He shook his head. “I move fast,” he said. “Speed of light has got nothing on me. You might have seen me for the infinitely smallest possible particle of a second. Almost nothing.”

“But—”

“I can’t control it,” he said. “But we are connected. You pull me.”

“How?”

“Do you want a scientific answer?”

“Maybe.”

“We resonate. Our cells speak the same language. At the same frequency.”

“Are you for real?”

“You pull me,” he said again. “It’s called love, Jude. I will always find you.”

I put my hand to his face, stroked his cheek, touched his jaw. “I never believed in all that.”

“In what? Love? What if it’s not a question of belief?” he said. “Just equations. Like your physics.”

“Is it?”

“I wait and wait for you, between times,” he said, while the day carried on as normal, minute by minute, and people everywhere told stories and paid their bills and rode their bikes and tried on sneakers and thought about what to have for lunch. It didn’t make any sense. I tucked my head into the crook of his arm, put my hand on his chest, the tips of my fingers on the pulse at his throat. Novo traced a line down the middle of my forehead, down my nose and over my lips and past my chin. “I’m always with you,” he said. “Even when I’m not.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I said.

“A satellite to a planet,” he said. “A moon. If you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

“Why me though?” I said.

“Why would you even ask that?”

“Because I want to know. What’s so special about me? I mean, aren’t there other bodies somewhere else, resonating in other times, with the same frequency?”

“No,” he said. “There’s only you.”

“How come?”

“I am a lost cause,” he said. “The original.”

“Meaning?”

“You’re my patron saint.” His smile breaking, the unsticking of his mouth, the clean shine of his teeth. He closed his eyes like a cat at the top of that smile. How does the rest of the world even function without seeing that?

“You’re different,” he said. “Be different.” And then he moved closer and kissed me. Soft, that kiss. So careful. So forever-destroyingly kind. I kissed him back, and the black-dark center of his eyes was fierce and open and hungry, and the quiet between us was something wonderful.

“Stay with me,” I said. “Don’t leave.”

“Easy,” he said, and he kissed me again. “Done, Jude. I’ll do whatever you say.”