It’s the first thing that hits him when he wakes up.
She doesn’t know who he is anymore. She doesn’t know what they had. She’s back in her own house, with Camille, waiting for the past few years to come back to her when they may not ever return.
His blurry vision clears as he blinks the sleep away, and the first thing he notices is something shiny catching sunlight on the pillow next to him. He realizes that it’s strands of her hair from a few nights ago, and that crushes him into the wall of sadness even more.
After that, his ears identify the loud buzzing that is coming from his bedside table. He flings his arm out and grabs his phone, just missing the call. The phone starts ringing again, but before it does, he gets a glance of the home screen.
3 Missed Calls From: Stretch
Dammit, he forgot to change that. The thought only lasts a moment before the questions flood him; “why is she calling”, “is something wrong”, the list goes on. He answers the call that’s currently coming in.
“Kirsten?” His tired voice croaks, killing him slowly has her name slides from his mouth.
“Morning, Cameron. How’d you sleep?”
It feels wrong. It all feels wrong. She never asked how he slept. Ever. It was like an unwritten rule that they both slept pretty well when they were with each other, so it was never a topic of conversation.
“Um, fine. Why are you calling?”
He doesn’t want to get up. He doesn’t want to continue this conversation and be continuously reminded of everything he lost. He wants to curl into a ball and go into hibernation for as long as it takes for the pain to heal.
“Camille said that you and I were really good friends so I thought I’d call and ask if you wanted to get coffee. I’m trying to get back to normal, you know, since clearly a lot has changed in my life in the past couple years. Camille and I also agreed that maybe it would be good for me to do something that was normal for me. It could even help my memory.”
He doesn’t want to. Well, he does, he wants her more than anything, but getting together with her sounds painful. Excruciating, even. But if he rejected, then she would know something was up, and maybe even be hurt by it (which she probably wouldn’t, she doesn’t even remember him, but the thought of hurting her might hurt worse than the pain of not having her. If anything, it makes the pain intensify).
“Um, I mean, I guess I could. Where do you wanna go?”
“This place called the Tea & Bean is really good. Do you know where that is?”
Of course he knows where that is. It’s where him and her would go and get coffee all the time, to bring back to either of their places, the lab, or get lunch on a day off. For a piercing moment, he thinks, “I wonder if she remembers that”. Then it hits him like a ton of bricks. She doesn’t.
He blanked. He didn’t realize.
“Sorry, yeah. I know where that is. What time?”
“7:30? Is a half hour enough for you?”
“Yeah. Do you, uh, want me to pick you up?” He thinks maybe just a second of normalcy, seeing her beautiful face coming out of her house and smiling at him, filling him with warmth and pride, would be nice.
Until she gets in the car and he realizes he can’t kiss her. He can’t rest his hand on her leg as they drive, he can’t make silly flirtatious comments that make her giggle. It isn’t normal anymore.
“Would you normally pick me up?” Her smirk is almost heard through the phone, and for the first time in what feels like years, he smiles, just the littlest bit, and when he realizes he’s doing it he stops. It was just such a Kirsten thing to say.
It’s all he can say. He wants to add, I drive you around a lot, or, we always drive together, but something stops him. If he made a comment like that, it would be light-hearted, and almost normal. But his brain keeps telling him to stop, because nothing is normal, and he can’t do things like that anymore.
“Yeah. See you soon.” He quickly presses his thumb against the red circle on his screen that ends the call. He’s about to haul himself out of bed, and mentally prepare himself for what he’s about to do, when a few numbers on his phone screen catch his eye.
It says he was on the phone with her for 6 minutes and 13 seconds, and that it is 6:56 AM. To any other person, this would mean nothing.
But for him, it raises flags, flashes lights, waves signs, and hits him upside the head. Every morning, at 6:50 AM, Kirsten would call him. It started back when she had Temporal Dysplasia, when everything had a fixed time and schedule for her, and when she lost it the routine kind of stuck.
If they were on the phone for around 6 minutes and it’s 6:56 now, that means she called him at 6:50. Like she always did.
He slaps himself for being so hopeful. It was probably just coincidental.
But then again, it may not be.
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