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I woke up mid-thrust, my body slick with sweat as the stench of stale perfume clogged my nose. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was or even who I was. The room was dark except for a sickly orange light seeping through bedroom curtains.

Disoriented, I squeezed my eyes shut as nausea crashed over me in relentless waves. When I opened them again, the grim realization hit me. I was inside a body that wasn't supposed to exist anymore - my own.

A sharp gasp tore from my lips and I jerked back, blinking into the dim light of the bedroom as I stared at the familiar profile of someone I hadn't seen in years.

Angie was on all fours, her blonde hair a tangled mess, mouth parted in a drunken moan calling out my name.

Her hands clutched mine, her hips grinding against me, and the whole scene reeked of something worse than her perfume: regret.

I pulled out of her and fell back against the headboard, gasping, my heart in my throat as I fought hyperventilation. My skin crawled like writhing maggots .

Angie blinked up at me, her mascara smudged, her mouth curled into the pout that had once made me stupid. “Levi?”

“Angie?”

Her name curdled in my mouth, sour and metallic.

It tasted of guilt, like copper on the back of my tongue.

Years of rotten memories compressed into the pit of my stomach as I stared at her.

She was not an ex, yet, but she was a gaping wound I'd left to fester, with her tinted smile I’d kissed too many times.

She was a mistake already carved into the marrow of my bones.

The urge to vomit ripped through me, violent and consuming, as I stumbled off the bed and clawed blindly for my clothes. I glanced down at my cock, slick with her, and the sight hammered me with another tidal wave of nausea, stronger than any hangover I'd ever crawled through.

Behind me, she let out a confused, broken little cry as I searched the room naked and trembling. I heard the sharp intake of her breath, the rising panic in her voice as I grabbed fistfuls of clothes off the lush carpet.

"Levi, what the fuck?"

I caught my reflection in the mirror above the dresser.

Smooth skin, no gray yet in my hair, no lines bracketing my mouth.

I was maybe thirty-six again, at the peak of my selfishness.

My younger, hotter, much dumber self: Old Me.

Panic seized me as I stared at the narcissistic asshole in the mirror and collected my thoughts.

I knew Angie wouldn't understand. Hell, I barely understood.

All I knew? I had died.

I had died years from this moment, in a distant future that seemed to no longer exist. And yet? There I was, trapped in my younger body .

I yanked my pants off the floor, shoving my legs into them with shaking hands, careful not to crush anything in the zipper. "Angie, I can't see you again," I said, the words scraping out of my throat raw.

I knew I needed to hurry out the door before I said something stupid. Nothing made sense right then.

Turning, I stared into her big blue eyes, disbelief and shock radiating from her as I pulled on my shirt.

Fuck, why come back to now? To this moment? Why not before I ever met her?

“I don’t understand baby, what’s going on?” Tears shimmered in her feathered eyes, blinking rapidly like a handheld duster. “You just moved in two days ago. You said you’d marry me.” She sat up, covering herself with the wrinkled sheet.

Baby. Fuck, how I used to love being called that.

But in that moment? Her voice was a knife in my ears.

If only she knew how violently she repulsed me, how the thought of being inside her made me want to tear my own flesh off just to feel clean again.

Yet there I was, dick limp and sticky in my jeans, soaked in her filth, with only one thought pulsing louder than the sickness in my gut.

How do I fix my marriage and earn back my family’s trust?

The problem was, Angie had confirmed what I feared… I’d already moved out. The pain at home would still be raw; my absence a fresh wound on the family the Old Me had destroyed.

Despite Angie's pleas, my brain kept leaping from thought to thought.

Somehow, I was back in time and nowhere near home.

My last memory? My body, shattered, engulfed in a fireball of twisted steel and broken glass on the road home, twelve years into the future.

In some cruel joke of time, I'd been dropped back into the exact moment my life began to unravel: a series of foolish choices by a foolish man-child.

The ultimate betrayal. I looked down at my hands: unscarred, whole, and alive. Everything about me screamed before.

Fuck me. Home. I need to get out of here and get back home.

“Angie, we both knew this was never built to last, especially once the money dried up. I’ll come get my stuff later.” I hesitated. “Actually, fuck it. Burn it all if you want. I don’t care.”

Angie's shrill voice scraped against my skull as I grabbed my remaining clothes and stumbled for the door. I didn’t look back. I couldn’t.

Shame clung to me like a second skin, thick and suffocating, as I stormed down the three familiar steps of her house, a house I'd slithered in and out of for months, betraying my wife with every filthy, grinning lie.

Sloane. Hell, Sloane.

The Sloane I knew felt distant. One of my last memories of her struck me like a blade to the ribs: sharp, sudden, unforgettable.

Despite every humiliation I dragged her through, despite the ocean of pain I'd nearly drowned her in, I still remember her calling me to wish me happy birthday - happy forty-eighth birthday.

The two of us sipped coffee together at that cafe, a cafe that wouldn't even exist yet, on the corner of 7th and Spring Street.

Her warm smile edged with lines. Her light touch on my arm when she laughed.

The casual, yet tender, way she asked how I was holding up, even when I didn't deserve a single second of her consideration after all I'd done.

In my previous life, I had traded Sloane and my perfect life for sweat-stained sheets and empty orgasms: a hollowness that paled in comparison to what we'd built together.

I had been left with a volatile mix of constant self-hatred and an endless, gnawing guilt that ate me alive, rotting every moment of my life like a cancer.

While all of those heinous mistakes I'd made were a painful and distant memory for me, the revelation of my fuck-ups would be only a few days ago for this new life.

And we remember what happens next.

I had the grotesque privilege of knowing the horror on the horizon. The lonely condos, the hollow sex… Angie crying in the rain or shrieks of rage that reverberated in the halls. Then there was Slone’s silence, Violet’s disappearance, and finally Liam's series of incarcerations.

So what was I supposed to do? Relive the wreckage? Play it all again and hope for a different ending?

Fuck. I hadn’t just ruined our family. I had obliterated Sloane, us, and everything we had built together. All I felt in that moment of clarity, coursing through my veins like ice water, was horror. I was a goddamn scumbag; a shell of a man in a skinsuit.

My death should have been my final punishment, my penance for the pain and suffering I had caused. Instead, I was somehow back again.

I stumbled out into the parking lot, the morning air sharp and cold against my skin.

Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed.

The world felt too big, too real. Twelve years of knowledge burned behind my eyes as I slid into the driver’s seat of my truck.

The crisp, sterile smell of new leather and carpet smothered me, a reminder of how easily I'd buried guilt under the guise of waste and luxury.

As I breathed through the onslaught of nausea, tears pricked at my eyes.

For the first time in years I let myself cry.

I sat there for a long time, staring out the window of my truck, watching the bruised sky as the sun rose, feeling like some cruel god had dragged me out of the grave just to force me to witness the beginning of my own ruin.

Not to change it, simply to watch it. Helpless. Aware .

Bile rose once again and I couldn't hold it back. I threw open the door, emptying out the remains of my stomach as the invasive thoughts kept coming.

I deserve this. This is Hell. This is my punishment for all I've done.

Hell or not, I knew something with bone-deep certainty: no matter how young my body, my soul was already rotting. And Sloane? Fuck, she would never look at me the same again.

Wiping the tears and vomit from my face, I crawled back in and started my truck. Anger coiled in my stomach as I came to the conclusion I needed.

Fuck whatever sadistic god brought me back and fuck whatever they had planned for me. I didn't care if it was intended as a curse, gift, or punishment. I had one more chance. I had to find Sloane and tell her how sorry I was before I lost her all over again.

Because I refused to lose her again.