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“Here’s the salad.” Meryl put out a bowl of cubed watermelon, diced cucumber, crumbled feta, and a mint dressing that Tressa Fay had watched her make. “I know it seems weird, but it’s delicious. Someone at work brought it to a team-builder event, and I got the recipe.”

The picnic table in Meryl’s backyard was full of food. Gayle had brought chicken burritos. James, who was incredibly beautiful and funny, had made guacamole and brought chips. Guy and Michael carried in a gorgeous cheesecake from Sucre, a bakery near downtown, and Tressa Fay had put together a sangria in Meryl’s kitchen with rosé, raspberries, peach schnapps, and her secret ingredient, Sprite.

She had even brought along Epinephrine in his special cat harness, but he’d arrowed toward Gayle immediately and been slow-blinking in her lap, pleased with his friend, who kept feeding him bites from one of the chicken burritos, “to tide him over,” she said .

Guy joked it was their first official meeting of the Time Travelers’ Club, and Meryl had joked back that it was appropriate it was a potluck, given that they were in the process of bringing completely different things to the same event in the hope that it would turn out well.

“So what’s the goal here?” James asked, filling up his plate. “And when is the grown-up coming who will fix this mess?”

“Yes, thank you!” Mary replied, batting her eyelashes at James. “I super-duper hate it when there’s a looming deadline over my summer.”

“ This is the goal,” Meryl said. “What’s happening right now. None of this happened in the original universe.”

Michael scratched his fingernails through his dark stubble. “The idea, you’re saying, is that in this universe, Meryl stays, because we’re making her staying more probable than whatever caused her disappearance.”

Tressa Fay glanced at Meryl while she filled her plate. She couldn’t imagine what it was like for her to hear something like that. Especially today, when it was warm and breezy, the sky perfectly clear, and mostly, they were laughing. James and Mary seemed to be flirting even more than Mary usually flirted with handsome men who were her type. Meryl had just reached over and rubbed a bit of smashed raspberry off Tressa Fay’s lip from the icy sangria.

“How’s your dad?” Linds asked. “And Jen?” She put her arm around Brooklynn, who she’d brought along to the picnic to meet Michael and Guy.

Mary had met Brooklynn at a plant store, and she’d immediately tagged the tall, criminally luscious, self-declared “plant mom” for Linds—especially after Brooklynn told Mary a story that metaphorized pollination as polyamory. Brooklynn was a sought-after cosplay seamstress for both fantasy/dragon cons and Midwest Renaissance festivals. Tressa Fay and her friends had seen a lot of corsetry lately, on both Brooklynn and Linds, and no one was complaining about the view. They hadn’t known Brooklynn was the same Brooklynn a different Mary had met at the taproom and tried to set up with Tressa Fay until Meryl exchanged a funny series of texts with future Tressa Fay that unrolled the entire story.

All of which was to say, Linds and Brooklynn felt extremely fated .

Tressa Fay’s optimism in the universe was high. “You know, I don’t know if it’s Jen or talking to him about Meryl, but Dad’s good.” She met Linds’s eyes. “We’re good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. We’re spending more time together. Meryl and I are going fishing with him and Jen.”

“What?” Guy laughed. “He’s willingly taking you fishing? And not just because he can’t leave you unattended at home because you’re a child?”

“I know! He’s interested in what Meryl knows about water, and probably also in the fishing spots she knows that he hasn’t found yet.”

“Definitely,” Meryl said. “He has his eyes on a trophy at his church’s rally in July.”

Guy shook their head. “I can’t credit it. I’ve been trying to win that man over for at least twenty-seven years, and he’s never said more to me than to tell my mom hello.”

Tressa Fay couldn’t quite figure it out, either, except that she hadn’t known what part of their relationship she had been holding away from her dad. Not that it was her fault. She thought maybe the hurt that had come from not getting the closeness she craved had resulted in her inhibiting more and more of herself around him as time went on. But something had broken between them. It wasn’t the same, in such a good way.

“I saw you the other day.” Guy was studying Meryl.

“Oh, yeah? Where?”

