Him
I got up from the squeaky bed, went to the bathroom and splashed some water on my face. I paused in front of the mirror.
I had managed to fly all the way to Nat’s. I first wanted to surprise her at her parents’ house, but then I thought about it some more and ended up deciding that it would have been stupid, even by my standards. I booked a cheap motel room in town, gave her the address and waited.
The meeting was upsetting. And weird. So, so weird. Seeing her again, we jumped into each other’s arms. She kissed me furiously and then burst out crying. I couldn’t help it either. I was jetlagged, exhausted and emotional on top of everything else. I cried too. For an hour we just sat there, holding one another and crying.
Then she jumped me, kissing me insistently while taking her clothes off. I joined her. I thought it would be good for us. Familiar territory and all that. It was still very, very weird. She was still almost a kid in appearance. She still had acne, you know? What was not different was her behavior, the look in her eyes. That was not an 18-year-old. That was Nat. I let my instincts kick in as well and we enjoyed each other.
The second thing that was odd was the room itself. We were staying in this shitty motel room from a small town. You can probably imagine. It was weird for us to be there. Back in our time, we weren’t crazy rich or anything, but we were stable and secure. We had nice holidays, we had good food – all that. But here we were, in this crazy situation where she was a kid still living with her parents while I was a minimum-wage 24-year-old, living paycheck to paycheck.
We had discovered each other at a point in our lives where we were both doing well careerwise (and as a result, financially wise too). But now we found ourselves on some new territory that we were unsure of how to navigate on top of the whole time-travelling situation.
That first day we fought. She was upset that there was no hot water in the shower, I was angry at the whole situation and instead of trying to calm her down, I burst into a rant. It did not help things.
She got dressed and went back home. I mean, she was supposed to, anyway. Her parents wouldn’t have been too happy to know she was staying over at a shitty motel with a stranger from across the country.
On the second day we fought again. I saw that she was repeatedly texted by this guy she knew, Theo. I asked her if she needed help with him. She suddenly turned defensive and told me to drop it, unless I wanted in return to talk about Christine. One thing led to another and I told her what had happened that first day after the ‘awakening’. She was not happy.
Third day, third fight. She wanted to discuss whatever had happened to us that we got transported back to 2012. I didn’t feel like getting into it. I was tired. I couldn’t sleep well in that place. My money was running low. Christine was calling me every day and my list of excuses was growing shorter and shorter. Mom was calling me as well. The money she gave me, she was suspicious about the whole thing. Lies kept piling up and it was increasingly difficult for me to keep track of them. I got calls from work, too. I had to be back into the office the next Tuesday.
We fought hard on that third day. Harder than ever before. It shook me a lot. Made me question a lot of things: my sanity, a way out, our future. I am not proud of my behavior back then but I still felt tempted to ask for the benefit of the doubt, given the situation. So, you’ll have to excuse me if my side of the story seems lacking here. I am not that eager to revisit it.
On the fourth day it was a bit better. It was Saturday, so she didn’t need to go to school. She spent the whole day with me. We talked about things. Still had no idea what to do, either of us. It was also very hard for either of us to separate our current situation from our lives in 2024. How could we? We were so messed up. That whole week, I wouldn’t call that living. It was like a nightmare.
So, there I was on that fifth day living in that shitty room, trying to get my bearings and find an answer to the most pressing question: what were we going to do next?
With no obvious answer I mind, I showered, put on some clothes and tried calling her. Busy tone. Odd. Without giving it much thought, I just waited for another hour or so. Then I tried her again. It did ring, but there was no answer. I was beginning to get worried. This was not like her. She was actually the most punctual and responsive person I knew. Something was wrong.
I went to her house. In front there was an ambulance parked. And I could hear wailing from inside. One voice was louder than the rest and very familiar, for I had listened to it all week during our arguments.
**
Her
When we first met at the motel, it took us a good minute to recognize each other. He had long shaggy hair (I hereby promise to never again judge the hair I met him with) and no beard. He was skinnier and the clothes…well, it was 2012 after all. I tried not to judge too harshly. Whereas I…I was eighteen. It really freaked him out. Once we could really tell that it was us, we broke down together, crying, holding each other and just venting out all the stress and pressure that had accumulated since we had awoken in this ‘universe’.
Trying to relieve ourselves of even more pain, I jumped him while ripping the clothes off of me. He hesitated for a bit - I could feel it. He was looking at me differently. He was paying too much attention to my body, to how I looked. He was not seeing his old girlfriend Nat, he was seeing a crying teenager furiously taking her clothes off. Wishing to get past that, I just overwhelmed him with my kissing and caressing. I was trying so hard to let him now that it’s still me. Finally, he gave into me.
