Page 19 of Time for You

“I’ve got it,” Ellie announced, coming out of her bedroom. She looked like she’d just won a battle with a vicious foe, her hair all unkempt and her eyes slightly wild. “I know how to get Henry back.”

Daphne’s stomach jolted unpleasantly. It was what they had all been working toward for the past few weeks, but now she felt vaguely ill, like it was something she was dreading, not anticipating. Sure, she liked him a lot more now, but she still wanted him to get back to his family.

Henry, on the other hand, seemed ecstatic. “Truly?”

“Truly,” Ellie said, breathing hard. “I had to do like, so much math , but I’ve got it.

” She thrust a stack of papers at them, all covered in signs and a series of long equations.

“It is ley lines, but whether or not the portal works is also dependent on the person. Henry is a Capricorn sun with a Virgo moon, which, whoa dude, no wonder you’re uptight as hell. ”

“Is that relevant, El?” Daphne asked.

“It is, in that it’s like, the worst chart I’ve ever seen. His to-do lists have to-do lists.”

“I don’t have any lists?” Henry replied.

“Okay, yeah, that’s not important, really—I just needed to explain myself.

But if the moon is in Virgo, like it was the day he arrived, there are spots on the ley lines that allow the veil between time and space to rip slightly, but only for someone who has the right star chart.

I did Henry’s,” she said, pointing to one piece of paper, “and then I compared it to that map in the book he found at Helen’s.

There’s a portal between here and Edinburgh that’s the right spacing apart for someone with his chart, so I just had to put everything into this equation.

” Ellie pointed at another piece of paper, this one covered in incomprehensible symbols arranged into a long equation.

“What does it say?” Henry asked, squinting.

“First of all, it says I’m incredibly smart and was able to figure out really complicated math involving astrology, so there’s that. But what it says is the portal opens again in ten days, just a little farther down the ley line.”

“How far?”

“That will take some more math to figure out exactly, but not that far—it’ll be close. But it does look like it will be really quick. What I could get from that book is that the portals are unstable and short.”

“ Unstable sounds bad,” Daphne said.

“Not unstable as in dangerous. Just like, it’ll show up and then go away right away, so we have to be super precise. But we’re really lucky; there’s two cracks at this. One opens in ten days, like I thought, and then the next one opens on the solstice, so just a few more months away.”

“Both back to Edinburgh?” Henry asked hopefully.

“Edinburgh in 1885 to be precise,” Ellie said with a broad smile. “There’s one more that I could find, but it doesn’t open for seven years.”

“But I could be home in ten days?”

“You could. Or in three months, if—”

“Of course I’ll go at the earliest opportunity,” Henry said. “Do I need to do anything to prepare?”

Daphne’s stomach twisted. “What if it’s unsafe?” she pointed out, quite rationally in her opinion. “Or wrong?”

Ellie looked at her shrewdly. “Daph, when the hell have I ever been wrong?”

“That time you thought you’d look good as a brunette.”

“I mean, wrong about something that involves math and being smart .”

“Fair enough,” Daphne conceded, but Henry was looking at her with a hard-to-read expression. “What?” she asked him.

“Do you really think she’s wrong?”

“No, I’m just trying to be sure—”

“Because you’ve been very clear since I arrived that I need to get back to my time, and now that there’s a chance I can go back soon, you want, what? To be cautious?”

“That’s not—”

“I’m going back,” he said flatly.

“I didn’t—”

“And I don’t need your permission,” he added, steamrolling right along.

Daphne looked to Ellie for help, but instead of Ellie being appalled at Henry’s behavior, she just looked amused. “El, what do you think?”

“Honestly, I think if Henry’s got a chance to go back, he should take it.”

“But?” Daphne prompted, because she could tell by the way Ellie was looking between them, she wasn’t done.

“But if neither of you guys can figure out why you’re suddenly so pissed at each other, that’s not my problem,” Ellie said, and walked back into her room, leaving Daphne and Henry sitting with a stack of undecipherable math equations and more questions than Daphne had ever had in her life.

With each day that passed, it was getting harder and harder for Daphne to ignore the truth.

She had feelings for Henry. Real ones, not just the passing “oh, that’d be nice” way she felt about dating in general.

She wanted to talk to him when she got back from a shift, craved hearing about his day, wanted to hear him excitedly explain how he’d learned to use the internet to find a new recipe.

It was mundane, simple things, like the way he’d rub the back of his neck when he was thinking, or drum his fingers on the counter while flipping through a stack of cookbooks Ellie had rounded up from her aunts.

Henry was getting to be a fairly good cook, and kept throwing himself deeper and deeper into it, wanting to try newer things, harder things.

“Do people dance anymore?” Henry asked, but Daphne was only half listening. She was working on a crossword and was stuck on eleven down ( An escape, sort of ) while Henry read some mystery novel he had swiped from Helen’s.

“Hmm?”

“Dancing. Do people dance?”

“I mean, yeah, you’ve seen our movies, and we took you out one night. We dance.”

“Not like that. Proper dancing. Real dancing.”

Daphne put down the crossword puzzle book that Ellie had gotten her for Christmas, using her pen as a bookmark. “And what, pray tell, is real dancing?”

