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It’s different than it was in recall. That was all impressions, gently faded.

Mental indentations, twice removed. This – this perfect, treacherous pocket of stolen time – is as raw and as immediate as anything.

As insistent. She charts it all in hazy awareness.

His knee pressed between her thighs. His mouth trailing along her throat. His hands in her hair.

“Touch me back, Wells,” he orders between kisses.

And she does. Her hands skate over his chest – over the hard hammer of his heart, the cords of his neck.

Georgina meets him in a kiss that obliterates what shreds of self-preservation remain, leaving them both fumbling with the buttons of his shirt, grasping at the hem of her sweater.

Shedding outerwear and undergarments with an urgency that borders on panic.

The books go toppling to the ground as his hands slide along her thighs.

As her legs hitch around his waist. As memory collides with experience.

“I’m sorry,” she gasps, as they move together. “I’m so sorry.”

She hadn’t realized how truly sorry she was until this moment.

Until they’re notched together in the airless dark, his arm belted around her back, both of them splitting and fracturing in a thousand different directions.

A slight shift, an explosion of starlight, and everything, everything, everything clicks at last into alignment.

“Georgina,” he says, “look at me.”

She obeys. He’s watching her the way he always does. Like he can’t quite make sense of her. He’s watching her that way, still, as she tips over the edge. As he follows, taut and trembling.

When it’s done, they dress in silence, then sink side by side onto the floor. They wait, his fingertips tracing the lines in her palm.

“I always knew you’d kill me one day,” he says. “It was inevitable.”

There is no word in the English language for this feeling in her chest.

“I’m going to fix it,” she promises.

He threads his fingers through hers. Brings the back of her hand to his mouth. She can feel him smiling, and she doesn’t deserve it.

“I know,” is all he says.

***

They’re a week into researching when they finally find it: the first glimmer of hope.

She’s curled on the couch in his apartment, hemmed in by a growing fortress of books. A useless, dusty hoard. She’s gone through everything. Annals. Records. Periodicals. Anything they can get their hands on. Anything at all. Every last resource has turned out to be a dead end.

In three days and two hours, Orson Auclair will die at her hand.

“We’ve been going about this all wrong,” declares Orson, bursting through the front door.

He unravels his scarf and drops onto the couch, tugging her into his lap in the same fluid movement.

He smells like the first snow, crisp and cold.

His hair is still damp with it when he leans in to nuzzle her neck. “Hello.”

She lifts her chin to grant him access, shivering as he peppers her throat with kisses. Caught between this slow, intoxicating bliss and a sense of stifling urgency.

“Orson, we should focus.”

“I am intensely focused,” he murmurs into her sternum.

She presses him back into the couch, shifting until she’s straddling him, her knees notched on either side of his thighs. “You’ve learned something new.”

“Maybe.” His touch scores Georgina’s hips. His eyes are bright, his mouth bruised with kisses. “I’ve been thinking about Parmenides.”

It takes her a moment to understand what he means. “The Greek philosopher?”

“Yes, and how he believed reality is intemporal.”

This again. “Orson—”

“Just wait. Hear me out. He thought the universe was the same, all throughout, yes? If true, that would mean time is static. Everything is happening all at once.”

She thinks about what he’s saying. “Except that line of thinking has been disproven.”

“No, there’s a lack of proof. That’s different. Think about it, Georgina. We’ve been taught to envision time as a river, ever-flowing. But what if what we’ve been taught is wrong? What if it’s a pool?”

“I’m not sure how this gets me home,” she says, driven to distraction by his touch. “A pool, a river, a puddle. The analogy doesn’t matter. I’m still stuck here. And even if I manage to go back to the moment I left, you’d still be dead.”

“But what if you haven’t left at all?” asks Orson, his fingers tiptoeing along her spine now. “If all time is static, then right at this moment there is a very distraught version of you sobbing over my corpse.”

“I didn’t sob .”

“No, you’re right. You’d be far too traumatized. It’s a common symptom of shock.”

“That’s not funny.”

He grins and tips back against the cushions, his hands bracketing her hips.

Peering up at her in that studious way of his.

With a steadfastness strong enough to snap her in two.

They spend some time sizing one another up, basking in the glow of a feeble November sun.

Lost in thought. Steeped in dread. Comfortable in the feel of one another, in spite of everything that has happened. Everything that will.

“I saw you today,” he finally says.

“Were you horrible to me?”