Afterwards, we were laying down, staring at the ceiling. I stood up.
“I’m hungry. Let’s grab a bite. I think the diner across the street is not completely terrible.”
He nodded approvingly. He was so quiet, so unlike him. He felt numb. Shellshocked. Unresponsive. I started feeling the urge to know what he was thinking about, something that never occurred to me before. He was usually so outspoken that there was no need to wonder. I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me or through me. I was getting dressed when he finally spoke:
“I didn’t know you were so chubby when you were younger.”
I was livid. I’m not sure how my face reacted to him saying that, but he was now trying to save himself:
“I mean, it’s not that bad, you’re still a kid, but still…compared to when we met.”
My mouth was wide open. Remember when I was telling you how in the beginning, he kept saying silly arrogant things only to follow up with a joke on himself? It felt like that but without the follow up. He had just been a complete asshole.
“Wow. You’re being a complete asshole right now.”
He felt sorry, I could tell. But the right words kept evading him and he continued to say stupid things:
“What I’m trying to say is that you look great when we end up together. Now you’re just…different. Probably just baby fat, right? You’ll grow into yourself.”
Usually, I would have bitten back with some snarky remarks but that was no usual day for either of us. I was not able to take his words well.
“I’m eighteen, you dick!” I yelled, tears in my eyes.
Trying to look defiant, I took all my clothes off and threw them at him and then ran into the bathroom.
“It was a silly joke, Nat,” he mumbled from the room.
I turned on the water and jumped into the shower. There was no hot water. My tears turned into anger. I lashed out at him:
“Great. I can’t even get a freaking shower!”
We did laugh at the shitty room he had booked prior to this. All of a sudden it was turning into a real topic. Like a boiling pot, he joined me in anger. He was losing it too:
“We’ll I’m sorry, princess, but this all I could scrounge to come up here and visit!”
It was the first time hearing him talk like that.
“What the actual fuck is wrong with you?” I asked. “Why are you acting like this?”
“I don’t know, Nat. Maybe because we’re living a fucking nightmare right now, and I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it? You’re not the only one experiencing this, you know?”
“I never said that I was…”
“Well then, I apologize for trying to relieve the tension with a harmless joke. In case you’ve forgotten, my name is James – I say stupid jokes!”
“I’ve never known you to make such thoughtless jokes, Jamie! I’m eighteen, how the hell do you feel like it’s appropriate to make comments about my body like that?”
“Oh, so you’re eighteen, now! Good to know. Half an hour ago, you were acting like you were your old self in the bedroom although I was extremely uncomfortable to be with you like that. How convenient that you’re now eighteen again!”
Ok, he didn’t use those exact words. It was actually worse. But I don’t want to recall them. That wasn’t the real him. I don’t want to paint him like that. For sure I don’t hold them against him right now. They were just words.
I put on my clothes again and stormed off.
So that was day one of us seeing each other again. Not the greatest start ever.
The next day I visited again. As I was climbing the stairs to his room, I could hear him try to plead and argue with Christine. I stopped to listen.
“Chris, please, it’s just for a couple more days. I’ll be home before you know it. No, it’s just…stuff with my parents, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I’m with mom, okay? Okay. Me too.” He paused. “I love you too.”
It sounded as if she asked him so say it explicitly. I sighed in frustration. Jealousy was the last thing I needed. Who was I to judge, anyway? It was noon and I already had twenty unread texts from Theo.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“Girlfriend trouble?” I asked as I put my hand on his shoulder.
He grasped in surprise, his brain freezing. Trying to come with another lie, perhaps?
“Well, as you can imagine…I did wake up in my old apartment and she was there.”
“Awkward, huh?”
“Very much so.”
“For how much longer will you guys be together at this point?”
He paused: “About two more years, I think. She then gets a job offer from abroad, I think.”
Two more years. Wow!
“It really doesn’t matter,” he added. “Me and her, we’re done.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t too excited by the perspective of erasing two years of relationship from someone. Even if they didn’t end up being happily ever after. Not everything in life ends up like that, doesn’t mean we should delete it. Their relationship must have had beautiful moments too, otherwise they wouldn’t have lasted for that long.
“What happened on Saturday was a mistake,” he continued.
He slipped. He did not want to say that. But he was so overwhelmed with all the lies he made up for his mom and for Christine that he just slipped.
“What happened on Saturday?” I asked softly.
He closed his eyes, probably cursing himself to death.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It was a mistake. It means nothing.”
“What, did you wake up in 2012 directly into her vagina?”
He did try to explain what had happened, with the fainting, the ambulance and the drugs they gave him. I couldn’t really get over it. While he was justifying himself, my phone kept buzzing with all the texts. I took it out and started scrolling through them. This upset him greatly. I wasn’t paying attention any longer.
