sure how long we’d been lying there, side by side, legs tangled, arms slung lazily across each other’s bodies, just watching each other. Usually I’d have rolled over and grabbed my phone to check whether work things were coming through, or Ollie would have turned on a playlist, tapping out the rhythms against his thighs with his fingertips, body present but mind totally absorbed in the music. But today, right now, we were both just gazing at each other, eyes occasionally following a fingertip as it grazed along a curve of the other’s body, neither of us saying anything, the silence not just comfortable but precious somehow, a tiny bubble formed just around the two of us, the flickering rainbows across its iridescent surface visible only if we didn’t move too fast, didn’t do anything to break its impossible fragility.

“Are you trying to get rid of me, Oliver Hughes?” My lips curled in a smile as I ran a finger along his neck and over his jaw, relishing the tiny shiver that flicked through him.

“I’m trying to respect my very important girlfriend’s very important job,” he said, grinning back. “You’re probably already way late. Unless today’s a holiday I didn’t know about?”

“It is.” I nodded gravely.

“Really? What’s that?”

“International Fuck Off from Your Day Job Day,” I said.

“Laurel,language.”

“That’s what I told the committee, but they were insistent. Said it really emphasized how much you weren’t supposed to go into your boring day job.”

“And the committee isn’t going to get you in trouble with your bosses?”

“Didn’t you hear? I’m a VP now. My bosses are all too important to care what I do. Besides, I’ve banked more PTO than even Pixel would ever be able to pay out on. If I left tomorrow I might bankrupt them.”

“I thought you had unlimited PTO.”

“Well, morally they’d owe me for not taking it.”

“Valid point.” Ollie smiled, but there was a hint of something in his eyes still, a hardness that I’d grown so used to I hadn’t recognized it for what it was, a wall going up to protect himself. I wouldn’t have recognized it now if I hadn’t just seen what he looked like with every defense down. “Seriously, though, you don’t have to play hooky just for me.”

“Good thing that I’m playing it forbothof us, then. Unless you’ve got too much going on today?”

“I’m wide open,” he said, the smile fully reaching his eyes now. “So? Where to first?”

My first impulse was to make some big plan—hike a mountain or hop on a plane to Paris, or splash out on a seafood tower and ridiculously overpriced champagne at some fancy restaurant downtown, but then it came to me, and it felt so right I didn’t even question it:

“Cambridge Antiques Market. Ten-dollar limit. Goal is…creepy?” The rules of the game we used to play on weekends were simple, but it had been so long since we’d done it that I felt almost unsure of myself.

“Oh, get ready to lose, Lo. You know I have a gift for finding the worst dolls to ever curse humanity.”

“It ison.”

The rest of the day was similarly uneventful and just as totally perfect. Brunch at the diner we used to go to when we first started dating, and “bottomless dollar coffee” was far more important than particularlygoodcoffee. A stroll along the Charles (with much better coffees in hand) with no particular destination in mind, talking about anything and nothing. A visit to the farmers market, where we stocked up on a mix of staples and exotic produce we had vague, grand plans of turning gourmet. Moving around each other in the kitchen as we prepped a ratatouille, the record player on in the other room, in the unplanned-but-perfectly-executed choreography I’d always thought of as a sign of a happy couple. Every sooften the voice would come back, the shock of it stopping my heart midbeat.

I could lose you.

But I couldn’t think of any plan that might prevent it, other than the one I’d already flubbed. And with every moment that passed, perfect in its sheer ordinariness, I felt less capable of trying again. If I had to lose Ollie, I wanted this first. A last perfect day together. I didn’t want to wind up in the wrong life, or worse, cease to exist altogether—and if that happened, would Ollie remember me? Would I be someone he lost, or someone who never existed for him at all? Or would I still be here as far as he was concerned, the hardware staying behind but the software fritzing out, a simulacrum of the person he loved?

Really, no great options.

But if I couldn’t control it, I didn’t want to spend what might be my last moments on earth—thisearth, at least—focusing on something I couldn’t change.

Ugh.No. That was the kind of lazy thinking that got me into this mess in the first place. Not a direct analog, obviously—taking your partner for granted and giving in to inevitable existential dissolution were…not all that similar, really. But sitting back and letting my life move past me, letting fear prevent me from doing something just because it might be hard or I might fail at it—that was the Laurel who was weak enough to create this whole mess in the first place.

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