“I tried not to be, but I think you’re suspicious.”

She blinks down at him, another piece clicking into place. Another epiphany, popping into sparks.

“I wasn’t suspicious,” she admits. “I was jealous.”

“Jealous?” He looks unreasonably delighted for a man approaching death.

“I thought you were seeing someone.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t gloat.”

His eyes glitter. “I didn’t say a word.”

“You don’t have to. It’s all over your face.”

He reaches up and presses Georgina’s hair behind her ears. “You can read me that easily?”

“Like a book, Auclair.”

“Give me an example.”

She considers him, shivering as his thumb traces shapes along the underside of her jaw. “The day I killed you, you knew what was coming. I’ve never seen you look so resigned.”

His touch stills. “I’ll know this time, too.”

The way he says it – as if it’s an inevitability – puts an awful pit in her stomach. “So, is this it? We’re trapped in this loop forever?”

“I don’t think so,” he says, after a moment’s consideration. “You didn’t know what was coming, which means you must have drifted somewhere .”

“But where?”

“That’s the mystery. If we’re operating under the assumption that we exist at all times, in all places, then theoretically you would have had to slip back into some version of yourself, at some moment in time. The fact that there’s two of you existing simultaneously in the same moment is a glitch.”

“A hiccup,” says Georgina.

“A hiccup,” he agrees.

She thinks of all she’s seen, the flickers, the variances, the memories. The answer feels like it’s right there, on the tip of her tongue. At the edge of her consciousness. She reaches for it. “You came to my apartment the day before you died. You seemed distressed.”

“Distressed?” echoes Orson, frowning. “That doesn’t sound like me.”

“You were wearing sweatpants ,” adds Georgina, as though this is further proof of how calamitous the entire situation had been. “It seemed like you’d been there before.”

Solemnly, he says, “I have never been fortunate enough to receive an invite to the great Georgina Wells’ apartment.”

“Don’t joke. This is serious.”

“Well, yes, if I was wearing sweatpants, then it must have been extremely serious.”

“Orson, stop it. This is important – you were in my kitchen, and you said something strange. You said a lot of strange things, actually, but there was one in particular – oh!” She snaps her fingers. “‘I’m too early.’ That’s what it was.”

He gives a short bark of laughter. “Wells, you genius. This is how we do it.”

“It is?”

“Yes. Don’t you see it? We follow the memories. We use them as a roadmap. Think about it – when you shifted back home, that first time in Rhode Island, what did it feel like?”

“It hurt,” admits Georgina. “It felt like I was slamming into myself.”

“What if you were?” asks Orson. “When I drift, I take all of me. What if when you drift—”

“It’s just a portion,” finishes Georgina, considering.

“If you’ve rattled a piece of yourself loose, you’ll need to put it back.”

“You make it sound like my soul was searching for yours,” she says. “That’s not science, Orson. That’s poetry.”

His throat clicks in a swallow. He searches her face. Finally, he says, “‘The steeds that bear me carried me as far as ever my heart desired’.”

She falters. “What is that?”

“It’s poetry.” His smile is crooked. “Parmenides, to be exact.”

When all she can summon in response is a scowl, flat and dark, he leans in to kiss it away. “We must have found proof of it the last time. Georgina,” he speaks into her mouth. “ Think . Why else would I have been expecting you on that day of all days?”

“Desperation?”

“Have a little more faith.” He pulls back to look at her. “Out of curiosity, what color are your sheets?”

“White.” She cuts him a sideways glance. “Why does that matter?”

“During our last transference, I saw us. Together. In a bed with white sheets. I said—”

“‘This moment’,” she finishes.

“‘This moment’.” Their eyes clash. The anticipation is a held breath. “Let’s recreate it.”

***

They go to her apartment in the late morning, once she’s certain November Georgina is safely on campus. Without her key, she’s forced to ask the super for help. Giulia Marino is a stout, Catholic woman. She scowls up at Orson as she lets Georgina in.

“I will pray the Rosary,” she says. “And bring you a lasagna. You are too thin.”

“She didn’t like me,” notes Orson, once they’re alone in her kitchen.

“Don’t take it personally,” says Georgina, setting down her things and gesturing for him to follow. “She gets jumpy if I have any male guests over. I think she missed her calling as an abbess.”

Orson tails after her, ducking to avoid hitting his head on the dramatic slope of the ceilings. “And does that happen often? You having male guests, I mean.”

“I’m sure you’d love to know.”