Page 61 of Only You
‘Why?’
‘I can’t be near you. We can’t be close. It’s a trigger,’ she continued, walking towards the street.
‘What are you talking about?’ he asked, seeing a truck speeding down the street.
He dropped the jacket and ran as she stepped out. His heart jumped out his throat as he narrowly pulled her to safety, making her drop her books. He gripped her arms tightly, pinning her to his chest. They were both breathing heavily, hearts racing as the truck drove by, not slowing down for a second.
‘Dani, stop! You could have gotten yourself killed,’ he snapped, unable to hide his fear. If he had been even a few seconds late… he looked at her, seeing her eyes start to gleam.
‘Then, I guess it’d be over. Like it’s s–supposed to.’ Her words gave into sobs. She gripped his shirt tightly, crying into his chest. The cries were ugly and desperate, the ones reserved for losing someone you couldn’t imagine living without. He swallowed the lump that suddenly formed in his throat and held her close, wishing this wasn’t their first hug. He could feel her leaning onto him more, her legs probably about to give out. He held her up, refusing to let her fall.
‘It’s okay.’ It was probably the worst thing he could have said but it was all he had, all he could force himself to believe. ‘It’s going to be okay.’
Dani could barely look up from her lap as she waited for Jones to sort things out with the librarian. One of them had followed, after seeing her crying her eyes out. Jones had led her to a stone bench just outside the building, promising to be right back. She had thought about leaving but couldn’t gather the strength to get up, much like Sarah. She placed her head in her hands at the thought.
She had researched for weeks but she couldn’t find an answer. There was no rhyme or reason to why she was reincarnating, why she was only remembering now when she couldn’t before, why she kept falling in love with the same person and why – oh,why– did it always end with both of them dying.
She tried listening to Dr Castillo, but everything pointed to their lives repeating. The only way she could think of solving it was by avoiding Jones. And now she almost killed herself trying to do so. She would laugh at the irony if she wasn’t so exhausted. She heard footsteps approaching and she moved her hands to her lap. Jones sat down next to her, placing the books she was researching and her coat between them.
‘Ms Diana told me to tell you that she likes the variety in your taste of books, just not your checkout method,’ he said.
She huffed out a tired laugh, but it was half-hearted and fell flat.
‘I’ll remember that next time,’ she told him. Her eyes softened as they landed on him. ‘You have the same eyes.’
He raised his brows. ‘As who?’
All of them, she wanted to say. He didn’t look like any of their past lives but the look of care and longing in his eyes was one she had lived with for over a century. A prize possession she could only ever cherish temporarily.
‘I’m trying to figure out what’s happening to us,’ she said instead. ‘I keep looking but nothing’s coming up. All I know is that the closer we get, the more likely it’ll be that you’ll die, or I’ll die, and I can’t figure out how to fix it.’
Her voice got wobbly at the end, and she bit the inside of her cheek to hold back her tears. She had been breaking down almost every other day. Every time she reached a dead end, she almost felt like she was dying all over again. It was too painful to bear, too hard to admit, when her friends or professors asked why she looked so tired or sad.
How did she tell them she was going to pass away because the universe or God decided she couldn’t have life and love at the same time?
‘The dreams started when I was a kid, maybe five-ish,’ Jones said, suddenly. Dani scrunched her brows before she recalled their conversation in the McDonald’s parking lot. ‘Like I said, the memories triggered during freshman year. My first love broke up with me, and I had never felt heartache like it. I guess that pain made it all come back. At first, I thought the headaches I was getting for weeks afterwards were just me missing her, but one day, the veil lifted. I remembered everything all at once, all those memories crashing together, and I had no idea what belonged where.’ He grimaced, staring off in the distance. ‘Some days, I felt like I couldn’t even get out of bed. I had to make one of my senior class projects about memory just so I would have an excuse to spend days mapping out the lifetimes, hoping that sorting it would make it make sense.’
‘What’s the first story you fully remembered?’ she asked.
‘Damien and Sabine and then the rest. I think it goes in order before getting chaotic.’
‘What do you mean chaotic?’
‘Sometimes it jumps to the first life, sometimes the fourth,’ he clarified. ‘It hasn’t jumped to the future yet, so I think we’re in the clear there.’
‘How many lives do we have?’ she asked warily.
‘It’s… hard to tell,’ he admitted. ‘From what I’ve calculated, we’re in life five or six now.’
‘And all the endings…’ Dani looked at him expectantly and he felt the weight of every lifetime, every disappointment coming back; he shrugged helplessly. The feeling of defeat made her shoulders slump. ‘We should stop seeing each other.’
‘Considering I almost made you run into the street, I think that’s fair,’ he said, remorse colouring his tone and she immediately wanted to take it away.
‘I ran because—’
‘You were scared,’ he filled in but she shook her head.
‘Because I knew I would run to you,’ she confessed. ‘I would ruin all my plans because I missed you. I missed talking to you, laughing with you. My only foolproof plan and I wanted to throw it out the window the moment I saw you.Thatscared me.’
