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"The key to what we're doing here - to what everyone is doing, is Narrative." Mr. Jefferson had paused, turning to the board at the front of the class, and wrote the word on the board in his long, elegant script. "Every artist, every speaker, every creative person you've ever met is telling stories; the oldest art form in the world."
She'd listened, rapt. She thinks about it all the time.
Growing up small and nervous and insular, it's day-to-day. She suspects everyone does it, to some varying degree; narrates their life as if it's been written, guessing at twists and turns, at tragedies.
Chloe drives her around in the early morning, before classes. They get breakfast. It's Max's favourite time of day - Chloe's truck emerging from the early morning fug like a ghost ship. Max watches it from her window, soundless from so far away, gliding into place outside the main campus buildings.
She'll open the cab, step out, look around. She'll pull a cigarette from her back pocket and put it between her lips. Two brief flashes around it from her lighter and she'll pull herself up to sit on the car's hood. Max doesn't even have to wait for her call anymore - seven o'clock sharp and she's already making her way to meet her.
That grey morning light has always been Chloe, somehow, just like music dizzying on the car radio, old standards on tape and whatever new band is dominating Chloe's phone, played blurry out of its speakers from the well between their seats.
It's a feeling, an experience, that Max has only ever barely managed to capture with her camera. It's lying in bed beside her that one morning and feeling choked with whatever was in her throat that was rising from her gut, memory and instinct and nostalgia. It's the swimming pool, stink of chlorine and the dark sky above; it's the long, winding trails of smoke that follow Chloe like spectres. She kissed her, once. It keeps happening again in dreams - but in dreams she can't rewind, watches her life play out like a movie.
It's like being depressed again, like when she still lived in Seattle; staring out of windows feeling listless and 'artistic' and lost. She is fucking terrified. She is revelling. Something is building.
It would take a lot, to hide what they're doing. The way Chloe carefully brushes a hand across her leg as they drive, reaching for her phone to change the track; how silent they often are, staring. Chloe has grown long and loping and beautiful; savage like a wolf and warm to curl beside.
Max isn't sure about herself but she feels taller than she ever has; like she could span acres if she wanted, touch the treetops with her fingertips, swallow mountains whole. In Seattle, before she came here, she always felt distant from her own life. Here she is full up with it, overflowing. She seems to live on sensation, one moment to the next, and Chloe is the warm, pulsing centre; Chloe, who always hugs a little too hard, a little too long. Who looks mortified and frightened when Max tells her how happy she is they're together again. Whose voice is too loud, in the silence.
They have their secret places, like when they were kids. Holed up in Chloe's room, Max's dorm room, or on the roof of the school - at least, until Kate died. Chloe, liquid, fills every inch of whatever container she is in. Max thinks she could fill concert halls, canyons; oceans.
She's got it so bad.
On the hood of Chloe's car in waxing sunlight, one morning after breakfast, Max was bold.
They lay out on the car like hunter's trophies; Max's arms spread out, Chloe sat up on her elbows, watching the sun rise. It was going to be hot that day, hotter than usual, and already the light was stifling, sticking jeans and t-shirt to her body, the small of her back to the car.
She told Chloe about the storytelling, not sure if she was listening. Boring even herself, she lapsed into silence. Chloe pressed her lips together tightly. "Some story." She said, still not looking at Max. "That's dumb." Another pause, where Max just looked at her, a little hurt despite herself. "Life doesn't have a beginning, or a middle, or anything. Shit just happens," she shrugged. Max tilted her head to look up at the sky.
"You don't see the patterns?"
"Patterns how?"
"Patterns in people, in places. Like, you and me, for example -" She figured then was as good a time as any. "Friends when we were kids, and then I save your life in a bathroom, years later." She paused. "That doesn't seem like... I don't know. Fate, to you?"
Chloe snorted. "Fate?"
"Serendipity. Plot. Whatever."
She sighed, long, and was distant when she next spoke. "No, Max. Not really."
Max fell silent, unsure of where to take it. There's no way to sensibly say that it's love. That it's taking over her life, like the tornado in her dreams wearing the rocks away; like Chloe shattered her quiet existence and brought it clanging, crashing to life. That the moments they spend together feel thick and weighted with meaning; that when they were kids, she'd always thought it strange how deeply she felt for her. Always thought she was so pretty, and talking about it made her Dad do his worried little frown.
"Well, I do." She said, breaking the silence again, feeling as if her chest was filled with feathers, and breathing in and out made them catch, tickle. "I think it makes sense that I found you again."
"You never looked for me." Chloe said pointedly. Max pulled herself up and slid to sit on the edge of the car's hood, knocking her heels against the bumper with every swing of her legs. There's only so many times you can say sorry. Chloe scooted up to join her. "You wanna go to a show tonight? It's only a little ways out of town, I can drive us."
Max smiled at her. "Way to change the subject. Smooth."
"Yeah, well, you started the awkwardness. What do you want me to say? Yeah, Max, I think it's fate we're together again. I think we're soulmates, and we're gonna save the world together."
