Page 22 of Love and Other Paradoxes

He was still reeling with the revelation when Diana swept offstage, pulling him into her arms. “Hear that?” she said breathlessly

in his ear. “That’s for us, my love. You and me.” She was trembling, her breath hot on his skin. “I know a secret storeroom

backstage. Let’s go and celebrate.” She kissed his neck.

He disentangled her arms from him and stepped back. He had a second to register her dismay, another second to take it back,

explain it away before it was too late. Both passed. “I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”

He rushed out onto the stage and down the steps, causing a commotion in the audience as he ran up the aisle towards the exit.

He pushed through the glass door of the lobby out into the frigid night. He ran on, turning down Sidney Street, scattering

smug Valentine’s couples in his wake. He pelted across the frosted grass of Parker’s Piece and crossed Gonville Place without

waiting for the lights. Ahead of him was Mill Road and the coffee shop and Esi, and every moment he spent without her was

another moment wasted.

He wasn’t sure what happened. One second he was striding across the road. The next, he was on the ground, ears ringing, a

searing pain in his leg.

He sat up, lightheaded. Nearby, a cyclist was swearing. Joe watched through the stars floating in his vision as they got back on their bike and wobbled hastily away.

Well , he thought. At least that’s over. He rolled up the ruin of his jeans to examine the blood running down his left leg. The wound looked deep enough to scar.

But something wasn’t right. He felt it in his gut, a wrongness he couldn’t yet define.

He scooted backwards to the pavement, yelling in pain, and fumbled Meant to Be out of his pocket. In the fuzzy light of the streetlamp, he turned to the page with the photographs. There he was, grinning

and dishevelled, bandages swathing his right leg.

He was trying to reason his way out— maybe I’m supposed to have two accidents, this is Cambridge, bikes crash into people every day —when he saw it. In the bottom right-hand corner, a detail he hadn’t noticed: a date, stamped on the photograph by the camera

that had taken it. 13.02.06.

The thirteenth of February. Yesterday. But that photo had never been taken. The accident it documented had never happened.

Here, on the printed page, was definitive proof that the past had changed.

Ringing filled his ears, like the fire alarm from this morning was still happening. What came through it, strangely, was the

voice of Dr. Lewis. Attention to detail has never been your strong suit. He stared blindly at the last picture, the one of him and Diana as thirtysomethings, still looking newly in love. He had never

bothered to read the caption. What could it say that wasn’t already clear from the way they were gazing at each other? Now,

his hands shaking so badly he almost couldn’t focus, he read it. Greene and Dartnell on 22nd May 2018 , it said. The day they first met.

He stared across the road into the empty darkness. “We’re not supposed to meet for another twelve years.”

It all fell into place. Vera starting to follow him after she saw him outside Diana’s rooms. The look on her face when she’d caught them together. The time travellers’ absence, stark as the silence from a broken clock. He had unwritten his future, his glorious, perfect future, and now it was gone forever.

Horror filled him, tinged at the edges with self-loathing. The truth had been right there in the book, hidden behind the questions

he should have asked as soon as he read it. Why was there no photograph of him and Diana together as students? Why did the

Introduction skip over their university years as if they were irrelevant to their love story? He had read that they had both

studied here, and his assumptions had done the rest: that Cambridge was where successful people met, that his future had to

start right now. Dr. Lewis again, speaking in his ear. You have a tendency to make leaps of logic that aren’t justified by the evidence. He stared down at the book, searching for an excuse, a way that this could not be all his fault. His eyes landed on Diana

in her first-year dress, her arm around Esi’s mum.

Esi. He seized on the thought of her like a drowning man reaching for a lifebelt. She was the one who had pushed him off his

destined path. Worse than that, she had taken his hand and led him further into the wilderness, claiming all the while that

she was setting him back on track.

He got to his feet with a roar of agony. He limped his way along Mill Road, the pain in his leg nothing to the torment in

his soul. The coffee shop lay ahead of him, the focus of all his rage: love and betrayal drawn together into a vanishing point.

The art in the window had changed. Now, it was a Valentine’s Day display, ringed with coffee bean hearts. Two figures were locked in an embrace under a thin crescent moon. He stopped in his tracks. A fingernail moon, a breath away from new: the same moon that had looked down on him and Esi in Diana’s garden, on the kiss that was never meant to happen.

He couldn’t think about that right now. He hammered on the door. He waited, then hammered again. Nothing. He was resolved

to keep hammering until daybreak when he realised: Esi was trying to be a ghost. Of course she wouldn’t open the door to a

random stranger. He got his phone out and texted her with shaking hands.

It’s me. Open the door. We need to talk.

After a moment, she appeared from the back. Her expression was soft, expectant, like she was both terrified and excited to

hear what he had to say. He thought of the original reason he had come here, and his heart twisted in his chest.

She unlocked the door. “What are you...” She caught sight of his leg, and her eyes widened in alarm. “Joe, you’re bleeding.”

“Yes, I’m bleeding! I’m bleeding from the wrong leg !” He barely even registered that she had used his first name.

She stepped back. “What are you talking about?”

He barged past her into the darkened coffee shop. “I’m talking about the future,” he said, turning to face her. “I’m talking

about what was meant to be, but isn’t going to be anymore. Because of you .”

She was silhouetted in the light from the window; he couldn’t see her expression. “What...”

“Pretend not to understand. That’s fine.” He paced towards her, and she turned into the pale light. “You’ve been helping me

get together with Diana. Right? That’s what we’ve been trying to make happen since we met.”

“Yes,” she said uncertainly. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

Either she didn’t know, or she was a better actor than he had ever suspected. He refused the first possibility, too angry

to let it in. “No. I wanted my future. The one that’s supposed to happen. And in that future, Diana and I don’t meet until

we’re thirty-three.”

