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You still, somehow, believe in free will.
You’ve made a career of paradox, and you’ve gotten comfortable with living in the Venn overlap of contradictions. Ever since the day you split the Algorithm — the day Neil passed that burden to you, and then walked eyes-open into the last he’d ever carry — you’ve understood yourself as marked by inevitability. You’ve known that someday you’ll be the one who starts this — not the war but the resistance, the struggle for survival against nihilistic despair, bright fish swimming upstream through the churn. You live in the shadow of choices you haven’t yet made.
But you do believe in choice, still. You believe that you’re choosing each day to walk this specific path, to live this specific life, to keep your face to the wind.
You believe that if you wanted to, you could walk away from this. You could disappear into what passes for retirement for men like you. You could finish the job you’d tried to do when you swallowed that silver pill on the train tracks in Kyiv.
But you haven’t. And you won’t.
And mostly your reasons are the correct ones, the kind of logic you’d include in a report if that was still part of your job. You’re doing this because someone has to, and apparently that someone is you. Existence itself is counting on you, a responsibility you can only stand to look at sideways, only tolerate in pieces.
You want to be a “greater good” kind of a person, like the men you admired as a child — the starship captains and rebel leaders and noble spies you watched on TV, sitting cross legged on the shag carpet in your grandmother’s living room. You want for existence to be your reason to stay here; to keep going.
You think of when you last saw Neil —a year ago, almost exactly.
It wasn’t until he’d turned away that you saw the charm on his backpack and understood the truth. You could keep moving forward in the usual sense — you could hide the Algorithm somewhere and then disappear into mundanity — but then you’d never play your part in the history he’d described to you. You’d never earn the trust that he’d already put in you.
And maybe existence is a part of that, too? Maybe cause and effect would unravel if you walked away, maybe the world would end. But that’s not what you’re thinking about now, sitting at the end of a pier on the Brooklyn waterfront — the lights of Manhattan doubled before you, river and buildings, water and steel. You’re not thinking about the millions of people behind those lights, all depending on you to complete the circuit; to live the tenet you’ve sworn yourself to.
You’re trying to remember if Neil was smiling the last time your eyes met.
*
For the first year or so after Stalsk-12, when Tenet needed you it sought you out. New contacts arrived with a plan and all the tools they’d need to execute it, with careful systems already in place to keep track of subjective continuity. There were cheats for the gaps in understanding, methods for leaving instructions via posterity. There were entire teams of assistants whose only job was to comb the public record for hints as to where inverted forces may have interfered. You took steps to make sure your own concerns were being looked after — Kat and her family are in Iceland, now — and you accepted whatever assignments were deemed worth your time. You were given instructions with exactly enough detail to get you where you needed to be, and to understand what you needed to do.
The assignments got further and further apart — weeks, then months. And for a little while, you wondered if that was how the war would end — not with treaties or annihilation, but with absence.
You were in Gibraltar when a man sat down beside you in a cafe, leaned in close, and asked you if you were ready to travel. An hour later, you were in the musty cabin of a small motor yacht, piloted by a young woman in a sun-faded windbreaker, who told you in terse German that you were to stay below deck at all times, even out at sea. As you drew near to the American coast, she gave you a date, a time, and an address, and had you repeat them back to her — over and over, call and response — until she was convinced you had them memorized. She forbade you from writing any of it down, or from discussing it on a call.
She left you on this pier an hour ago, dressed in coveralls and heavy boots, a hardhat pulled low over your eyes. You’re clean-shaven for the first time in years — another instruction you knew better than to question. The Williamsburg Bridge looms upriver, close enough that you can hear the rumble of cars, and the thunk-thunk of wheels as they pass over seams in the roadbed.
You check your watch — something cheap and digital that doesn’t know anything but the time. Your phone is at the bottom of the Atlantic, smashed into pieces and thrown overboard along with the ashes of the passport you’d used to fly to Europe.
You strip out of the coveralls once you’ve left the port. You’re wearing slim jeans and a gray sweater as you cross the bridge on a pedestrian walkway, the river a distant glittering black through the grates under your feet.
The address is for a dumpling shop with a neon sign out front, which has two formica tables with cracking vinyl chairs, and accepts only cash. You order ten fried dumplings and two diet cokes, and sit at the table that’s furthest from the door.
