Love Lost Elsewhere

"I don't like sunflowers."

"Okay," he says, and looks for a trash can.

"I appreciate the effort." She stares at him, eyes half closed as if she's about to fall asleep—as if she actually couldn't care less about his effort, with flowers or with anything else in her field of vision.

For example, she could've noticed his tie. Namely, that he was wearing one. Or that he had tried to iron his shirt and that his hair had globs of gel in it.

This is the fourth time Milo and Maggie have met up, and it's going about as well as it's ever gone.

"You're still dating that guy?" he asks, after they spend a lethargic few minutes dragging their feet through the park.

"Barry? We're engaged."

"Cool." The word is all wrong. The humid summer air sucks up his meager verbal offering and spits it out. Steps on it. Digs a figurative foot into it.

"Yes," Maggie says. "It's very...cool."

Milo doesn't know a whole lot about Barry except that he's tall and self-employed and presumably smart enough to not buy his girlfriend—strike that, his fiancée—sunflowers.

"What about your girl?"

"We broke up." He waves a hand before Maggie can conjure up a moment of forced sympathy. "There's a new one now."

This also sounds wrong, but less so than his torturous "cool." Somewhere, on the back, back burner of his brain, he's wondering how bad he's coming across right now. On the jerk scale. On the loser scale. On all the scales he can't quite seem to shake.

"So I think this should be the last time we do this," she says.

And Milo feels himself exhale. It's not relief, exactly, that floods his body, but a release of tensions too long wound up. He's been waiting for Maggie to say this since the day they met.

"Okay."

This results in a flicker of surprise from Maggie, a flicker that darts across not just her face, but her body. A head-to-toe twitch.

"You're really okay with that?" She shakes her head as if to yank the cliched question out of the air. "After all this time."

"After all these four times?"

"You know what I mean."

Milo frowns. "Not really. It's been four times."

Maggie waves her arm around, an uncharacteristic moment of whimsy, taking in the park and taking in Milo. "But all this has significance, right? That's why we do this."

"I don't think it's working. Or not working right." He pauses and squints into the sun. "Though, come to think of it, I don't even know what 'working right' would look like. Maybe we are 'working right'. Maybe this is supposed to be..."

He can't bring himself to finish the sentence because there's something like hope crinkling Maggie's eyes—and he can't bear to squash it out.

She squashes it out herself after a few seconds, with a hand swept across her temple. And then she's back to her old self, the self he's used to.

"It's all probably a trick, a silly experiment." Now she's parroting back the words he used on their first meeting, even though he had only ever said them to impress her with his nonchalance. "Parallel universes, parallel soul mates, parallel fools. Just because someone says we fell in love in another universe doesn't mean a thing. We didn't ask for that information! And we live in this universe. We can't just throw it all away because—what?—science says we should?"

He nods and looks away, at the trees, at the kids playing over the hill, at anything that isn't Maggie's face. He bets she's thinking of Barry now and how impossible it would be to leave him.

"Goodbye, Maggie."

She bites her lip and one corner twitches into a small, sad smile. "Goodbye, Milo."

Maggie takes a few steps away, but then she turns back. In one jerky motion, she snatches the sunflowers out of Milo's hand.

"I do like sunflowers," she says.

And then she leaves.