“What about you and this Theo, huh?”
“Nothing happened. Not since I woke up here.”
“Oh, so you’re an item,” said Jamie.
Here we go, his turn to get jealous.
“What’s bothering you, that I had a boyfriend twelve years ago? Well, I did. I’m sorry,” I apologized sarcastically. “Am I forgiven?”
“It’s fine” he mumbled.
He was not fine. I shrugged at him and started texting back, trying to stop the spamming. Jamie was visibly bothered by this.
“Why not just tell him to fuck off?”
I was, but in a polite manner.
“Why didn’t you tell Christine to fuck off?”
“What do you-“
“Or is ‘I love you too’ code for fuck off from where you come from?”
It was unfair. I knew it. We were both on edge and already fighting. I left as upset as I was the day before.
The next day I came in focused on dodging any sensible topics that could make us argue. Instead, I wanted us to start doing something else: think about what had happened. How did we get here and why? I already came up with a plan. My friend – actually future friend (and also future bride, twelve years from now), Emily, was a physicist. She could have an explanation (at least a theoretical one) as to what had happened to us. She was teaching Physics at the same University where I was teaching Psychology. That’s how we ended up being friends. Of course, she wouldn’t be a physicist for another number of years but it was a start.
Jamie didn’t want to hear a word of it. Which, now that I think about it, is hilarious. Only days after he’d cry over us following this thread for as far as possible. It wasn’t the time for him then. In any case, we fought again, no matter how hard I tried to avoid it. We couldn’t help it.
We fought hard. We fought so hard that for a minute I thought he was going to leave and that we’ll never see each other again. It was that bad.
I wouldn’t say that this fight had impacted anything on the long run, between the two of us. I think we were both so traumatized by it and so scared of ever repeating it, that we decided to never let ourselves getting in that position. From that moment on, no matter how hard things got (and they did get even harder) we decided to be kinder to one another. So, the way I look at it now, it was a precious lesson, not just for our relationship but for our lives going forward.
The next day was a Saturday and it was also the first where we acted like normal people. We went out, chit-chatted, had some good lunch and even made out like teenagers, in the park. It was nice. But he was not there with me completely. His thoughts were somewhere else, far away. Something was clouding my heart as well. As if something was going to happen. Something bad had already happened, I wondered how it could get worse.
I decided that I had to do some self-reflection. I had to analyze my past and try to learn from it. There was going to be a lot of digging. But I was also so tired that Saturday, that I couldn’t help but postpone the history searching for the next day.
Unfortunately, the next day was going to be too late for someone.
My father had passed away on the 20th of May 2012. He had a heart attack. He woke up early that morning, the same way he always did. Drank coffee, had breakfast and then started working on his garage project. At some point, the heart attack occurred. Mom found him laying down in the yard. She called the ambulance immediately, but it was too late. He was 49-years-old.
That was the first time.
The second time, it was me who found him. I woke up that morning, saw the date and only then I had realized what it meant. But it was too late.
I know what you’re thinking: how is it possible that I didn’t remember at least a day before? Why didn’t I think about it that very first day I saw him alive again?
These are questions I asked myself millions of times after. Had I been so absorbed by the whole thing that I forgot the most tragic thing (or the second most?) that ever happened to me? Was I so messed up by not getting along with Jamie that I forgot about my own father? I blamed myself endlessly. I blamed my ignorance. My stupidity. My confusion during those days. I blamed everything about me. Even now, I blame myself and not a thing or person in the world will ever convince me of the contrary. I had the chance to save him. And I realized too late what was happening. I let my father die although it was in my power to stop it. And I will live with that fact my whole life.
The first time it happened, it was painful, it was shocking. It was the end of all things.
The second time was worse. I was hysterical. I kept screaming and crying “I should have known. Why did I not warn him?”
Why, indeed?
On top of it all, it hurt that instead of spending more precious time with him, I was embroiled in senseless fights and depressing moments with Jamie all that week. It hurt so bad that I wanted to die.
Ironically, that reiteration of May, the 20th was the day I actually started the self-reflection. I began looking back at my ‘original’ past twelve years and started taking notes.
I don’t know why me and Jamie were ‘sent’ back. I don’t know if was just a random accident or if the universe was trying to tell us something. At some point you have to wander what kind of coincidence is it that I’m taken back just a week before I’d lose my father. Either way, if the reason was to make a difference, that day I failed hard. And an immutable feeling grew in me that day – that I will never let it happen again. If I could save someone, I will do it, no matter the cost.
And I realized that in the twelve years that were to follow there was one episode that was standing above all others. One episode that I would do anything to change. I mentioned my father’s death as the most tragic thing that happened to me? I was not going to let ‘the second most’ take place.
