Regrets

“Our last night together.” She whispers though we’re alone here. Perhaps she's just matching the quiet around us as we wait for the sun to emerge over the shadowed edges of the field. But I think it’s because she’s afraid of the words we both know to be true.

My arms slip around her middle and she leans back as the lip of the sun touches the horizon. She entwines our hands and I lay my chin atop her head. This moment is perfect: impossible contentment I will never feel again.

“It doesn’t have to be,” I say and whisps of her hair float around my face as I speak. “We can find a way to be together can’t we?”

She sighs, “What are you proposing? That we run away? Don’t go back to school? Elope?”

“Not…exactly. More like, we tell our parents we’re going out to see friends and meet up here, in our spot, for sexy rendezvous.”

She laughs at first, but then sighs heavily, breathing away my suggestion. One hand reaches back and cradles my neck as I lean in for a kiss.

“I wish summer never had to end,” her voice is all sad resignation against my mouth. And I know, I know, she is not serious. “I wish” is just one of those things humans say in hyperbole, like “I could kill her” when angered or “I could eat a horse” when hungry.

I’ve heard spoken wishes many times in my young life and they always stir that bit of magic in me not yet developed. Like imagining the taste of something you have only smelled. But this time is different, with her words so close she’s speaking them into my mouth and I have no choice but to breathe them in as her fingernails scrape against my neck. “I wish.” It’s intoxicating and flavorful. It’s bathing my tongue.

It’s not a real wish. It has no expectation or foresight. But my magic doesn’t see the difference. My muscles engage, making my body go rigid as I fight the compulsion.

She doesn’t know what I am and telling her now could be a mistake. History has taught my kind again and again that human judgment can not be trusted with power as potentially damaging ours.

But I’ve already erred in judgment. We held hands this summer. We spent countless hours whispering and kissing. We held hands even when our palms were slick with sweat and we snuck home through windows in darkness. We lay in each other’s arms at the end of the most intimate night I’d ever experienced and she’d lightly scratched her nails from my hip bones to my shoulders. I’d shuddered and she must have thought I simply enjoyed having my back scratched, but it was more than that. I knew it then, but it terrified me to acknowledge it. I fell into her arms and her touch awoke my magic.

Now, it’s too late to process: she’s said the words and I am compelled to answer my mistress’s command.

“Do you?” I grit my teeth to hold back my power, hoping that she’ll take it back before it pulls free of its muzzle. “Really?”

She must mistake my rigidity for an attempt at holding back my emotions, because she turns in my arms, hugs me tightly, and coos directly into my ear in the softest and most powerful voice I’ve ever heard, “Yeah, I really, really do. I wish I could turn back time and spend this summer with you all over again.”

I pull away from her and look steadily into her eyes. The reflection of the last rays of sunset bursts out of her irises and she is all colors when I say, “Your wish is my command.”

I close my eyes and focus. The world slows. Our bodies are thrown into the grass, but I cushion our fall.

“Hold on,” I whisper and I tuck the back of her head into my shoulder to protect her as my power makes her wish come true.

The sun melts back into its shadows in the east and rises the wrong way around behind us. For a moment, I catch the reflection of the sun in her eyes as it arches over us. The sun sets in the east only to whip back again. She screams, and I can see the wonder and horror on her face, but I can do nothing but hold her and keep our souls from getting pulled out of us by centripetal force as we move through time.

Around and around, the grass shortens and flowers shrink away as they unblossom and regress to buds. The air starts out wet and then burns our skin. It is humid and then dry and then humid again. Our bodies sting and ache as time pulls away from them.

For our consciousnesses to transfer back into the bodies it has been minutes, but the time is eight weeks prior. We are in the bodies we were in at the beginning of the summer when we’d walked across this very field and she’d tugged at my hand and threw her arms around me and kissed me for the very first time.

The world is finally still and the sun is back at its place at the edge of the world with its dying rays peeking over at the angry girl and the shattered boy.

“What did you do?” She looks different now. I forgot how young she’d looked at the beginning of the summer. Her hair is short and dark and her skin is pale.

I must look different too. I can feel less strength in my muscles and the breeze tickles my ears more than it had any right to in my own time. Worse, though, I feel the closing door on my powers. In this time, she has not awakened the genie, for that part of me is a physical thing. That was the future and this is the past.

“You wished to go back and now we are back,” I say and I know the words are too simple, but it’s the only thing I can think to say.

“What? How? Why?” She steps away from me. As if this was my fault. As if she wasn’t the one who wished for this in the first place. And yet, how was she to know?

“I’m sorry, I…didn’t tell you before,” I say and I show her my empty palms, “I have this power. A power to,” I sigh and just say it “grant wishes.”

“What like a genie?” her voice is frantic, earsplitting. Not attractive at all, actually.

“Exactly like a genie.” I am relieved she gets it. This will make things so much easier. Maybe I can introduce her to my family-

“Turn it back!” she screeches.

“I can’t,” I choke out.

“No!” She insists, “I wish to go back. We have to go back. We have school tomorrow!”

“We don’t, actually. As you wished, the summer has started over. Don’t you remember when we stood just here and you pulled me down and kissed me?” I admit that I’m hoping these words will remind her of us. Of our love for one another.

“Why are you doing this?” She appears hurt, but can’t she see that my heart is breaking, too? In normal circumstances, a mistress throwing out her genie would be enough to kill him, but I am no longer tethered to her. The urge to provide for her every whim is a phantom limb.

“I was just doing as you asked,” I say, but I am no longer trying to convince her. It’s a closing argument.

“But now I wish for us to go back. Why can’t you just take us back?” her eyes are wide and her palms are open. She is pleading. Perhaps she does not understand. I get it. Time travel is a shock. Even for me and I knew this sort of thing was possible. Theoretically, anyway.

“The future, the summer, is in our memories,” I try to explain, “but it’s not our physical bodies. Here, in this time, we haven’t made love. You didn’t rub my…”

“Do not say lamp.”

I frown. I don’t feel compelled to follow her instructions anymore and I’m not sure that I like it. I don’t feel relieved. Just lost.

“I’m sorry it’s not what you expected, but can we make the most of it? We have the whole summer to spend together again,” I throw my arms out to show her just how wide and open our world is to us.

“I wish I had never met you,” she says as she turns and whispers through the grass and the moon arises and laughs at my heartbreak.