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Except the memory was half dream.
A crowded bar. A bitter drink. A familiar song. That smile. And the best kiss of her life.
Feeling her whole body tingle with a sensation she couldn’t name, almost as if her limbs had gone to sleep from lying on them wrong, she slowly sank back into her chair.
Jack nodded at her, letting his lips fill out the other half of his smile. “Do you remember?”
She did not want to expose herself by answering. She cleared her throat with a shake of her head, searching for her bearings. “Okay, so if all this has happened before, what changed? Why is today different?”
The full wattage of his smile broke out, and she was glad she had sat down. “Because I tested a theory.”
She could not deny that her interest was piqued.
She nodded at him to continue.
He gazed out the window for a moment, watching the street. She studied the line of his jaw, the light brown stubble on his chin. He had a classic look about him, and she wondered if he was an actor. The thought sent her spiraling into another tunnel of doubt: it was all made up, someonehad hired him to prank her, and he was doing an excellent job of getting her to fall for it.
But the thoughts dissolved when he turned back and gave her a look too sincere to be faked.
“Gemma, I walk through this day every day, over and over. I’ve turned every stone and looked in every corner, trying to find my way out of it, and I can’t. It’s all the same dead ends no matter what I do. The only glitch—theonlything that varies in the slightest—is you. It took me a while to realize it, but you’re the key. You have to be. Every time I run into you, I feel the earth tilt, like gravity is shifting, and I think you feel it too. It’s like we’re on a collision course with each other—literally—and I think... I think we’re meant to do more than apologize and walk away.” He softly chuckled and ran a hand through his hair. It was cut somewhere between short and shaggy and fell in a messy, shiny tumble that made Gemma bite her lip. “But the problem is, you always walk away. Some days, it takes longer than others, and sometimes I can convince you to stick around for a while, but you never stay. Not really. I’ve been trying to get you to remember me, but your memory is wiped every morning, just like everyone else’s, which feelsreallyunfair since you’re the only person I’ve ever met who I’ve actually wanted to have remember me.” He faded out with a soft, sad laugh and stroked his chin.
Gemma stared at him. It was either the most romantic or the most irrational thing she had ever heard, and she realized, profoundly, that the difference between those two options might be less than she’d thought.
“Then why do I remember you today?”
The words slipped out. She was under the spell of hisstory, momentarily untethered from reality and wanting to buy into his explanation for the morning’s confusion and the undeniable pull she did in fact feel toward him.
He smiled again. “I think because we kissed last night.”
Gemma flushed, startled. “Wekissed?”
He nodded. “We did. Finally. At your friend’s birthday party. I wanted to see if that would make you remember me; it’s part of my theory. And by the looks of today, it worked. Kind of.”
Gemma was reeling all over again. The vision she’d had moments before that felt like a dream—the bar, the kiss—had actually happened, if he was to be believed. She could barely wrap her mind around it.
“What do you mean, ‘kind of’?”
He sighed and leaned back again. “Well, you seem to remember me to some extent, but you weren’t aware that today is a temporal anomaly until I told you, right?”
She had no idea what was right or wrong, but the term suddenly jarred her out of the fantasy like a whole bag of ice cubes down her bra. It sounded like something he’d found on a subthread of a subthread on a conspiracy website.
She arched one dubious brow at him. “Atemporal anomaly?”
He held up his hands. “Okay, I can see that I’m losing you, but give me a chance—”
She checked the time and saw that she needed to get to work. She had wasted enough energy on this stranger and his sci-fi theories of déjà vu gone wild. She kicked herself for almost buying it. Good guys didn’t just fall into your lap and tell you wild, swoony stories about your being the key to their rescue like some warped fairy tale. Goodguys probably didn’t even exist. Or if they did, she had yet to meet one.
She stood with more resolve than she had the first time. “Listen, Jake—”
“It’s Jack.”
“You seem like a nice guy—strange—but nice. I wish I could help with whatever is going on, but I have to go.”
He scrambled out of his chair quickly enough to send it scraping across the floor. A few heads turned. “Wait, Gemma, please.”
A small headache had taken root at the base of her skull, and she realized that despite being bathed in it, she hadn’t actually had a single sip of coffee that morning.
“Goodbye, Jack.”
