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In Portland, Kai oversleeps.
But not dramatically so. The polished full moon is still up, which means he shouldn’t be. Though he is, because he has a plane to catch. Not for work or a wedding, but because another winter has coiled itself around him, throwing him out of himself.
At the exact same time in Mystic Falls (though three hours later, so it’s not really a fair comparison) Bonnie, put together and poised as always, drinks a freshly pressed lemon juice and ginger shot. Her ride to the airport isn’t for another two hours, but she, being the kind of person who’d write: buy more sticky notes on a sticky note, likes to stay ahead. Kai, on the other hand, would probably write a tiny best-seller on a bar napkin and then leave it behind.
When he dashes to PDX his hair is still wet and his coffee stays forgotten on the kitchen counter. Somehow, there’s always a button torn on every single one of his jackets.
He seems to constantly be caught between things, as if he’d hopelessly misplaced himself in someone. Between jobs, between girlfriends, between who he is, and who he means himself to be. Between houses, even- currently crashing in his sister Josette’s basement with a futon and a family of many-legged crawlers who probably pay more rent than he does.
When offered shiny, complementary bonbons by the flight attendant, he, with his raging sweet tooth, greedily scarfs down at least four of them. On another flight, Bonnie smiles at the name, but shakes her head no.
When his plane lands at JFK under a sky ready to give in to rain at any second, he suddenly feels at ease - almost unusually so. The toddler next to him chews a boarding pass like it’s jerky and then smacks the wet paper directly on his knee, while the pilot crackles through the speakers after a too-loud static, but both fail to awaken his close-at-hand rage. In fact, he can’t ever remember feeling this unbothered.
Meanwhile, Bonnie’s flight lands twenty minutes earlier. She’d flown in from Richmond, wearing soft cashmere and practical boots. Her family has money, but Bonnie prefers to never talk about it unless it comes up, and even then she winces- carrying that legacy makes her feel responsible for the whole entire world in ways she feels entirely too young for.
Now, finally leaving her seat by the oval window and chewing gum to ease the pressure in her ears, she boards the connecting shuttle to the terminal, its hazard lights blinking smoky orange through the mist. She hates liminal spaces: pavements, hallways, lobbies, elevators, buses, airports. Always has. Makes her feel like she's misplaced something.
It doesn’t help that all her relationships have felt like between-spaces too. When she lays writhing under a boy named Jeremy she thinks his hair might be too wavy. Nora’s too soft. Tiki’s too long. Enzo’s too short. And Kol’s almost just right, but only when she’s drunk and without her glasses on.
Inside the airport, somewhere in the long, seemingly everlasting line of people walking and walking and walking, cattle-like, down the glass-way corridor to the baggage claim, Kai feels warm again, as though that feeling of pure bliss had followed him, crept in through the vents. He squints at the windows, something about the bus arriving at the terminal tugging at him - like he’s on an invisible leash. Watching neon-clad figures operate in perfect sync out on the tarmac, he thinks back to a conversation with Josette:
“How do you know Alaric is the one?”
“I don’t,” she’d said, in that clipped, stoic way of hers, while wrangling two babies at the same time. "It just works for now."
“I know that no one I’ve met is the one,” he had announced with complete conviction, sounding more sentimental than he had ever before believed himself capable of feeling.
Josette had sighed, only half-listening over the mewls of the babies. “There is no such thing as the one, Kai. That’s a mental trap you’ve put yourself in so you can continue to avoid any form of attachment.”
Kai had laughed. “Oh no, don’t you psychoanalyse me, Sissy,” he’d warned.
“I’m just saying.” She grinned. “That one you’re talking about, if such a person even exists, is more likely closer to you than you think anyway, because of compatibility.”
“Actually, don’t sociologically analyse me either,” Kai had said, grinning back. Though a strange sensation, almost like ancestral dread, had crept up on him, enough to stop the smile from reaching his eyes.
It had always engrossed his thoughts, haunted him in his dreams even, the feeling that something, from somebody, might be missing him, and that he’s yet to find it, and not in the bottom of a golden beer, or submerged in a crisp clear blue ocean far away from home, or in all the nights tangled up with his hands on another tourist- both pretending they didn’t wish the other was someone else.
Now, even though the feeling he’d tried to make his sister understand hasn’t quite left him, he feels oddly accompanied. His greedy nature flared up and subdued at once: like a baby latching to a nipple, desperately hungry but content all the same.
Bonnie and Kai barely pass each other in the customs line. Their luggage, her suitcase with its red ribbon, his, with a cracked handle, does not arrive at the same carousel. They both take theirs without a second glance around. But for a moment, the weight in Bonnie’s chest shifts and eases too.
In another universe, she orders a drink from a lanky, cheerful bartender, with her British boyfriend standing to her right. They share smiles, but nothing more. Three weeks later she ends things with the boyfriend, says: she doesn’t feel it anymore. Still, even though she looks for him, she never meets that bartender again. "It's probably for the best," another bartender says to the bus boy when she's out of ear-shot. "That guy was a fucking weirdo."