"Why not?"
Chloe laughed loudly, surprised. "Why not what?"
"Why not, soulmates saving the world? You think I saved your life - like three times, by the way - so you could keep me grounded? Because I was bored?"
"I don't know. There are worse ways to try to fill your saturday nights." Chloe grinned at her, but Max's head was warm, feathers in her lungs still barbed and scratching.
"I think it's a love story." She didn't realise she was talking until it had already been said. She lifted her hands, that familiar burning sensation at the back of her spine. She watched Chloe's expression of surprise reverse; mouth closing, eyes lowering, face turning back towards the sunset. She tasted copper.
"-saturday nights." This time her grin quickly faded. "Are you okay?"
Max touched two fingers beneath her nose, and they came away dark red. She'd only done it for a couple of seconds, at the most - but since Kate died she'd been exhausted, and a couple of seconds, it seemed, was enough.
"Yeah, fine. Sorry."
With time travel there are no accidents; no surprises. Practising every word is too easy to do, and it sickened her to think of all the things she could do, without ramification. Of how many times she'd seen Chloe die.
"Are you upset I said we weren't soulmates?" She elbowed Max, a little too hard.
Max swallowed, hands itching to move. If she rewound again, she'd hurt herself - and there was no telling how much. Here in the present, with her words, she was in the same danger.
"Did you love me when we were kids?" She said, meeting Chloe's eyes with determination - with her powers dampened, this was the time to be brave, truly. No stepping back from it, no tricks. No lying.
Chloe blinked. "Yeah, of course I did."
"Me too." Max held her gaze, fighting the urge to just burst into tears like a baby. Her nose was dribbling blood all over her lip - she wiped at it distractedly with her sleeve. "I got my heart broken when we moved away, and then I got over it, and then you came back."
Chloe frowned at 'got over it', but said nothing.
"Do you love Rachel Amber? And I don't mean like, 'she's my best friend'."
"What?" Chloe looked away, then back at Max, face flushed. She looked furious, and kicked at the underside of the car. "Yeah." Her voice was barely a whisper.
"Do you love me?"
Chloe turned back to stare between her own knees. From this angle, Max couldn't read the expression on her face at all. "Yeah, Max, of course."
"Okay." Silence. The small space between them seemed all of a sudden to yawn widely. The car beneath them was heating up in the direct sunlight, and it stung to press her hands against it. "I love you too. Just in case that wasn't obvious."
"What am I supposed to do with that, exactly?" Chloe's voice was thick.
"I don't know."
"What do you wanna do?"
"I don't know." She felt stupid saying it. Chloe shook her head and sniffed, hard. Scrabbled at her eye with a hand.
She was so quiet, so unlike her. She wouldn't meet Max's eyes. "I can't - Max, I can not deal with this." Chloe pushed herself off the car, and Max didn't follow. She watched her, so beautiful - the stark lines of her angular face turned towards the sky, hair blown haphazard about her face, mouth drawn in a taut line. "You don't know what it was like - being here, loving you, loving Rachel, when no one loved me. It's not that easy, just saying you love me like it's gonna change any fucking thing about this situation." She kicked her way through the dust. "Maybe at art school this goes well for you - maybe it helps you write better stories," She spat, "But it doesn't help me."
Max watched her pace, tears in her eyes. This wasn't how it was supposed to play out.
Like a punch in the gut, she reeled backwards - dragged in an instant to the cab of the car, soft worn leather beneath her, sun a barest line on the horizon, rising. Chloe, beside her, smiled warmly.
"Wanna sit on the hood, watch the sun rise?" She said. Max's head was on fire, her vision blurring, nausea rising endlessly in her gut. She felt like she was going to explode, and blood trickled freely from her nose, dripping onto her jeans. Chloe's expression flipped quickly from levity to abject horror. “Max?”
"I'm fine." She said softly, and remembered little else.
---
Fate - serendipity. Whatever - is a double-edged sword.
She saw the bullet go in, saw her stumble back, saw her fall. She saw the train roar towards her, the rough crack as it hit. She saw the knife go in. She saw Chloe fall a dozen times. It felt like hundreds.
Thing about fate is, you can't see how it connects. How things interweave. She should have learned the hard way that life comes with balance - that one person's life might mean another's. That you don't always know best.
Chloe hits the ground like a bag of sand, a dull thud, and in the dark Max can't see the blood dribble from her forehead, but she knows it's there.
When you're in the story, it's hard to see what path you're on. All this time she thought she was writing her love story; that all the chips were falling into place, that something magical was happening. That feeling like they were on borrowed time just meant time was important - not that it would inevitably run out.
Time moves slowly, and this time she's not the one manipulating it. The gun flashes in the dark, and everything replays, over and over, like her dreams. She can't move, can't speak. Can't change the way this runs.
She watches Chloe fall for what might be the final time, and it feels just the same as the tornado slamming into the town, razing everything to dust.
As the whales on the beach drying out slowly, sun like acid burning them away.