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They really had flicked a domino that knocked everything into place, but what had been the first piece? Where did it start? Which decision put it all in motion? Had it been her decision to get coffee that first morning? Or had it been Jack’s when he chose to kiss her in the bar that night? Or was it something bigger, perhaps. Something outside them that couldn’t be pinpointed or backtracked to an origin.Perhaps it was all as Dr. Woods had said and they were objects in random motion that had coincidentally collided and gotten stuck.
Whatever it was, Gemma knew it had led her to where she was supposed to be. To him. The catalyst to the changes she needed to make for her happiness.
“Jack,” she said, her voice quiet and her mind moments from slipping under. She reached her arm across him and heard his heart steadily beating inside his chest. “If I hadn’t met you, I never would have fallen in love in one day.”
He squeezed her against him and kissed the top of her head. His voice was warm and soft. “Today was the best day of my life.”
CHAPTER
16
Jack woke witha crick in his neck and a chill at his back. The front of his body was curled around the warm, soft shape of the woman of his dreams. And he finally had her. Right there in his arms. She smelled like flowers and vanilla. On instinct, he wanted to press his lips into her shiny golden hair, but he didn’t want to wake her. In all the times he’d seen her, all the months he’d spent trying to get her to remember him, he’d never seen her sleep. She was so beautiful and peaceful, her lashes gently closed, her perfect lips in a soft bow, that he forgot to panic for a moment.
Realization of where they were and what had happened shot through him like an electric shock. He sat up quickly but carefully and looked around.
They’d fallen asleep onstage at the Hollywood Bowl.
Pale morning light layered the empty amphitheater in a gauzy L.A. haze. Birds chirped somewhere nearby, braving returning to the trees now that the stadium wasn’t blastingmusic. The warm summer night had cooled into a fresh new day.
“No, no, no,no!” Jack whispered in a panicked rush.
They weren’t supposed to fall asleep! They were going to stay up all night to make sure it worked, to make sure the loop didn’t reset! Even if they woke up where they’d fallen asleep, there was no telling what might have happened while they were unconscious. Everything could have been ruined.
He looked down at Gemma still sleeping, her cheeks flushed from the warmth of their bodies pressed together, and felt sick with worry that she’d wake and not know who he was. He’d lived it one hundred and forty-seven times, and it was the worst kind of heartache. The cruelest trick that fate could play on him. The open and willing but perpetually unfamiliar look on her beautiful face that he saw every day haunted his dreams.
From the moment he’d met her, that first day in the coffee shop, he’d done everything in his power to erase that look from her face, to replace it with one of recognition—and he had! He’d succeeded the day before by kissing her. He knew it the moment their lips had touched. Heknewkissing her would work because he was completely, helplessly in love with her by then, and even the universe’s cruelest game couldn’t fuck with something like that.
But staring down at her soundly sleeping, he couldn’t shake the fear that it had all gone away again. That a wicked hand had reached into her dreaming mind and stolen it.
He couldn’t bear the thought. He couldn’t stand to think of starting over, not after yesterday, last night. He’d convinced Nigel Black to sing her favorite song, for god’s sake!
Jack was a good person; he knew that about himself. Sure, maybe he could have volunteered more often or donated to more charities, but altruism wasn’t the singular hallmark of a good man. He was kind and thoughtful, liked in both professional and social circles. He spent every Sunday on the phone with his mother. Back at the start of the loop, he’d thought he was being punished or perhaps tested in some way, and he’d spent many weeks resentful about it. But he’d realized over time that the loop wasn’t some sadistic prison sentence or test that he had to pass. It was an opportunity. An opportunity to point his life in the direction it needed to go.
He’d honestly lost track of when he stopped remembering the days before the loop began, but he wasn’t sure it mattered. Gemma had been the catalyst all along. He now knew that she’d entered his life the day after he’d made a life-altering decision that would have left them worlds apart, and as a consequence, he was given the chance for a redo.
One hundred and forty-seven redos.
He couldn’t be mad about that because he was a million times happier than he’d ever been before her—even if all the redos had been the most exhausting experience of his life and the single greatest challenge to his sanity.
But if it hadn’t worked... If all the life-fixing they’d done, the closure-finding and path-resetting, didn’t sum up to breaking the damn loop, he was out of ideas.
He watched her continue to sleep, the woman he knew undoubtedly was the love of his life, with a gut-wrenching fear that she’d forgotten who he was.
Hesitation curled around his throat as if it might chokehim. As long as she was asleep, she was still in love with him after their long, life-altering day that finally—finally—put everything in place. If she woke...
He didn’t want to consider the other half of the thought experiment.
He sighed and looked out at the still morning bathed in blue light. It occurred to him that he had a second source of information to confirm if they’d broken the loop: the date on his dad’s watch. But even then, if he looked down at his wrist and saw that the date had moved forward, that didn’t guarantee Gemma would remember him. There were no rules in this game.Thatfact he had learned well.
There were no rules about how he’d ended up in that coffee shop that first morning, a place he’d never been but randomly decided to check out on a whim. No rules about how the first time he’d crashed into Gemma, he felt the significance in his bones, and by the second time, he knew she was the missing piece in his life. No rules about how chasing after her every day left him both heartbroken and determined to get it right the next time. No rules about how she got more beautiful every time he saw her, and how every new thing he learned about her, no matter how small—her favorite drink, her favorite song, how she picked the blueberries out of a muffin—felt precious. There was nothing logical about any of it, other than the fact that he loved her.
There were no rules. Only decisions, big and small, that shaped any given day and accumulated into a life.
The first day they crashed into each other, a decision had been made for him. He wanted her—neededher—in his life. And there was nothing he wouldn’t do to keep her. It was still true, he realized as he looked down at her now.He knew it with the same certainty he’d felt every previous iteration of the day. A dogged determination to hold on to her because he knew she was the one, and he couldn’t give up.
Even if it meant living through a one-hundred-and-forty-eighth version of the same day.
He made another decision and quietly moved from the couch to kneel in front of it, facing her. He listened to her softly breathing for a final, perfect moment before he reached out and pressed his hand to her arm.