At the funeral, I saw Theo quite a lot. Of course, he was a funeral director’s assistant. The family business. For those couple of days, he was so helpful and supportive, not only to me, but to mom as well. And I had suddenly remembered how we ended up being ‘officially’ together after sleeping around all those weeks before. It was his calmness and firmness in front of tragedy that gave me comfort. He was protective, strong and unshaken. Was I falling for him again? Not exactly, but I liked to revel in the good feelings and memories I had with him. They made sense this time around too.
Jamie was around, of course. He tried to be supportive and present, without freaking out the rest of my family, since they had no idea who he was. I made up a lie saying that we knew each other from Facebook and that we were both big fans of Hitchcock films (not a complete lie, actually). It was enough for the time being.
After we left the cemetery, I took his arm and asked him to walk with me through the nearby park. I could feel Theo staring at us from behind. Originally, it was his arm I took and him who I brought to the park. Things can change if you take action at the right time.
In the park, we sat down, me and Jamie. He pulled a cigarette, lighted it up and sat quietly.
“Let me have one,” I said.
He shared another with me. We sat there in silence for a couple of minutes. He kept looking at me, trying to read anything on my face. Since I wasn’t saying anything, he decided to break the silence
“So, guess what,” he said. “Before I flew here, I placed some money on sporting bets.”
I saw where this was going.
“How much money?” I asked.
“All of them. Everything I had.”
I smiled.
“Yeah, so…it worked. It works! I have $30.000 dollars in my bank account. And it can only be the beginning.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes. I can remember some tennis matches, some NBA championships, some Olympics results. I can do more.”
“Is it reliable, long-term?”
“Course not. But I can use the money and invest in stock, right?”
That was smart. I gave him a short smirk.
“Right.”
“There’s also this crypto thing that’s going to blow up in a couple of years.”
I smiled again.
“So, it seems we can change things,” I said.
“It seems so.”
“I want to change things, too.”
“Want me to share some sports world insights?”
I took his hand and squeezed it gently.
“This day is actually the first day I’m starting a relationship with Theo.”
He didn’t say anything. He just focused on his cigarette.
“Theo and I…we’re going to be together for a while.”
“You mean, in the ‘original’ timeline.”
I rolled my eyes. We were starting to sound like comic book characters.
“Originally, yes.” I held my breath and then let the rest of it out: “One year from now I get pregnant. Something happens and I…I lose the pregnancy. I lose the baby…”
I paused to look at him. He had stopped smoking but would not make eye contact. I continued:
“It was bad luck the first time around. An accident. I get hit by a bike…anyway, it doesn’t matter.”
“You never told me about this.”
“No. It was too painful to tell. It broke me. It is what broke me and Theo up.”
“Otherwise…?”
“He was planning to marry me. After the baby came.”
He let out a heavy sigh.
“That’s why you couldn’t have kids?”
I nodded.
“Shit!” he said. We sat there in silence for another minute.
“And now?” he said.
“Now I want to save that baby.”
I could feel him trembling. Tears were flooding his eyes. I now realized that I wasn’t holding his hand anymore. I was crying too.
“I’ve already failed dad. I can’t fail this baby too. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“Yes, I see. Where does that leave us?”
“I’ve done a lot of thinking and planning and the truth, Jamie, is that…I don’t know. We’re not supposed to meet for a number of years. But I do know for sure that this baby is happening. But this time, I don’t want to lose her.”
He seemed to react at me calling the baby ‘her’.
“If we’re meant to be together,” I continued “then we’ll be together when the time comes.”
He didn’t buy that. I wasn’t sure I did, either.
“This is a mistake,” he replied.
“What is?” I asked.
“All of it. Nat, we’re supposed to be finding a way to…We should go back, not stick around, trying to change things!”
Now he wanted to talk about that.
“But we are back, aren’t we? It all depends on what side of the fence you’re looking from. You already changed things, right? All that money? I did too.”
I told him about my second chance with Professor Shepard. “Why not stay and fix what went wrong with our lives? A second chance. There must be a reason all this is happening. Do you know a way back? Cause I don’t. And if I am to survive this whole ordeal, I have to do the things I feel need changing.”
“Can you just…wait? Maybe we find something! A way back!”
I didn’t answer but he could tell.
We sat there some more. Quietly.
“Are you going to say anything?” I asked.
“I don’t know what to say, Nat. I just, can’t compete with a baby. I know it and you definitely know it. If I’m supposed to fight for you, here, I don’t know how.”
“I know,” I said through the sobs.
“I do love you, you know!” He finally looked at me.
“I know…” And I loved him.