Mahir is dressed in joggers when he steps in from the street. You pass him a fork and crack open both cans.
“I’d get a second order, if I were you,” he says. “The food in there is awful.”
“Really?” you ask. “I’d always thought it’d be like it is on submarines. Fancy meals in a tin can to keep up morale.”
“Maybe at the start,” he says. He eats another dumpling, careful of his beard. Then he looks up to meet your eyes, and his mustache twitches with a quick smile. “They don’t care what you bring in, as long as it fits in the turnstile. We’ve got time for shopping, I’d load a suitcase with porn mags and candy, if I were you.”
That surprises a laugh out of you. “Thanks for the tip.”
“Anytime.”
You give yourself twenty more minutes of this — of normal conversation about nothing in particular, easy time with an old friend. You watch sidewalk traffic through the restaurant’s glass door and picture windows — gangs of drunk college kids hanging off each other, delivery guys on e-bikes, old women pushing collapsible carts loaded with their shopping, old men smoking cigarettes with xiangqi sets tucked under their arms. Indifferent strangers busy with their own lives
You’re going to miss this. Wherever Mahir takes you next, whatever’s waiting up ahead of you, it won’t be anything like this, not for a long time.
You’re going to miss a lot of things.
*
You and Mahir take turns changing in the tiny restaurant bathroom — he becomes an old man with silver in his beard, and you pull on a shapeless dress and a wig that hangs down over your eyes. You buy a folding cart on Grand Street and fill it with canned food and drinks you know you like, a cheap ereader that can handle PDFs, a small magnetic Go board and a book of famous games. You and Mahir drink sweet milk tea while you use the shop’s wifi to download old mystery novels and the complete works of Stephen King. You zigzag through narrow streets on the Lower East Side, back toward the river, to a building in the shadow of the Manhattan bridge.
New York surprised you as a choice at first, but the logic is perfect once you’ve thought it through. A city where common courtesy means minding your own fucking business; where you can live next door to someone for years and never see their face. As long as there isn’t a smell or a suspicious wet spot in the ceiling below, as long as the bills get paid, no one here gives a shit if you’re the private type. And that’s how this’ll read to most folks, of course: a weird private neighbor who doesn’t get many visitors. They even picked a place with high turnover, too, just to be safe — the kind of building where half the residents are month-to-month.
There were other requirements too, of course. Solid construction that won’t buckle under the weight of all the necessary equipment. A sufficient number of years of unbroken ownership by the same management company, preferably one that only cares if the rent gets paid on time. Cops who’re easy to pay off in cash and who don’t ask too many questions, because no matter how careful everyone is, you’re going to end up on security footage in any modern city unless certain steps are taken.
When you remark all this cleverness while waiting at a crosswalk, Mahir chuckles and shakes his head.
“What?” you ask quietly as the light turns.
“Funny to listen to you compliment this sort of thing,” he says, “that’s all.” And when you frown a little he asks, “Whose idea do you think all this was?”
*
The apartment looks normal from the hallway.
When Mahir opens the door, you can see it’s twice as thick as it should be, as are the walls and the door frame — soundproof, and maybe bulletproof as well. Immediately inside the door is a cramped entryway, with a worn welcome mat and a few pairs of discarded shoes, a small desk and a chair. A young woman who looks like a student is sitting at the desk, and gets up to eagerly shake your hand as the door swings shut behind you on soft-close hinges.
She leads you to what used to be a dining room, which is now almost entirely taken up by a turnstile, split in half by a slapdash airlock only just barely larger than the inside of the machine. She explains the layout of the apartment and general shape of how it works with words and with gestures in the air. There’s no paper anywhere. Nothing is written down.
In addition to the room you’re standing in, there’s an eat-in kitchen, three bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room with couches and a TV, and a large closet that’s been turned into a greenhouse with UV lamps hung from the ceiling.