“Downtown. I was walking a client to the courthouse so they could request a document, and you were crossing the street in front of city hall. I actually was thinking I’d like to talk to you sometime. I have a case I’m dealing with where I’m representing a group of people with properties along the East River that the city condemned. They’ve been protesting, and the way they went about it got them arrested. I just need to check with my team to make sure if I do ask you some questions, I won’t be messing with the city’s prosecution unfairly or that you wouldn’t need to be deposed.”

Meryl pushed her glasses up, which Tressa Fay recognized as a sign of interest. “I know something about what’s happening with the East River, and I could likely talk to you, since I don’t have anything to do with the city’s actions.”

Tressa Fay listened to Guy and Meryl casually talk about the case, Michael asking questions, Gayle exclaiming whenever she realized there was something that Meryl did for her job that Gayle didn’t know about. James and Mary were in and out, sitting on a metal glider in the yard and definitely invading each other’s space. She watched them until Mary noticed and glared at her.

“Hey, James.” Tressa Fay leaned forward. “What do you do? Meryl said you work with students at the university.”

“I’m the director of student services.” His brown eyes were criminally beautiful, sleepy and thick-lashed, and his coral tank against his smooth brown skin made him look like a vacation poster. “A less glamorous job than I make it appear.”

Mary sighed, looking at Tressa Fay. “You know, I’m over the moon for you and Meryl, but I’m forever trying to fix you up, and you’ve never once taken me up on a girl who, for example, isn’t trying to avoid a universe where she disappears. No offense, Meryl.”

“None taken.”

Guy reached over and took Michael’s hand. Michael was summer crisp in navy shorts and a grass-green gingham top. He pushed his Ray-Bans into his dark hair. He looked like the secret bad boy on a superyacht. “You know what I’ve been thinking about, probably because of all these time conversations?” he asked. “After I came home from Michigan’s law school prom, second year. I’d gone with this man I picked up at a bar a couple of weeks before.”

“In front of me,” Guy said.

“Yes. Probably because I’d been so confused, I felt like I had to. But, weirdly, it didn’t help to pick this man up and talk to him, take him out just enough in two weeks to get him to come with me to the prom, where I ignored him in favor of dancing most of the night with Guy, who I very seriously contemplated grabbing by their sequined cocktail dress and kissing.”

Guy’s eyes widened. “You did? I have never heard this. You told me you wanted to kiss me when we ran into each other in Minneapolis and we ended up talking all night at the rooftop thing. I had already transitioned.”

“I did want to kiss you then.” Michael raised his eyebrows. “And I wanted to kiss you before that.”

Everyone in the yard was listening now.

“My point is, I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t want to kiss you, and I shouldn’t have let you go like I did after graduation. I wasn’t ready, but I shouldn’t have let you go.”

Guy smiled. “I wasn’t ready, either. Even though you were the very first person I wanted in a way that made sense to me. I shouldn’t have let you go like I did. Obviously, I never really let you go.”

Michael grinned and pulled Guy in for a kiss.

They could do that as much as they wanted now, for as long as they wanted to. It felt to Tressa Fay like an impossible luxury. With the sun slanting away, it was cool, but the prickling sensation over her arms had nothing to do with getting cold.

Tressa Fay pushed the feeling away. She wouldn’t think about it, wouldn’t let herself become maudlin, because she had no intention of letting Meryl go. She knew that the unimaginable other Tressa Fay wanted Meryl with her, too, and the only thing that could possibly mean was that this picnic, this plan, had worked .

It had to work.

They talked until it was just starting to get dark, the sky purplish and insects beginning to sing. Tressa Fay’s temples ached from her laughing so much and tracking so many different conversations at once.

“Is that what you wanted?” she asked when she and Meryl were back in the kitchen, doing dishes.

Meryl put a bowl away. “I think so. In any event, it’s what we can do, right? Look at it, talk about it, research it, science it, hope that time is merciful.”

“It would feel so much more real to, like, lock you up in one place where we could watch you and guard the door so we wouldn’t have to be afraid that we were missing something easy, like someone we could chase away and tackle to the ground.”

