Page 44 of The Getaway List
In the periphery I can sense the confused amusement of the rest of the group, which is fair. This song is so niche that I’m surprised the place even had it in the karaoke binder. See, proving that there is no brand of nerd quite as aggressive as the Tides of Time fandom, we kind of accidentally collectively wrote a song.
It started with a scene in the sixth book. The characters traveled to the distant future where they went to a “Museum of the Past” that was really just our present, and every artifact and exhibit they stumbled upon hilariously garbled its “history.” There was a “typical American dinner,” which was a turkey stuffed to the brim with mac and cheese and potatoes and cranberry sauce. There were a bunch of mannequins in a chaotic mash-up of fashion through the decades that only Jesse would be able to believably pull off. Most notably there was what the heroine, Claire, and her friends dubbed “The Worst Song Ever Written”—a combination of country, techno, rap, pop, opera, and jazz, as if they shoved every musical genre into a jar, shook it, left it on the road to get run over by a truck, and shook it again for good measure.
Naturally fans took to the internet to create their own version, and enough people collaborated on it that one unholy definitive version stuck. A version that is currently about to blast through this entire room and spend the next two minutes and fifteen seconds scarring all of its occupants for life, because fans made a whole routine to it, too.
I squeeze Tom’s arms back and say, “Yes. A thousand times yes. My whole life was just a buildup to this humiliating moment now.”
Tom grins widely as he lets me go to walk to the space in front of the screen. I reach for a soda and Mariella says quickly, “No, wait, that one’s mine,” pulling it from my grasp fast enough that it spills over a bit.
“Oh, sorry.” I find my own and take a long swig of it before settling in next to Tom. “All right, anyone who values their limbs is gonna need to give us an extremely wide berth.”
Tom extends his hand to me just as the song kicks off and pulls me into him with a spin so satisfyingly sharp and steady that it suctions some of the air out of my lungs.
This is, of course, the first and last graceful dance move the song has to offer. The rest of it demands that we leapfrog over each other during a verse where the singer just goes, “Health insurance! Capitalism! Everything is bad” in a jazzy swoop underlaid with a country guitar plucking; that I jump on Tom’s back while he extends his hands like a crosswalk safety guard and spins during a brief interlude that’s just someone blowing the same note on a harmonica over and over again; and that we crab walk on the floor around each other during an operatic verse mashing up “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” with no regard for rhythmic structures or the human ear.
Ostensibly we are supposed to be singing, too, but I doubt our lungs or our friends’ brains could come back from that.
We end the song half stumbling, grinning into each other’s faces, finishing off the long dissonant closing chords with our own grand finale: the very complicated series of nonsense gestures that was our secret handshake. We end with our thumbs pressed to our noses and hands splayed out as usual, but so enthusiastically that our chins nearly bump into each other, that there’s a not-at-all subtle voice in the back of my head egging me on to get even closer, just to see what might happen if I did.
As it turns out we’re so breathless with laughter by then that I can barely hold myself up. We end up colliding with each other, half-intentionally and half-not, until Tom turns it into an embrace by wrapping his arms around me and pulling me in so tight that my feet leave the floor. He spins me around for good measure and I hook my arms around him tight, breathing him in, trying somehow to pull him even closer to me even though we’re as close as two sweaty, panting bodies can get.
I’m dizzy when he sets me down, but doesn’t let me go. His hands are still on my waist, his fingers digging into the thin fabric of my shirt, and his face—
I realize in that moment why it’s so easy to tease Tom for being beautiful. It’s because anybody can see that about him. It’s the first thing you notice about Tom; it’s been true every single day of his life.
But very few people will ever see Tom like this—that beautiful face of his split wide open in a grin, hazel eyes brimming with happiness and crackling with mischief, cheeks flushed all the way to his hair. He spends so much of his life composed for other people’s sake, but there’s nothing like being one of few people who gets to see him completely undone.
Like being one of the people who has the satisfaction to undo him.
Tom takes his hands off me only to skim his fingertips just above my ears and through my hair, his eyes teasing. I realize as he smooths it down that my hair has all but evicted the scrunchie from my head. I roll my eyes even though my skin is tingling in every place his fingers roam, even though I’m leaning into his touch without even fully meaning to, like we’re the only ones in the room.
“Worth the wait?” he asks me, so low I can barely hear it over the sound of the next song starting to play.
No, I want to tell him.
I’ve read so many stories about magic. Made up plenty of my own. But I don’t think I understood the heart of it, really—that I couldn’t until this moment now, standing on the other side of the most magical few minutes of my life.
It wasn’t worth the wait, because there shouldn’t have been any waiting at all. We’ve had these stolen few weeks, these past few minutes, when we deserved years. So much wasted time, but for once I’m not sad about it. Not angry or frustrated or stuck. It feels like a new understanding has shifted in me, and instead of being upset for the time we lost, I suddenly can’t bear to think of taking any of the time we have for granted.
I suddenly can’t imagine a world where I don’t tell Tom that I love him, every way I’ve ever known him and every way I ever will.
Something in my face must give way, because Tom’s own expression softens, his eyes settling on mine. I hold his gaze and know it has to be soon. Maybe not tonight, when I tell him I’m staying, but soon.
“Tommy boy, your phone’s blowing up,” Mariella announces.
Tom doesn’t seem surprised by this, his eyes still trained on me. “I’ll get to it,” he says.
It’s strange, but the idea of telling him doesn’t scare me. It’s Tom. Even if he doesn’t want me the same way I want him, I know I’ll never lose him. The worst of what could happen to us is already in the past. So maybe my heart will break a little bit, but at least I will always have Tom in my corner—at least I’ll always have this person I trust above everyone else, who knows me better than anyone in the world.
“It’s about the bug I fixed,” says Mariella, stirring me out of my thoughts. “Well, it might be unfixed now. Shit. My bad. I could hop back in now, but I’ve never fixed an app bug drunk before.”
Tom eases his hands off me and I feel strangely cold without them. So much that it takes me a moment to register what Mariella just said.
Luca beats me to it, lowering the mic he just picked up from the table. “You’re drunk?”
“Bug for what?” says Jesse.
Mariella holds Tom’s phone to him. “For the ‘Dear, Love’ Dispatch. It was bugging all morning before I fixed it.”