The floor of the second bedroom has been reinforced, and is stacked up to the ceiling with MREs, oxygen canisters, and tanks of potable water. Another set of tanks hold water for showering and brushing your teeth. Technically you could use the city’s pipes, but showering in reverse is awful, and they aren’t sure what your inverted sweat and skin flakes would do as they built up in the sewage system, so instead you get a filter to run your greywater through, and a few iodine tablets just in case you’re ever in a pinch. There’s an incinerator and a trash compactor. There’s an air scrubber the size of a washing machine and a large case of filters. There are alarms for carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and smoke. There are personal oxygen masks for emergencies. All told, it’s enough to last you through five years, if not comfortably.
“But probably it won’t come to that,” the attendant says. “Whenever someone joins you, they’ll bring a resupply. Fresh food, more water, maybe more books.”
You frown. “Probably? Maybe?”
“No records,” the attendant says. “Officially, the resident’s a bachelor who took over his grandfather’s lease in the nineties.”
“This is the oldest safe house we have,” Mahir says. “If anything makes it into posterity, the future’s got us by the balls.”
“We can guarantee electricity, except for major city outages,” the attendant says. “There haven’t been any fires in this building since the aughts, and we’re above the flood line.” She gestures vague apology. “That’s all they told me, I’m sorry.”
You look at the turnstile itself, the matte gray metal jarring against what remains of the dining room’s parquet floor. “Do we know when this was built?”
“Not a clue,” Mahir says.
You press your lips together. You look at the shadowy chamber at the heart of the machine, patient and inert as it waits to swallow you.
You remember how they taught you to pick up an inverted bullet.
You have to have already dropped it.
*
You’ve exhausted your ereader’s library by the end of the second month.
There’s a library in each usable bedroom that takes up an entire wall, floor to ceiling. You find a series of textbooks for learning Mandarin and you fold them into your routine, along with the body weight exercises that’ll keep you in something like fighting shape. You spend most of your time rotating between your bed, the small kitchen table, and the more comfortable of the couches. You practice stroke order by drawing characters with your fingertip on the table.
You aren’t allowed pens, or a phone, or a computer. There’s a wooden calendar with physical pieces you can reconfigure from month to month, and that’s the only way you have of keeping track of time. You’re reliant on your memory of which months have how many days, and whether or not it’s a leap year, and sometimes you forget to move the pieces backwards instead marching them ahead. Probably when you get out of here, you'll be off by as much as a week or two.
The food isn’t as bad as it could be. You were given explicit instructions to avoid being seen, but every so often — sometimes days apart, sometimes weeks — you hear the turnstile roar to life, the machinery vibrating through the floor. And after you’ve waited the prescribed thirty minutes for the room to clear, you’ll open the door to the turnstile room and find a package waiting for you on the near-side of the lock. Usually it’s fresh produce, or meat that hasn’t been freeze dried. Sometimes it’s a takeout bag with lukewarm noodles or a fast food burger, or a thermos of fresh hot coffee with half-and-half.
You don’t know who leaves these things, or if it’s even the same person. There’s never a note, and they never wait to speak with you, which is all by design of course — it’s better if no one knows who’s using the safehouse right now. But the softer parts of you that still haven’t atrophied do take it a little bit personally. For better or worse, you’re still a man. You’re still a person with a heart that aches.
You start to leave videos playing on low volume for most of the hours you’re awake, just to hear other voices. It helps, a little; when you’re busy with something else, it almost feels like you have company.
*
You met a lot of interesting people in the CIA. Other spies, sure, but most of them were bland by design — practiced at being wallpaper, unnoticed while they did their work. Early in your career you were part of a think tank on how to maintain backchannel connections between Russian and American organizations, regardless of what was going on at the executive level.
After the work was formally over but before everyone went home, you ended up at a hotel bar with a group of astronauts and cosmonauts who’d done time on the ISS. One of them was part of a team in Houston working on the problem of crewed deep space flight — the kinds of missions you’d need for boots on Mars to ever be a reality. Specifically, she was the director of a long-term analog mission based in Antarctica — a simulation of a trip to Mars, featuring a crew of six.
You’d asked how useful that kind of simulation could actually be — they’d have gravity, after all, and breathable air right outside, and no radiation to worry about. And she’d explained to you that the main goal was to study how the stress of isolation would impact the crew, their mental health, and their ability to do their jobs.
