We were happy for a while, probably longer than we had a right to be. It was beautiful and mundane—tossing clothes in the dryer, sorting the recycling, sleeping in and then rolling out of bed to hit a diner down the road—a preview of some future we could have. Maybe no wedding ceremony and honeymoon was in the cards for us, but we were in this for the long haul, whatever we decided our lives would look like. And I wanted all of that with him, with the way he made me want to be more of the person he saw in me. With the way that he shut up the rotating cast of heckling voices in my head, how he canceled the production of their shitty here’s how Hayes is a fuckup now scenes before they even started.

Sheets soft as cotton candy in their huge bed where I kissed down Yusuf’s neck, past the hair across the valley between his chest, following the archipelago of moles down his torso. We opened a bottle of wine. He slipped on a pair of white briefs and stepped out to the small bedroom patio, a floating island of blue tile above the city, just big enough for two chairs and a small table where we could have coffee in the mornings and talk about our days.

“We can do this,” Yusuf said, in profile against the twinkling city lights. He sipped his wine, his grip so soft on the glass that it looked like he could drop it at any second. “We can find a universe where we can make this work. Some pre-Digital Age version of Earth where it’ll be easier to fake identities. We can get jobs and find a place to live. Or some version of Earth where the you and me there are already dead. Or, or maybe—maybe we talk to the guys here and tell them what happened, and we can share their identities. We can work something out. You and me.”

The cool breeze rippled goosebumps over our bare skin. With our weeks and weeks of universe-skipping, winter was just around the corner.

I changed him from the man who could barely unknot the feelings in his own head and explain them to someone else, to this different version, with his soft eyes. I’d never asked him to change for me, and maybe it was more that he was showing himself to me and I just couldn’t wait to see more. No one else had talked about wanting a future with me. I almost told him to wait so I could run to the instant camera by the front door and snap a picture of him like this—wrapped in blue shadows from the bedroom, his bed-mussed curls a dented halo, the swoop of one corner of his lips. But I didn’t want to interrupt the moment just to document it.

*   *   *

So.