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Sarah clicks that fatal button, and in an instant they’re flying together. To where, he isn’t sure—all he knows is that he’s flinging through space, aimlessly. A sudden excruciating pain burns him, sinks inside, digging beneath his skin until he’s positive that every cell within his body is being torched, the pain mind-numbing and endless. He’s no longer holding Sarah; he doesn’t know where she is anymore. Panic seizes him, and he paws blindly for her, but she’s out of reach. He might just be dying, actually dying for real, not the temporary kind that happened numerous times in the loop. This must be hell, he thinks, and then—the world goes still, quiet, and cold.
Blinking his eyes open, blurry and not yet ready to face the world, he’s awoken by the morning light, alone in his hotel room. It’s almost as if nothing happened in the first place.
That can’t be true though; he remembers it. He remembers everything that happened: the limitless November ninths he experienced, the countless times he died, and SarahSarahSarah, her face on repeat in his brain until it goes blank once again.
He breathes in deep, thinking to himself: I’m alone. I’m alone, and that’s never happened before, at least not here. That must mean—
A knock echoes through his door, before it opens without prompting.
“Hey,” Sarah whispers, shutting the door behind her quickly. Her eyes are big, bright, searching, when they meet his.
He stares. Did they—? “Hi.”
She bites her lip. “I checked my phone,” she says, raising her eyebrows like that’s supposed to mean something to him.
“Okay?” he asks, tilting his head to the side.
A smile blooms onto her face, slow and spectacular.
He squints at her.
She grins, all teeth. “It’s November tenth.”
“It’s—” he tries to repeat, but cuts himself off when Sarah screams, loudly, “It’s November fucking tenth!”
“Oh, my God,” he says, and then she jumps onto the bed, careful not to hurt him, grabbing his shoulders with her hands.
“We’re free,” she tells him, wide-eyed.
“We’re free,” he repeats, pulling her into him and rolling them over, hugging her so hard that it might leave bruises in its wake, but just knowing that it’s true, that they have life to live now, is a shock. He feels mildly terrified, more scared than he thought he’d be if he managed to get out.
“I’m so happy,” she says into his neck, and he closes his eyes. He feels almost sick with relief, but at the back of his mind there’s a wicked sense of dread that itches to crawl over his skin. It would be the end, but somehow, it’s only the beginning.
Most of the wedding party leaves the villa by early morning, but he and Sarah are stalling. He packs his suitcase, helps her pack hers, and fills them in the trunks of their respective cars, but in the early afternoon, a few minutes before they’re required to leave, they find themselves sitting at the edge of the pool.
“It’s weird,” Nyles says to her. Inside him, there is a deep, melancholic sadness that he isn’t quite sure how to deal with. “This has become my home.”
Between them, the sounds of the wind meeting the water and Sarah’s quiet breathing fill the silence. “Mine, too,” Sarah tells him, because she’s right—he’d probably estimate that she’s been here with him for nearly two years, and he’s been in it alone for five times of that. “But there’s more to life than outside of here.”
He swallows, chest tightening. He feels like someone has reached inside his chest and tightened their hand around his heart.
“I never asked,” she starts, knocking a knee against his. “What’s your full name?”
“Nylan,” he tells her, but his throat closes up around his surname. “Fuck—Sarah, I—” He tries to laugh, but his breath catches in his throat and all that comes out is this weird, garbled sound.
She turns to him, worry etched over her features. “You okay?”
He’s—not. He thinks he’s dying, Jesus Christ, what the fuck, he’s never felt like this before. Is this a heart attack? Could he really not survive one single day without immortality? God, he can’t breathe, he can’t fucking—
Sarah grabs his face between the palms of her hands, and his vision is blurry but she’s there, in front of him. He tries his hardest to focus on her eyes. If he’s going to die now, he wants them to be the last things he sees.
“Hey, hey,” she says, soothingly, her thumb brushing over the skin of his cheek. Hairs on his arms stand upright. “Breathe with me, it’s going to be fine.”
He listens carefully to the sounds of her breaths, copying her in her movements. Slow inhales, deep exhales.
“How about we stay for one more day?” Sarah asks him, all understanding and gentle eyes and compassion, without him even having to provide explanation. He loves her—he knew he did when they were in the loop, but God, she was so good to him, with him, even outside of it.
His heart rate has slowed now, breathing a tad more under control. “Can we?” he asks. “I mean—seriously, can we? Everyone is gone, and—”
“Hey,” Sarah cuts in again, until he stops. The static in his brain fizzles to a halt. “Trust me. Let’s stay for a while.”
Of course, the family who owns the villa ends up coming back later on that same day, so they’re kind of forced to leave, but it’s still the thought that counts. He cherishes the hours alone with her at the villa, the rest of their worries melting away, more than she’ll ever know.