This wasn’t the first attempt at this specific study, she’d said, her voice lowered into confidence — the first time, they’d had to abort ten months into a planned two-year simulation. They’d called it a “scheduling conflict” in the press release, but in fact, one of the astronauts had washed out. After several weeks of erratic moods and obvious depressive symptoms, he’d contacted mission control via the emergency channel, and the entire simulation had to be scrapped.
“Humans aren’t built to live in boxes,” she’d said over the rim of her drink, with the understated dryness most astronauts have.
You’d asked if solo missions might be better — if it was being cooped up with crewmates for so long that made the time unbearable. You were only twenty-three, then. You hadn’t known any better.
She’d have had every right to laugh at you, but instead she’d gotten very serious, and set her drink down on the table. And she’d looked you in the eye and said, “We don’t do that to people.”
*
You know how to be alone. It’s always been part of the job for you, and you’re better at it than most.
You keep yourself on a strict schedule: your sleep, your meals, your exercise, your language practice, your leisure. You read twenty-five pages every night. You turn off the lights at exactly ten and wake up every morning at six. You keep careful track of the passing days, even if you do your best not to think about them too hard.
You can do this because you’ve trained for it. You get up every morning and you fill the endless empty hours, day after identical day. You measure time by the strength in your muscles, the vocabulary you’ve learned, the classic Go matches you’ve memorized one move at a time. You stay busy, and you focus on what’s in front of you — the next step, not the road ahead.
You still believe in free will, but maybe you also surrender a little to the comfort of inevitability.
You can do this because you already have.
*
At first, you think it’s just another resupply.
The turnstile’s been quiet for almost six weeks — the longest silence so far in the fourteen months you’ve been in here. You’re asleep when it whirs to life again, but by the time the lock finishes cycling you’re out of bed and pulling on pants as you walk into the living room.
There’s no peep hole or window into the turnstile room, so you set a mechanical egg timer for thirty minutes and sit down on the couch,
You hear footsteps through the wall, and the whirr of hard plastic wheels on the floor. You fold your hands loosely in your lap, your fingers laced together. This kind of waiting is a novelty, now, and you settle in to savor it.
When the handle of the door turns, you’re on your feet before the thought has registered, reflex taking over.
The door swings open.
The shock of seeing him again — of seeing anyone at all, after so long — stuns you into silence.
“Oh thank god,” Neil says, generous with his relief.
He’s across the room and hugging you before by the time you’ve found your words again.
“Hi,” you say as your arms close around him. You lick your lips and squeeze him tighter. “Wow.”
“I brought beer,” he says, still holding you. “And diet coke, but if you leave me to get drunk on my own you’re a bastard.”
You step away again, back to friendly distance, but you’re smiling as you say to him, “I don’t drink on the job.”
“Good thing this isn’t work, then,” he says, and reaches up to pat your cheek. “I intend to be aggressively unprofessional.”
*
He’s brought fresh bagels, still warm from the oven, loaded with cream cheese and lox and capers and sliced ren onion, which you both sit and eat immediately. You make obscene noises of pleasure as you chew, and he laughs and smiles at you through his own mouthful, and you feel human and alive. He fills the refrigerator and cabinets with treasures from the pushcart he’d wheeled in — eggs and bacon and loaves of bread, sticks of real butter and cartons of half-and-half, packages of fresh ravioli and big jars of sauce, plastic containers of crudité and different kinds of dip. Mostly simple things or pre-made things, like you’re college students instead of grown men, but every item he pulls from his cart is another thrilling reveal. You have never in your life been this excited to eat a carrot stick.
You gorge yourselves on snacks, and then you sit on the couch with sweating bottles of beer in your hands. He’s brought an ipod with him that has to be at least ten years old, from before the smartphone era — just a hard drive filled with MP3s and enough of a brain to play them. It’s funny, what’s allowed in here and what isn’t, but you aren’t complaining. He plugs an aux cable into the little stereo system they gave you, and unfamiliar guitar and plaintive vocals fill the room. He tells you about the band — “mates” of his from university, he explains, although he hasn’t seen them in years. He tells you a rambling story about making a copy of the campus master key and squatting for three semesters in an elevator machine room. You sip your beer and relax into the couch cushions. You can’t remember the last time you felt this at ease.