In another version of things, she loses a round of rock paper scissors with her co-workers and has to eat lunch last. She’s on her break when he walks in, and someone else greets him at the front desk. And in just one, on a cold, copper-red, sandy island where no one ever dies, they’re creatures taught by angels how to find each other for a kiss under the twin moons of Mars.
In some, he, sociopathic and stir-crazy, stabs her with a knife and leaves her for dead on a sun-warmed lawn, and then she, traumatised and vengeful, stabs him back, unmoved when his blood paints the snow a crimson red. In one, she’s God, and in another, he sells his soul to the Devil.
In most others, they’re born just enough years or miles apart for their paths to never cross. Though their dreams always remain the same.
Bonnie’s town car pulls up soundlessly to the airport while Kai fumbles with the taxi app in the rain. Her driver is silent and indifferent, playing the radio on low volume: a song she doesn’t recognise, some 90’s rock hit.
She sees Kai standing under the awning, holding his phone like it’s a foreign object he’s only just learned is a part of the world he inhabits, seemingly not one bit bothered by the rain. She cranes her neck, watching him like he might turn around. He does not. She doesn’t even catch a glimpse of his face before she’s swept into traffic. If she had, she might have thought it familiar, the kind one recognises as if from a different life.
That first evening in Manhattan, somewhere in Midtown, they both order spaghetti. Different restaurants. Kai hums a song by Pearl Jam, though he does not hear it playing, doesn’t even remember why it got stuck in his head in the first place. His phone buzzes: his sister, asking if he can babysit next week. He says yes before he can think of any reason not to, still tapping his thumb against his pocket in time with the 1994 tune in his head.
Later that night, Kai will go to bed on the rugged couch of an old college friend, who snores like a trucker, and contemplate killing him with his own dull kitchen knives to be rid of the noise. Bonnie will stay in a large suite with an unobstructed view of the Manhattan skyline, wondering if her dad will show up to her birthday dinner this time. They will each sit by windows in their separate lives, drinking tea or not drinking anything at all, and still feel that same familiar longing. Still in desperate need of those fated kisses that might finally burn a new meaning into their, until then, quite unremarkable lives. Both might wake the next day and the day after that with the imperceptible and unnameable feeling that something good had just brushed past them.
Though, Bonnie will never think of the feeling of relief from the airport again.
Neither will Kai.
He will not remember soft cashmere and a red ribbon, and Bonnie will not remember a lanky boy-ish man, brown hair dripping wet in the rain. Still, for that short period in their timelines, while a few blocks apart, they will both sleep unusually well. He won’t dream, but he’ll think he hears soft singing, a voice so sweet and angelic and almost holy (which definitely rules out his snoring roommate). In her sleep, she’ll see someone reaching for her hand, but will wake up before he touches her.
Yet, later that year, when the sky dims and they both look up at the eclipse at the exact same time, something forgotten will still not stir.
On one of his last days before leaving for Portland, Kai slides into the window seat of a popular café that serves lush birthday cakes and afternoon tea on the Lower East Side and immediately notices the worn book left behind by someone, tucked behind the napkin holder. He picks it up.
It’s a dark mossy green and small, barely larger than his palm, but looks old and brittle and important. If he hadn’t known better he’d call it a witches grimoire. At the centre, a curled, antique-looking B is etched in gold. As he flips through it, past letters and crests and sigils he does not recognise, one catches his attention: the symbol for the Gemini constellation - he’s seen it enough times to remember it. This particular one makes him feel like he’d been hurt in this exact way before. Maybe in another life, or maybe in the womb, together with Josette. He hates déjà vu.
He thinks of selling the book to an antiquarian that he passed on his way to the café, but decides against it what-with the way the book seems to speak to him from eternities past, as though binding itself to him by some ancient debt.
As he slides the book into his pocket, something like a gentle silken presence drapes over him, leaving a phantom kiss on his lips. A new sense of calm covers him when he steps back out into the New York cold, making him wonder why he suddenly feels forgiven.
Hours later, it will wind up back inside her tote bag anyway. Nobody involved will find it strange. Especially not the book.
Neither event of the week is interesting on its own. Together, they still mean absolutely nothing. But if those two had been able to zoom out far enough, all the way to the outer edges of the multiverse, they might have been able to see that they almost form a pattern, every time. And sometimes, the pattern forms something so beautiful, where earnest wide-eyed love can finally blossom.
Though in this universe, it does not. They never see each other on any of the rain-wet New York streets. If they fly to the same city again, their paths still fail to cross. They will never bump into each other at a crosswalk. No shared elevator trips. No friend-of-a-friend introduction. No accidental coffee mix-ups. No meet-cute at a bar after a lame stand-up show.
And of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she does not walk into his.