Chapter 04 | A Plan for the Time Being

The alarm went off at 7:30 exactly, and Leon's arm tightened before his brain caught up.

It was a reflex — the body answering an alarm not with alertness but with resistance, curling further into warmth rather than away from it. His right arm was draped over something soft and was wrapped around what his half-asleep mind registered as being very warm and very pleasant to hold, and for exactly two and a half seconds he was not awake enough to understand why.

Then he was.

He went very still.

Nina was there, nestled against him, his arm over her waist and his hand resting across the fabric of her dress at her stomach. He could feel her breathing, slow and just-woken, and the soft fragrance of her hair was at extremely close range. He had never been this close to a woman before — not like this. Not with this particular texture of comfortable and intimate that didn't feel like anything except right, which was somehow the most disorienting part of all.

He heard her laugh, low and sleepy.

"My mind is telling me no," she murmured, voice still thick with sleep, the cadence of someone quoting something, "but my body—" She stopped herself. She pressed her lips together, visibly suppressing further amusement. "That song. I heard it somewhere. Very funny. Not entirely appropriate to rehearse the full lyric in present company."

Leon attempted to remove his arm.

Her hand came down over his immediately — not the grip of someone alarmed, but the casual, practiced hold of someone who had stopped him from retreating at least twice now and had made a small science of it. "A hug," she said, with great reasonableness, "is acceptable. As long as your hands have no funny business in mind."

"They don't," he said, with feeling.

"Then relax." She adjusted her position by a fraction — settling rather than pulling away. "It has been a while," she said, more quietly, "since I was held like this." A brief pause. "Even if the arms holding me belong to a different version of the man I married." Her voice was warm, a little soft at the edges. "I'm going to indulge it for another minute."

Leon said nothing. He was acutely aware of several things simultaneously: the weight of his arm over her, the warmth coming through the dress fabric, the complete reasonableness she was deploying in a situation that was not, by any conventional measure, reasonable.

"I'm glad," he said at last, because something needed to be said, "that my hug is up to standard. But we should probably get up for breakfast."

"Should we," Nina said, as though the concept were theoretical.

"Nina."

She giggled again — and there it was, that unguarded sound, and he felt it more than heard it. "Tell me first," she said, the tease clear in her voice, "that you don't find this warm and comfortable and not at all difficult to stay in."

"That's not the point."

"Isn't it a little bit the point—"

"Nina."

She let go of his hand.

He withdrew his arm. They both sat up, and the morning came back into full focus — the pale yellow light at the curtains, the city sounds starting up outside, the ordinary Saturday texture of the world that was doing its level best to be normal despite everything. Nina stretched her arms above her head with a small, content sound, then stood, reached for the apron hung over the back of the desk chair — he had no memory of putting it there, which meant she had found it herself — and tied it on as she walked toward the kitchen.

"Stay as long as you like," she said over her shoulder. "I'll start on breakfast."

He followed her out in a few minutes, drawn by the smell before it had even fully developed — butter, he thought, and something with egg. She was already in motion when he came around the corner, moving between stove and counter with her particular brand of efficiency that made the kitchen look like it had been designed specifically around her.

"What's the plan today?" he asked, pulling out a chair and sitting at the table.

"A date," Nina said, without turning around.

Leon waited for context. It didn't come immediately. "Why a date," he said, "instead of tracking down the temporal anomaly?"

She picked up the pan, shifted something in it with a spatula. "The detection mechanism is already deployed," she said. "I set it last night, while you were sleeping. It needs time to accumulate positional data — a few days at minimum. Rushing it would just give me noise." She glanced at him over her shoulder. "So until then, I have time. And I intend to use it."

"Where are we going?"

The corner of her mouth curved. "You'll find out when we get there. I'll navigate. You drive."

He considered arguing with this. He decided against it.

Breakfast was, in keeping with what was rapidly becoming a pattern, exceptional. She had made eggs with herbs he hadn't known were in his refrigerator, toast that was somehow the right amount of golden, and coffee that tasted like she'd made it approximately three hundred times and knew exactly what he preferred. Leon sat across from her and ate and thought, not for the first time, about the version of himself that had somehow managed to persuade this person to marry him.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"You can always ask me things," Nina said.

"How is she? Your past self." He looked at her. "The one at the university."

Something in Nina's expression shifted — not to sadness exactly, but to something more considered. She held her coffee cup in both hands and was quiet for a moment.

"Shy," she said. "Very shy. Reserved. She's the sort of person who blends into the back of every room on purpose because being noticed feels dangerous." A small pause. "She's not confident. She has a rather low opinion of herself — not in a way she'd say out loud, but in the quiet way that shapes every small decision. She studies because that's something she's good at, and she fills the hours between classes with her research, and she doesn't know what to do with people very well."

Leon looked at her. At Nina, who had walked into his apartment uninvited and cooked him roasted chicken and teased him about the gohan-ofuro-watashi joke and gone toe-to-toe with his half-asleep attempts at impulsiveness with perfect composure. "That doesn't sound like you," he said.

"No," she agreed. "It doesn't. Not anymore." She turned the cup slowly between her palms. "She changed. I changed." Her voice was even, not dramatic about it. "He did that. Your future self. Not by trying to change her — he never did that. Just by..." She searched for it. "By loving her in a way that made her feel safe enough to become someone else. Someone she didn't know she could be." The trace of a smile. "We were good for each other, I think. He became steadier. I became bolder. And in between we built something that—" She stopped. Looked at her coffee. "It was a good marriage. Not easy, but genuinely good. Every part of it."

Leon was quiet.

"Had it not been for the erasure," she said, simply, "it would have lasted."

He didn't try to answer that. It didn't seem like a thing that could be answered. He ate his toast instead, and she let the silence stand without filling it, which was, he was beginning to understand, one of the ways she showed consideration.

After a moment she set down her cup and looked at him with a different expression — lighter, purposeful.

"I'm going to give you a cheat code," she said.

He raised an eyebrow.

"Over the next few days," she said, "something is going to happen. Something involving her — my past self. I won't tell you what in advance. I want you to see it for yourself, without preconceptions." She held his gaze. "I'll make sure you're present for it. And afterward, you'll understand her better than most people ever have. You'll know what to say, and what not to say, and what she needs from someone before she's able to say she needs it."

Leon looked at her steadily. "You're coaching me on how to court you."

"I'm coaching you," Nina said, with great dignity, "on how to court her. She's a different person. It's an important distinction."

"Is it?"

"Legally and temporally, yes." She picked up her coffee again. "Emotionally—" She tilted her head in a small, equivocal motion. "The distinction becomes somewhat philosophical."

Leon looked at her for a long moment.

"You know," he said finally, "for someone who has been through what you've been through, you're remarkably put together."

Nina looked down at her coffee. A small smile appeared. "I have good days and less good days," she said. "Today happens to be a good day."

She looked up and met his eyes, and there was something in her expression then — layered, honest, holding both the grief and the warmth in the same space without letting either cancel the other out. It lasted only a moment before she set down her cup with a small decisive click and reached to collect the plates.

"Finish your coffee," she said. "We have a date to get to, and I refuse to be late."