In the months after, he can’t help but resent her for getting them out, something that doesn’t seem to change for a long while. It isn’t an ongoing, debilitating sense of resentment, so at least there’s that. It’s more of something that exists in the back of his mind, something that rears its ugly head when he’s at his lowest.
Here’s the thing: Nyles is a simple dude. He wouldn’t have ever been able to figure out how to exit the time-loop; he knows fuck-all about quantum physics, and he sure as hell doesn’t have the discipline or brain capacity to learn about it. He uses the same repeated tricks to get out of shit, to get into shit, because he’s simple like that—he knows what works for him, and he uses it to his advantage. Work with what you know, right?
Well, after being in a time-loop for what must’ve been something close to a decade, the truth is that he doesn’t know shit. He doesn’t remember shit. It comes back to him, in pieces, the months following the explosion, like some stupid self-inflicted form of amnesia and he fucking hates all of it. He remembers his house, first, in Arizona, and he remembers his dog—thank God, because if he’d forgotten Peanut he would have never been able to forgive himself—and he remembers his mom. It takes him longer to remember his dad, close to a week out of the loop, and he eventually realizes it’s because his dad hasn’t been in the picture since he was a teenager. So, fuck that guy too, I guess.
Sarah suggests they go to his house first the moment they hit the road, because it’s on the way to hers in Texas, so they do. The only thing is, when he gets to his place, he does not want to be there at all. He picks up his dog from the neighbour’s, a couple important files from his tiny office, and some stuff from his bedroom—clothes, things he had the feeling that he used to use often, other necessities—and he tells Sarah this: I don’t want to be here anymore.
Sarah takes a moment to look at his face, and nods her head, grabbing his hand and pulling him toward his car.
It’s been five months, and he remembers his job—he was a fucking I.T. guy, for fuck’s sake. He’s well off. But what he does not remember is how to do it.
All that college debt and for nothing.
Nyles hadn’t been like this before, that’s one thing that he’s sure of. He’s never felt resentful or broken or empty or anxious. All of those things start happening with concerning frequency in the months following their escape.
When Sarah had asked him to leave the loop with her, he’d known he was eventually going to say yes, no matter how terrified he was to do it. There was absolutely no way he could keep doing this—not dying, living on repeat, experiencing the same goddamn day over and over and over—and that ending well.
What he hadn’t known, what he hadn’t expected, was this: he didn’t know he was going to feel this way, lost and aimless and sad. He didn’t know it would be an uphill battle, dealing with everything he experienced in the loop, dealing with the weird, fucked up forgetting of his past life. He didn’t know he’d feel so defeated.
“I think you have PTSD,” Sarah says to him one night, when they’re under the covers at her house in Texas. She says it gently, like she’s telling him that someone he knows has died. He supposed he’s died, in a way—his spirit has definitely taken a bit of a hit, at the very least. “Maybe… have you thought about, I don’t know, talking to someone about this?”
He sighs, suddenly feeling like he’s fifty years old. He supposes he is, mentally, if he thinks hard enough about it. “I talk to you about it.”
“Nyles,” Sarah says, tiredly. “I meant someone professional.”
“I’m not seeing a therapist, Sarah,” he replies, going short with her. He turns over so his back is to her in the bed, his body tense. In a low tone, he mutters, “How am I even supposed to fucking explain this to anyone else? They’re going to think I’m crazy. That we’re crazy. I just—I can’t, okay?”
Sarah goes quiet after that, probably because she knows he has a point, and probably also because she has no idea what she’s supposed to say. Instead of it pushing her away, though, she moves into him, wrapping her arms around his midsection and pressing her face to his back. She’s spooning him from behind, something he loves when she does, though he’s never explicitly said it. With her warmth, he relaxes, heart clenching from how much he loves her. She doesn’t deserve his feelings of resentment and bitterness; she’s so fucking good and patient with him sometimes.
“It’s going to be okay,” Sarah whispers into his shoulder blades.
A moment passes, and his hands find hers, where they’re wrapped around his waist. Tightening them, he asks, “How can you be sure?”
“I’m not,” she admits. “I just have hope that it will be.”
Here is the other thing: Sarah is fucking brilliant. She’s smart and funny and sexy and gorgeous—God, those fucking eyes—and yet, for some reason, she’s had sex with Nyles upward of a thousand times, even if she doesn’t remember it. Through those little moments, he’d learned so many parts of her, small things which made her realer to him than half of the other people in the loop.
It’s why he always went back to her, and it’s why he likes her the most, of all the other people that he talked to at the wedding, spent time with, had sex with. Sarah always keeps it real, even for (what she thinks is) a one-night-stand. She doesn’t want to impress him, she doesn’t want to fool him with falsities. She just wants him to be with her, in that moment, one hundred percent authenticity. He respects the shit out of her.
It’s probably why she ended up there, eventually.