He tells you that he’ll be there for just over thirteen days — a blink, compared to what you’re in the middle of, but you’re so fucking relieved. It’ll mess up your routine, it’ll undermine everything you’ve done to make your peace with solitude, but it’s hard to care about any of that while you’re standing next to him in the little kitchen, watching him make popcorn in a pan on the stove.
He’s dressed more casually than you’re used to — a rumpled blue collared shirt with a white tee underneath, too-big chinos rolled up at the cuffs, socks with holes in the toes. His hair is longer. He hasn’t shaved in two weeks at least, and he’s most of the way to a beard.
You can’t stop thinking about how different this Neil is from the man you thought you’d gotten to know. It reminds you a little of the times when you’ve met someone in the field, both of you trying to flatten yourselves into wallpaper, only to encounter them again years later without all that baggage of discretion. You’ve known for a while now that he’d kept a lot of things from you when you first began working together — first for your subjective, not for his — but as you watch him now from two couch cushions over, loose-limbed and smiling and at obvious ease, your memories of him shift around, rotating in new light. You’d thought he was a little cold, a little removed, the stereotype of a buttoned-up Brit. But maybe he was hiding more from you than work; more than just a friendly history of surviving some shit together.
In some ways, it’s like talking to an entirely new person. This Neil is easy with his smiles and his hands. He sits sideways, one arm along the back of the couch, so he can watch you while you talk. He gets up to fetch another beer, and then sits back down much closer to you, his knee an inch or so from your thigh. He touches you when he laughs at your jokes, and his eyes are always on you.
Eventually, the beer and the hour catch up with you — it’s past four, and you’re slipping in and out of a doze, losing the thread of the story he’s telling. He sighs, and nudges your leg with his foot, and says, “Let’s turn in, love,” and you’re tired enough not to think too much about him calling you that. Just like you don’t think too much about him following you into your bedroom, and pulling the covers up over your shoulders, and leaning in to press a soft kiss to your temple before getting up to turn off the light and close the door behind him.
*
“Something’s up,” you say over breakfast in the morning. It isn’t a question. You’ve been doing this job long enough to feel the weight of what he isn’t saying to you. Not the closed-off distance of before, but a sort of coiled tension just out of sight, a fist clenched under the table. Not bad, though. Probably. You aren’t sure what to make of the way he keeps watching you when he thinks you aren’t looking.
You’re both sitting at the table in the kitchen, mugs of coffee in your hands, and you watch his face very carefully. He looks sheepish, and a little relieved, as he sets his mug down and leans back in his chair and blows out a long breath.
“Something is,” he agrees. You don’t understand the way he’s looking at you, or why he winces at whatever he sees on your face. “See, I knew this was coming, but it’s...” He laughs softly, a hand coming up to ruffle his own hair. “It’s another thing to actually be here. Doing this.”
“Doing what?” you ask.
“Well.” He grimaces. “God, I’m making a hash of it, aren’t I? Let’s...here.” He pushes back his chair and stands. “Change of scenery, let’s go sit with the plants.”
Bemused, you follow into the greenhouse, where he flips the switch that turns off the UV lights. There aren’t any chairs in here, just a rug and a pile of cushions on the floor, but that’s moot, since he doesn’t actually sit. You close the door behind you, keeping the warmth and humidity in. Then you stand in the little open space between shelves of monstera and pothos and palms, watching him fidget with his cuffs, rocking his weight between heel and toe.
“I always thought you’d be the one to start this,” he says. “And I suppose you still might, we’ve got nearly two weeks, after all. I could wait and see, but...” He meets your eyes again. “I don’t know. I don’t have any idea what to do here.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” you say.
He barks a laugh. “See? Exactly. Not even remotely on your radar.”
“Neil,” you say, a little pressure behind the word. “You gotta loop me in, here.”
He sighs, his shoulders falling. “You’re right,” he says quietly. “I do.”
He steps forward into your space. His hand comes up to touch your cheek, his palm cupping your jaw.
*
It doesn't feel like a first kiss.
It feels like being read aloud — like you’re a book he’s opened to a well-worn page, his fingers following the lines, his mouth warm and confident, comfortable with you.