Meryl leaned against the counter. Tressa Fay was shocked to see that her eyes were shiny, and she was blinking to keep the tears back. “This feels real. It feels so real to me. But I talk to you there , where I’m really, really not .”

Tressa Fay reached out for Meryl’s hand. “But you are, or we wouldn’t be here. Which, I know that’s a head spinner, but we don’t have to let it be. Think about what my dad used to say when I bombed algebra tests.” Tressa Fay gently kissed Meryl’s forehead. “Whatever you don’t understand is for God to know.”

Meryl laughed. “You’re amazing.” She took Tressa Fay’s face in her hands. “You are helping me every single day to remember to let the awe happen, you know? Even if there are scary parts and hard parts.” Meryl stepped closer. She had put on one of those old-timey sundresses with the stretchy top and tied shoulders and tiers of prairie fabric. It was soft yellow and covered with tiny white flowers, so that the fabric was nearly an inverse of Meryl’s skin, with its golden freckles. Her hair was all on top of her head, and she looked sun-kissed and windblown in the best way.

“You’re the amazing one. Look at you.” Tressa Fay slid her index finger under the first inch of the smocked bodice of Meryl’s dress.

Meryl reached up and slid her hand under the skinny tie around Tressa Fay’s neck holding up her black bikini top. “Look at you .”

“Do you have any ideas for what you’d like to do next, and do any of them involve untying things?”

“All of my ideas involve untying things. What is this that you decided to wear today? It’s so upsetting.”

“This is my notion of a Green Bay picnic outfit.” Tressa Fay looked down at the black bikini top she’d paired with a sarong skirt, which was really a vintage Hermès scarf of her mother’s that she’d tied at her hip.

“I don’t know if that says more about you or more about Green Bay.” Meryl kissed her neck. “I want to abandon the rest of these dishes to soak, and I want you to come upstairs so I can show you how easy it would be to tie someone’s hands to my headboard, if someone wanted that, and then I’m going to start removing this sartorial sin.”

Tressa Fay got fully five degrees hotter than she already was. “We should do that.” She slid her hand up Meryl’s neck and cupped her jaw, then kissed her softly. “That way, I won’t be so jealous that you’re sometimes texting her instead of talking to me.”

“You are literally the same person. We’ve talked about this.”

“But things have happened to her that haven’t happened to me.” She kissed Meryl again. “It’s confusing. My brain has simplified the problem by deciding to be jealous.”

“ That’s why you’d like me to tie you up,” Meryl said, smiling. “So you’re not jealous. Of yourself.”

“Yes. I’m glad you understand.”

Meryl laughed. “Go on, then. I want to watch you walk up.”

The staircase was adorably old fashioned, with wooden steps and a red runner of carpet, and it ended at a tiny landing with three small bedrooms and a bath opening off it. Meryl’s bedroom was the biggest one. It had surprised Tressa Fay with its softness. There was a low, pale wood bed frame with rows of spindles and a fluffy white duvet, a pale pink rug, and filmy curtains. Being in Meryl’s bedroom was like being nestled in one of her silky work shirts.

Walking up the stairs, Tressa Fay noticed the fatigue in her legs. The heat and the sun and conversations had made her tired. She wanted to burrow in Meryl’s soft bed.

“Are you genuinely in the mood for stern and bossy?” she asked. “Because I could probably dig down and shift my energy, but now that I have climbed one whole entire story, what I’m feeling is much more naked and lazy than what you were talking about downstairs.” She flopped backward onto Meryl’s bed, letting her arms be loose above her head, her scarf skirt falling open to show her bikini bottom.

Meryl lifted the skirt of her sundress and put her knee on the bed, then crawled over top of Tressa Fay. She kissed her collarbones, her shoulder, the spot where her neck met it. Then she bit the curve of Tressa Fay’s neck hard enough that she yelped and clenched against the hard thump between her legs. “I can just spoon you.” Meryl reached up and took one of Tressa Fay’s wrists, licking into her mouth for a dirty kiss. “That’s fine with me.”

