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I can’t help it—I burst out laughing. “I’m sorry,” I say. “My mind went to a weird place.”
“Is that not where your mind usually lives?”
“True,” I admit. It’s an unexpected moment of accord between us. It shouldn’t make me feel as fuzzy as it does, and yet very few things make sense about the Barrett Bloom who ran a half mile without stopping.
This time when the band stops, I jog toward them to give the leader my request.
Miles lifts his eyebrows at me as the horns and drums start back up. “Did you ask them to play ‘Toxic’?”
With a few flaps of my arms, I motion for him to stand. I’m not a great dancer, but that’s never stopped me before. At least half the crowd is cheering, getting into it, singing along. “You can’t just sit on the ground while a marching band is playing Britney’s greatest song. Arguably one of the greatest songs of the 2000s.”
“It is a good song,” he concedes, getting to his feet. But that’s where he pauses. He simply stands there, in the middle of a football field, surrounded by a few dozen college students dancing to vintage Britney Spears.
“You’ve got to give me more than that.” I move my hips and lift my hands to the sky, surely looking ridiculous but not caring. “No one’s going to remember your slick dance moves tomorrow.” I give him a wink. “Except for me.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.” With an exaggerated sigh-groan, Miles starts moving to the beat. And, well, I think what he’s doing might be considered dancing. On some planets.
If he were anyone else, I might consider inching closer, draping an arm around his shoulders. Attempting to dance together, since I’d love nothing more than to erase the last guy I danced with.
But we stay in our own bubbles, every so often catching the other’s eye with a small smile.
“We should be doing things like this,” I say when the song ends. Breathless, I fling an arm out, gesturing to the scene around us. “Getting out. Exploring.”
There’s a pause, and I’m sure Miles is going to come up with a hundred reasons why we shouldn’t do the one thing that makes a time loop exciting.
“Let’s do it, then,” he says after a few moments, sounding resolute. “Let’s go out and explore.”
I stare at him, letting a slow grin spread across my face.
“Oh no. That look is scary. I already have regrets.”
“We’ve just discovered that time travel exists, and so far? It’s boring, Miles!” Maybe that’s a simplistic way of putting it, but that’s what it boils down to, right? “Best-case scenario,” I continue, “we fix whatever’s going on. Worst-case scenario… we finally have some fucking fun.”
“I’m not opposed to fun,” he says. He could swap fun for invasive dental surgery and his tone wouldn’t need to change at all.
“Think about it. There are zero consequences. We can do whatever the hell we want. Anything you wouldn’t normally do—this is our chance to go wild. Like, let’s go rob a bank just because we can!”
Miles looks horrified.
“Okay, not a bank,” I say. “But we could travel! Win the lottery! Those people who were shitty to you in high school—we can tell them to go fuck themselves or key their cars or give them brownies baked with dog shit. Or maybe you have some eternal unrequited crush—you can go tell them how you feel. That’s kind of freeing, isn’t it?”
“No. It’s terrifying,” he says quietly, and I can tell there’s some real fear there.
I want to tell him there’s nothing to be afraid of, only I’m not certain I’m right. “What’s something you’ve always wanted to do?” I ask, a thrill working its way up my spine. This is it. The loop has already taken so much from us, but it’s also giving us an opportunity. I want to hold on tight, refuse to let go.
He considers this, tapping a finger on his chin. “Take a four hundred–level physics class,” he says, and it wins the award for the most Miles thing I have ever heard. “Just to see how much of it I could keep up with.”
I shake my head and flash him a grin. “Buckle up, buttercup. We’re about to have the time of our fucking lives.”
DAY FIFTEEN
Chapter 20
“IS NOW A BAD TIME to mention that I have a slight fear of flying?” Miles asks from the first-class seat next to me.
I pause with my glass of guava juice halfway to my mouth. When I asked for champagne, the flight attendant raised her eyebrows and asked to see my ID. “Didn’t you try to go to Geneva?”
“I was on edge the whole time, and I couldn’t bear the thought of doing it again,” he says, sheepish. “One time when we visited relatives in Japan, I cried so much on the plane that my parents bought everyone on the flight a drink.”