You’re hesitant and careful, not sure of how to hold your head, how to fit your lips between his, how long to linger on each kiss. You’re used to taking the lead with these things, but there’s a confidence in him that you don’t feel yourself at all, and so you relax. You surrender. And he’s patient like a guiding hand.
Would you have kissed him if he hadn’t kissed you? Would you have even thought to try? You don’t fuck on the job any more than you drink, but there are bottles of beer in the fridge, and there’s a man’s tongue in your mouth. “Work” is too tidy a word for the life you’re living now, in this airtight apartment, this terrarium world. “Work” is what’s waiting for you when you flip back over, when you pass through the turnstile and leave this apartment and become a real person again.
Neil is comfortable and comforting, easy to kiss and easier to follow, his eyes dark in the soft green light when he pulls back to study your face. He holds you by the shoulders as he asks if you’re sure.
You are. Of course you are, because you understand what this is, now. You can taste it on his lips, and hear it in the way he says your name, fond and familiar, a murmur against your neck.
Neil is elegant under the wrinkled clothes — graceful lines in your arms, strong hands at your waist. He already knows where you want his fingers, his mouth, his tongue. “Is this okay?” he asks, “is this good? Like this?” but you know he’s asking for your sake, not his. He doesn’t need your answers. “Like this?” he asks, his hands in your underwear, his teeth at the lobe of your ear, and the answer is always yes. You aren’t easy, but this is. You aren’t simple, but this is.
You’re a language he’s already learned.
*
Two stories are happening at once, layered on top of each other.
There’s the loud bright excitement of novelty, a familiar face made new again by the way he looks at you and by the angles you’re seeing him from, crouched over him in bed. It’s a dialect you aren’t fluent in yet, but you’re learning it a little more every time you touch him.
There’s the bittersweetness of a beautiful thing finally at its end. There’s savoring every languid lazy morning in a bed that smells like sex; every hour spent on the couch together listening to music or reading your books or watching a film, some part of you always touching; every quiet conversation on the greenhouse floor, laying among the cushions. He sits at the kitchen table and watches you make coffee, and it’s like he’s committing you to memory.
You’ve been in love before. You were a man, once, before becoming an oath, and you know how love changes things between people. You know the first embers are catching now — a cheerful little flame cupped between your hands and his. And you know that the hearth of his own heart has been burning for a long time, steady and settled. You could feel the warmth of it in the greenhouse when he closed the distance between you, a first for you but not for him. You could feel how it flared when you kissed him back, sending off sparks.
And the tinder was there, ready to burn. You’d noticed his eyes, his face, his lips. And you’d missed him. You’d dreamed about him, more than once. You’ve been back to Stalsk-12 again and again, the weight of the Algorithm in your hands as you watch him walk away.
*
Neither of you talk about how much — how little — time you have left, but you can’t help but keep track. You move the little pieces of your calendar every day, marching the counter backward, further into the past. And eventually, inevitably, you wake up to what will be the last full day before he leaves you
The two of you get out of bed long enough to eat and freshen up, because you’ve had most your meals under the covers between rounds of fucking each other, and now both of you smell like sweat and cum and stale breath, and you keep finding toast crumbs stuck to your ass.
You kiss him in the shower, water plastering his hair to his forehead, his soap-slick fingers following the lines of your back. You put fresh linens on the bed, four hands making quick work of the fitted sheet and pillow cases, and then he pulls you under the covers again, clean skin and damp hair and toothpaste kisses. And for a while you disappear into each other, just bodies and breath and quiet words. You’ve learned so much since this new thing started — new for you, you remind yourself, only new for you — and every moan you coax from him is a testament to your fluency.
Afterward, you catch your breaths, sweat cooling on your skin. He goes to the bathroom again to clean up, and while he’s gone you stare at the indent on his pillow — at the empty space he’s left beside you — and you make a choice.
You wait for him to come back and settle in again. You aren’t sure how to do this, but there isn’t time to put it off, and so you lick your lips and you get the words out.
“So,” you begin, in a tone that has him turning his head to watch you say the rest. “How long until I see you again?”
His mouth quirks into a smile. “We’re doing this?”
“We are very much doing this, yes.”
