Page 117 of Time Loops & Meet Cutes
New memories fill my mind. Some of them are things Noelle told me about earlier, but now I know details that weren’t in my imagination before.
The taste of her mouth after eating halo-halo.
The breeze on my face as we ate and drank on the patio at the izakaya.
Her ass on my desk at work as I knelt between her legs.
“What is it?” she asks. Not in my memory, but in person.
“Holy shit,” I repeat, opening my eyes and looking at her. I can’t piece together the order in which everything happened, but it’s all gloriously vivid. “Iremember.”
44Noelle
When Cam set the dumplings in front of me, I had a hunch. These dumplings were different from all the ones I’d eaten in my quest to figure out what happened on June 20… and Cam’s grandmother died in January. Judith’s mother died in January. They could be the same person, right? His grandmother could be the one who served me dumplings at the night market, in what feels like another lifetime.
As I sat there, contemplating that possibility, Cam started eating, then doubled over.
“You remember,” I repeat. “You remember all those iterations of June twentieth?”
“Well, I remember all the time I spent with you. I remember introducing myself to you over and over. I remember you spilling bubble tea on my crotch. I remember beating you at bowling and losing to you at mini-golf after I got my ball stuck under a kraken.”
I cover my face with my hands.
“What’s wrong?” he asks. “I’m glad I have all these memories of you.”
“I’m glad too,” I say. He already believed me, but if he had any doubts, this should erase them. Except… “Some of theearly things… I only felt free to act the way I did because there were no consequences. I knew you wouldn’t remember anything the next day, other than maybe a vague feeling. I can’t believe I tried to trip myself in front of you. Spilled bubble tea on you.”
He shrugs. “It’s all good.”
That’s one of the things I learned about him in the loop: he’s better at shrugging things off than I am.
“But what I don’t understand,” he says, “is why these dumplings did that. I—”
“Your grandmother was the woman at the market. Her daughter, Judith, must be your aunt.” She said she didn’t have kids, so she can’t be his mother.
He nods slowly. “Yes, I have an Auntie Judith. But I didn’t know that my grandmother ever sold dumplings. Or that she could manipulate time.”
“Your aunt said her brother—your father, I assume?—made her promise not to do it when she came to Canada. Apparently, she put him in a time loop once.”
Cam seems to have reached his threshold of shrugging things off. He sits there in silence, absorbing it all, and I take his hand and squeeze it. With his other hand, he picks up his chopsticks and eats another dumpling. This time, he doesn’t look like he got a sudden migraine.
I can’t help wondering what this all means.
“Your grandmother said the dumplings would give me what I needed most,” I say. “I can’t help thinking it was related to you.”
“You think she was trying to set us up?” Cam asks.
“Itisquite a coincidence that I fell in love with her grandson.”
Did she somehow arrange it? I’m not sure I like the idea that this was fated to happen, thanks to some matchmaking grandma. When she went to the market, was she looking for someone for Cam?
“She didn’t force us to fall in love,” he says.
“Are you positive? What if something in the dumplings acted as a love potion?”
“I can’t imagine it. We watched a drama together once, and she disapproved—strongly—when someone used what was essentially a love potion.” He pauses. “Sure, maybe she had a feeling when she saw you, and by giving you the dumplings, you had the opportunity to encounter me over and over. But it was you who made the effort to talk to me, to ask if Canmore is where I was conceived.”
“Oh my god.” I cover my face with my hands. “You remember that now.”