He saw the thoughts flying across her face, chasing implications. “Wait. You’re saying—you’re saying we’ve changed the future?”

Her brow furrowed, then lifted, light coming into her eyes. He saw that joy, and for a terrible, unworthy moment, he hated

it.

“Yes. You were right. Are you happy? You get what you want. Congratulations. I just don’t see why you had to fuck up my life

in the process.” He hated how the words sounded even as he said them. “Did you hate my poetry that much?”

“No!” Her face was open, desperate. “I didn’t know, okay? I would never have tried to help you get with Diana if I’d known.”

She was telling the truth, and he knew it. But he was a wound-up coil of rage, and that anger needed to get out. “What do

you mean? It’s right there in the book!”

“I didn’t read it! I told you, it was a free gift! I’m only here to save my mum. That’s all.” Terror flashed over her face.

“Shit. Shit! The whole point was not to make any other changes. If Diana’s future has changed this much, then the effects

could be huge—”

He laughed, ecstatic to find a real reason to be angry with her. “Aye, let’s focus on you right now. Never mind that this

whole time, I’ve been blithely setting my existence on fire because I thought my future was guaranteed. I nearly threw Diana

off a roof because I thought we were both immortal! Fuck, I could have killed her!” He buried his face in his hands. “I could

have killed myself.” That last part should have hit harder, but losing his immortality barely registered when weighed against

the only future he had ever wanted.

“I never told you your future was fixed. That’s on you.” He could see her mind racing; she was still thinking about how this affected her. “You have to make this right. Break things off with Diana.”

He started laughing. “Oh, I’m way ahead of you. I did that before I even found out.”

Relief flooded her face, until it was replaced by confusion. “What? Why?”

He thought of his previous self, running here in joy and terror to tell Esi he was in love with her. It felt like a vision

from another universe. “I...” She was looking at him with strange expectation. He shook his head, sinking down into a chair.

“It doesn’t matter now.”

She sat down next to him. “It doesn’t mean it’s over. You can meet her again in the future, when you’re supposed to.”

He kept shaking his head. “Maybe that would have worked four months ago. Maybe it would have even worked two days ago. But

not now.” He drew in a breath that turned into an embarrassing sob. “That future’s gone, and it was all I had. I stopped working

on my degree. I’m going to fail, and go home with nothing, and everyone’ll know I was never good enough.” He pressed his eye

sockets until he saw patterns, spinning out to infinity. “I’m fucked.”

“You’re not fucked.” Tentatively, she touched his shoulder. “You’re still you . You still have the talent, the potential. Even if you don’t get back with Diana, you can still have a future.”

She was trying to make him feel better. He didn’t want to feel better. He wanted to set himself on fire. He stood, shaking

her off. “I don’t want ‘a future.’ I want my future. Mine. The one with my name on it. The one I had, before you came along

and took it away.”

She rose to her feet, slow and deliberate. He had thought he had seen her angry before. He had been wrong. Her real anger didn’t look like his, hot and blustering. Hers was cold, and it froze him to the heart. “You came in here that day,” she said. “You talked to me. You followed me to town, you stole the book, and you went and talked to Diana. You. No one else.”

His mouth worked silently. “Okay. Fine. I talked to you. But you—you talked back. You couldn’t resist, could you? Oh, here’s

that fucking nozz Joseph Greene, let’s make a crack about his poetry. I should have known right then that you didn’t give

a fuck about my future—”

“‘My future. My future,’” she mimicked him. “Tell me something. What makes it yours?”

He stared at her, lost. “What?”

“Why should you be entitled to it, just because you had it before? Why shouldn’t you have to work for it, and risk, and doubt,

just like everybody else?”

Her words undid something in him, something so deeply rooted he had never even realised it was there. It hurt, like being

a child and watching a longed-for balloon disappear into the empty sky. The hurt had something underneath it, something important,

but he wasn’t ready to face it yet. Right now, he just wanted to push the hurt outwards onto the person who had caused it.

“You told me when we met that you were a bomb crater. But you’re worse than that. You’re a bomb. You came into my life and

you exploded it to fucking smithereens, and you don’t even have the honesty to admit that’s what you did.” He shook his head,

trembling. “You tried to warn me. Guess I should have listened.”

He got what he wanted. Her expression splintered, and her proud, upright posture sank, as he hit the heart of her vulnerability.

“And I should have walked out as soon as you came in here. I wish—”

“—we’d never met,” he filled in. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? Wish things had never happened, instead of facing up to them. Rewrite history, instead of finding a way to move on.” He walked to the door, turning back to face her. “I’ve never been real to you, have I? This whole time, you’ve treated me like nothing but an obstacle to your plan. But I’m a person, Esi. I exist. Here and now.” He hit his chest, wishing she could feel it. “You can walk away. Jump into that river and come out of it as someone else. Overwrite me and you like we never met. But we did. It happened.” He swallowed, wondering why his voice was shaking. “I’m not going to forget.”

He wasn’t sure how it had happened, but he wasn’t talking about his future anymore. Somehow, through the rage and the hurt,

he had circled back to the reason he had first meant to come here.

She walked up to him, until they were as close as they had been that night in Diana’s garden. He stared into her dark, red-rimmed

eyes, unsure if she was about to kiss him or shove him away.

What she did was worse than either. Her voice trembled as she said, “I can’t wait to forget you.”

She reached past him and opened the door. He turned and left, the pain in his leg surging back, his eyes filling with stupid,

needless tears. As he passed the window, he saw Esi sweeping away hearts and couple and moon, scattering them to fragments

as if they had never been.