Here is what Nyles learned in the time-loop, before Sarah joined him: she wears Orchid Explosion by Fournier, but only because her sister asks her to. She tells him, a little drunk, that she will never compare to her sister. Tala is too damn selfless, and Sarah just thinks of herself as a complete and utter fuck-up who’s been to rehab multiple times, self-destructive tendencies totally out of whack.
He discovers that she likes his hands and his mouth, because she tells him that breathlessly as he touches her, kisses her, worships her. She especially likes when he uses them together. She likes when Nyles kisses her with just a little tongue, when his mouth devours hers and he touches her through her clothes, works her up a little before they actually fuck. She likes when he talks to her a little dirty during it, when she can hear him making sounds and responding to her. She likes him.
He discovers that maybe, just maybe, he likes her, too.
He discovers that he’s even willing to spend eternity with her, that he’d be willing to put up with a million little deaths and a thousand repetitive days as long as he had her with him to endure them.
It’s why he chose to leave the loop, after all, despite the terror that seized him at the very thought of it: her. Nyles would try for her, he’d do it for her. He could deal. He really could.
Sarah is what made it worth it, for him—the loop, and everything that came after.
“Come here,” she whispers to him on a chilly night in April, and he tilts his head back to look at her. He’s on his back on the floor, Peanut on top of him, ruffling his fur. He really needs a haircut. Both him and Peanut.
“Tempting offer,” Nyles says, smile quirking his mouth as he looks at how bundled she is in her onesie. “Especially with how hot you look right now.”
Today is a good day for him, has been for the most part. He’d moved permanently to Sarah’s house last month after selling his house in Arizona for a healthy sum, so he’s been working on some landscaping in their backyard. It helps him, having things to do. He’d taken up cooking as well these past two months, which had helped as well; he hasn’t told her yet, but he’s considering going to culinary school. He doesn’t want to do I.T. again—he definitely doesn’t have it in him, and he gets much more joy from creating things, sharing them with the people he loves. The point is: he’s doing a little better, day by day, and tonight, he’s okay.
Sarah stretches her legs out on the sofa, wiggling her hands at him. “Come here.”
He pats at Peanut until he gets off him, then hovers over Sarah by the couch. “I’m going to jump you.”
“Don’t,” Sarah says, glaring at him menacingly, which is way too fucking cute and not at all as menacing as she thinks it is.
He grins at her, big and wide. “Scoot!”
Within twenty seconds, they’re laid out together, legs tangled. He cradles Sarah’s head to his chest, running his fingers through her hair, then presses two kisses to her forehead.
She sighs, quietly. She’s so quiet today.
“How was your day?” Nyles asks her, twirling her ponytail in his hand.
She clearly hesitates for a moment, before admitting to him, “Bad.”
He pauses. He’d noticed her being weird earlier, but had figured she just needed some space—when she had come home from work earlier, later than her usual hour, she’d been shifty-eyed and jittery for two hours until she calmed down and helped him clean up the mess in the kitchen.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, hoping it isn’t too pushy to ask. Talking it out always seems to help.
Her leg twitches against his. “I—ugh. It’s hard sometimes, being… actively not self-destructive. You know?”
He thinks that he knows what she’s trying to say, what she’s implying, without her having to say it. Sarah told him a few times about her tendencies. She’s told him about her relapses, about the inclination toward escapism, about the fleeting urges. Pressing another kiss to her temple, he says, “One of those days, huh?”
“Shit sucks sometimes,” is all she replies. She gets like this: semi-closed off, a little vague, hard up to be vulnerable. He worries about her, sometimes, because she’s always so worried about him and he wonders when she has time to think after herself instead. He hopes she knows that she’s the most important person to him, and that he wants nothing but for her to be okay.
“Babe,” Nyles tries, voice soft. She’s been so strong for him, these past few months, but he knows that she isn’t totally alright either, not entirely. “You know I don’t have a monopoly on time-loop trauma, right?”
She nods a bit into his chest. “Yeah.”
He pulls his head back to look her in the eye. “I’m serious.”
“I know,” she says, sighing, but not looking back at him directly. “I really do.”
It’s funny, how they take turns lamenting in their own sadness and end up needing to pull each other back upright, but he also wouldn’t change it for the world. Tugging on her hair, he murmurs to her, “Come here.”
When she lifts her head up, he leans down to kiss her. He wants her to know how much he cares for her even in her worst moments, through the lows and the highs. He’s going to stick with her no matter what. Their lips move together, and he just hopes Sarah knows, that she can feel it in his kiss.
“It’ll get better,” he tells her, after he pulls back, rubbing his nose against hers. I have hope it will be, he thinks, watching her. For the first time since they escaped, he actually believes it. After a moment, she smiles back, and he becomes sure that it’s true.
Here is what they tell you, but you don’t believe until it comes true: with time, you heal. In motion.