“Hmm.” Tressa Fay closed her eyes. “Possibly I can summon a second wind.”

“Yeah?” Meryl focused on the knot at Tressa Fay’s hip, breaking it open. “Lift up.”

Tressa Fay lifted her hips, watching Meryl, who slid the scarf out from under her and rolled it up carefully, slowly, and then pushed her glasses up her nose, which was what got Tressa Fay wet. After that, Meryl leaned over and very competently tied Tressa Fay’s wrists to the spindles of the headboard.

She tested them. They were extremely secure. “Oh no.”

“It’s a predicament,” Meryl agreed, untying the bows at her own shoulders. She looked Tressa Fay over as she shucked off her dress, and then it was Meryl everywhere, all the skin, all her dips and hollows, all of her.

“Gah.” Tressa Fay was starting to pant. She brought her knee up to assist her with wiggling and pressing herself against Meryl’s body, but Meryl just pushed it back down and slid Tressa Fay’s bikini bottom off and began a very slow and torturous process of kissing her way up from Tressa Fay’s toes to the arches of her feet, from her ankles, along her shinbones, to her knees, where she licked a circle around her kneecap and blew on it.

“This is very much worse than I thought it would be.” Tressa Fay’s nipples were so hard. She had her bikini top on and nothing else. Lying on Meryl’s pretty duvet cover in her pretty bedroom with a scrap of fabric over her breasts and her hands tied above her head was the most exposed she had ever been.

“Look at you.” Meryl repeated the sentiment from downstairs, except this time it was accompanied by a slow rake of her nails from Tressa Fay’s belly down to a hip and then over her thigh.

“Please.” Tressa Fay decided that begging was the fastest route to getting what she wanted, even if she wasn’t sure what she wanted, only that she trusted Meryl would give it to her.

It was when Meryl would give it to her that worried her.

“Put your feet flat on the bed,” Meryl said softly. “Show me.”

“Yes. Okay.” Meryl’s hands were so gentle over the skin of her legs, her inner thighs, that even though Tressa Fay had wanted to watch, she couldn’t keep her eyes from closing. When Meryl’s tongue slid into the hollow of her high inner thigh, it was soft and hot, and that was when Tressa Fay knew for sure this was it for her. She wasn’t going to survive. Meryl would have to go forward into the uncertain future without her. She hoped November Tressa Fay could take over for her and enjoy more of Meryl’s erotic torture.

“Stay with me,” Meryl whispered.

It was such a completely ordinary thing to say to the woman you were touching and turning on. A gentle command when everything was getting out of control, good and hot and perfect. Stay with me.

Except Tressa Fay felt her throat go tight as Meryl’s mouth moved over her, making her throb, making her hips move closer for more. “I want to.” Her voice was hoarse. She didn’t want to cry, but she hadn’t been wrong about her body, and what it wanted was to wind itself around this woman, bind her up in her arms and hold her here.

Instead, she was tied down in one place, with no choice but to trust that Meryl wouldn’t leave her. That Tressa Fay could somehow be enough.

Meryl wrapped a hand around her thigh, and then she was at the edge, close and throbbing, every muscle tight, pressing every part of herself she could in Meryl’s direction. “Please,” she said. She wasn’t begging Meryl to let her come.

She was begging Meryl to never go.

She came in a long, slow, endless clench, Meryl right with her, and when she shuddered, Meryl moved over her and slipped the knot on the headboard and gently smoothed Tressa Fay’s arms down.

Then she did what she wanted, which was to wrap herself completely around Meryl, holding her. She pressed her cheek against Meryl’s temple, and her cheek was wet after all. She kissed her temple, the bridge of her nose, each corner of her mouth.

“Don’t cry,” Meryl said.

“I have to,” Tressa Fay told her. “But it’s okay. You don’t need to worry about it. I’m very free and easy with my tears.”

“I’ll just look at you, then.”

“Yes. Look at me.”

Don’t stop , Tressa Fay thought. Don’t ever stop, and let’s see if that works.