“Waltzing. Doesn’t anyone do that anymore?”

“I mean, I know people do. But a lot of us don’t know how to do much more than swaying.”

“They don’t teach it in school?”

Daphne wrinkled her nose. “I had to learn square dancing in school, if that counts?”

Henry’s brow furrowed, and a curl fell across his forehead. “Square dancing? Do you—make squares?”

“It’s hard to explain,” Daphne said. “But to your question, no, we don’t really learn dancing in school. I’m sure there are places to learn, but you’d have to seek them out.”

“I see,” he said, returning briefly to his book. “Actually, no, I don’t.”

“Look, education here is really underfunded and—”

“It’s not that. It’s more that dancing is an art, and it’s sad that more people don’t care.”

“It’s less that we don’t care, and more—I dunno, we don’t really have time.”

“Pardon my observation, my lady, but it seems you here in the future have nothing but time.”

“Um, we’re super busy?”

“In some ways. But with all this technology, you really do have more time—you just spend it differently.”

“And what, you think we should use it learning to dance instead?”

“I think you’re unhappy. And would be happier doing other things.”

Daphne chewed on her lower lip, because Henry was looking at her the way he did sometimes, like he was seeing right into her heart and recognizing something she didn’t want to look at. “ You’re unhappy , as in, you think I’m unhappy? Or just twenty-first-century people in general?”

Those impossibly blue eyes bored into her. “That depends, Daphne. Are you happy?”

God, sometimes she wished she hadn’t made him switch to calling her that.

Miss Griffin was irritating, but it had a distance that didn’t make her stomach flip over the way Daphne did in his lilting Scottish accent.

She swallowed hard and reached for the Doctorsona mask she used at the hospital, the one that kept her feelings from showing.

“Are you offering to teach me how to dance?” she said instead of answering.

As usual, she didn’t fool him, but he accepted her dodge with grace. “Do you have anything that’s a waltz?” he asked, standing up.

Ellie had a stack of vinyl records that she had gotten from an uncle, and a refurbished record player sitting in the corner. Henry had gotten into the habit of using it from time to time, since it was technology that was vaguely familiar to him in a way computers simply weren’t.

It had been a long time since Daphne had taken her one music appreciation course to fulfill her arts requirement in college, but she flipped through a mental list of the records they owned and tossed out a suggestion while he pushed the coffee table off to the side.

There wasn’t a ton of space in their living room, but Henry didn’t seem deterred.

He slipped her suggested record out of the sleeve and placed the needle on the correct track.

“C’mere,” he said, and shit , she wished Ellie were home. Her stomach wouldn’t stay put, tumbling over and over, and it was so much easier when she was around to act as a buffer.

Daphne took his hand and let him pull her off the couch. The touch of his palm to hers sent a frisson down her spine and suddenly her lungs felt too small, like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the universe for her to breathe properly.

“One hand here,” he said, placing her hand on his shoulder.

“Like this.” He took her other hand and there went the tingles again, setting off another round of stomach gymnastics.

His hand went to her waist, and Daphne had never quite felt like this, like there was an intimacy between them she’d never experienced.

It was silly, considering she was hardly a virgin, but it felt new and unexpected.

Quietly, Henry began counting through the music, explaining the steps and then leading her through them.

She wasn’t the best dancer, but she caught on quickly enough.

The song ended and Henry went and found another one she suggested, and together they waltzed around her living room to a slow ballad she’d once listened to over and over again on her bedroom floor as a middle schooler, pretending she’d felt real heartache and feeling unimaginably grown up.

The seconds blurred together and the rest of the room faded away, until it was just Henry and the way his hand flexed on her waist, the way his eyes kept dipping toward her lips.

The way they kept getting closer and closer, despite his initial explanation of the importance of a separation between them.

“This is nice,” she said, sounding dazed. She felt dizzy, even though they hadn’t really been spinning much. But the world felt strange and unreal, like lights had been extinguished all around them.

“Daphne, I—” Henry looked dazed too, his eyes saying words she couldn’t interpret.

They had stopped. Daphne didn’t know when that had happened, but now they were standing in each other’s arms, frozen in place while Norah Jones sang mournfully in the background. He let go of her waist and cupped her cheek in his hand, cradling her face gently. “This is—I can’t—” he stammered.

A key slid into the doorknob, bumpy and metallic, and the handle twisted. Daphne and Henry jumped apart just as Ellie walked in, launching into a story about her shift without preamble. “And then the nurse said—wait, what’s up? Were you guys dancing?” she said, interrupting herself.

Henry recovered first. “Daphne didn’t know how. I offered to teach her. How was your day? You were saying someone had something stuck? Somewhere?” he said solicitously, but Ellie was looking between them with narrowed eyes.

“Everything okay? You guys seem ... weird.”

“Everything’s fine. Keep going,” Daphne said.

“Okay, well, Henry, like I said at the start, I’m sorry that this will probably be shocking for you to hear, but a guy came in, claiming he ‘fell’ on a carrot, and—”

Ellie continued her story, and yes, Henry blushed as she talked, but Daphne had the distinct impression that blush had been building before Ellie walked in.

Even worse, she felt her own ears burning, and it had nothing to do with a carrot up someone’s butt.