He shifts from his back to lying on his side. “You’re sure?” he presses, seriousness in the angle of his brows.
“I am.”
You’re twin curves on the bed, now, your fingers loosely knit together on the sheets between you. He studies your face, his jaw shifting back and forth as he thinks. Eventually he says, “You can’t tell me that we had this conversation.”
“Of course.”
“I’m not worried about paradoxes,” he says, answering your unspoken question. “Cause and effect sort themselves out, I just don’t want to know. Or...well, I didn’t want to.”
“So you are coming back,” you say. Your fingers trace the lines on his palm. “Soon?”
“Three months,” he says. “Only for a couple of days, though. They almost didn’t let me use this safehouse, I had to beg a little. Quite pathetic.”
“You begged to be here.”
“Of course I did.”
“So that wasn’t the first time either,” you say, walking out further onto thin ice. “We keep doing this.”
“We have certainly done this more than twice,” he says, careful.
You watch his face so so closely. “How many more times?”
“Does it matter?”
“You knew this was the last one,” you say quietly. “Your last. My first. You knew before you got here, so I must have said something to you.“
“You were very good, actually,” he says, “but I had a feeling. And then, well...” He laughs softly. “The look on your face when I arrived...if I’m honest, I think you were more excited about the bagels.”
“Neil...”
“You’ll know,” he says. He reaches over to touch your face, his thumb brushing along your cheekbone, just above your beard. “You were so good, darling. You were perfect, you never said a word.” He sighs. “Not that you had to.”
“So what...you just decided to go for it one day?” you ask, and your tone is light but the question itches at you.
He chuckles again and pats your cheek. “You’re painting quite the landscape of assumptions.”
“Are you saying I started this?”
He pulls his hand pack to press a finger to his lips.
“Was the first time even in here?”
“No,” he says. And his expression softens as he remembers something you haven’t yet done. “We get up to quite a lot of nonsense together, you and I.”
“When?” you ask, the words out quicker than you can think. “How long am I in here?” When he doesn’t answer right away, you scoot closer on the bed, your eyes holding his. “You know.”
“I have an idea,” he says, and then winces. “We shouldn’t be talking about this.”
“There’s no record,” you say, pushing harder. “There’s no posterity in here, you can just tell me.”
“I don’t think I can,” he says, apologetic. “I don’t think you knew.”
“I thought you said you aren’t worried about paradox?”
“I lied,” he says. He kisses your mouth, his hand still on your face. “If I fuck this up...if I say the wrong thing here, and it all unravels...”
“Time takes care of itself,” you say, but he’s already pulling away from you, rolling onto his back.
Your hand settles on his stomach. He covers it with his own, but it takes him a long time to speak again. His eyes watch the ceiling.
“In case you haven’t picked up on this,” he says at last, “I’ve hardly any idea what I’m doing. Most of the time, I feel rather like I’m banging around in the dark, and I’m...” He winces. “I don’t want to break anything important.”
You sigh, not quite a chuckle. “Guess I can’t blame you for worrying more about the cause than my curiosity.”
“Oh, you misunderstand,” he says. “I’ll risk the end of history, but I cannot abide jeopardizing the specifics of the first time we fuck.”
A real laugh bursts out of you, then. And you know he’s joking — of course he is, of course you are. Both of you are here to do a job. Both of you have a long line of bullets left to catch.
“So it was good,” you say, trying for playful.
“Our first time?” He cuts his eyes sideways to glance at you, and then he smiles. “I could tell it wasn’t yours.”
“Was that weird at all?”
“Was it weird for you?”
You know what he means. “No,” you say. You move even closer, you arm sliding around his waist. “I could...” You swallow. “I could feel what was there already.”
He turns his head to kiss your brow. “It was good,” he says. “It will be very good, dear heart.”
*
You help him pack the few things he’ll take out with him — the cart, his clothes, some trash that can’t be burned.
You kiss him in the living room — an airport goodbye, not enough but the best you can do.
You could follow him into the dining room. You could leave today if you wanted to. You still, somehow, believe in free will, and you know you could change the course of things. You could choose a different history.
You tell him that you love him — because you do, and he deserves to know.
You listen to the roar of the turnstile as it takes him away from you.
You turn your face into the wind.