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BABY YOU LIGHT UP MY WORLD LIKE NOBODY ELSE, THE WAY THAT YOU FLIP YOUR HAIR—
I turn over in bed and poke at the snooze button on the radio alarm clock until One Direction stops vibrating through the rickety walls of our borrowed room. I try to look at Baz, but he’s burrowed under the sheets. I can smell him, though; his scent is all over me. Cedar and bergamot. Just like always.
Some blood vessel or other stings in my chest when I glance over at my bag thrown into the corner of the room. The ring I’ve had on me for eight weeks is buried under my socks and underwear, but I feel its weight burning a hole against my thigh anyway. It hasn’t stopped singing at me since I bought it.
This was supposed to be the weekend I did it. The weekend I finally asked Baz to marry me. In my head, we would already be engaged by now; I was going to do it yesterday. But I didn’t get to it fast enough, and the stupid groundhog in this stupid Pennsylvania town said he’d take an interview, and I volunteered to help just so that I wouldn’t get left behind. So now we’re here. Not engaged. And I don’t know when I’ll ever be brave enough for this again.
Baz begins to rouse when I shift on the lumpy mattress. I can just make out a grey eye peering at me through the sliver of space that frees up Baz’s face from beneath the linens. There he is. I paw at the sheets until Baz’s whole head appears out from under them, and I lay a kiss to his forehead, right at the start of his widow’s peak.
“I’m going to shower,” I say, dragging a hand through his hair as I stand. “If you’re not up by the time I get out, we’re going to be late.”
“Okay,” he hums, stretching like a lazy cat. I glance at his left hand—at his bare ring finger—and hope he doesn’t hear the way my breath catches.
…
Baz almost misses the interview. “I needed to eat!” he yelps at me when I nudge him forward, forcing him up the steps of the town hall faster. “Did you want me to drain the groundhog?”
We have one hour slotted for this interview, 6 am to 7 am, right before Phil’s 7:20 live prediction. We tumble through the main doors at 5:56. I busy myself setting the camera up while Baz makes a beeline for the man of the hour: Punxsutawney Phil, the seemingly immortal groundhog who can predict the future (or, at least, the end of winter). He’ll make a great feature for Baz and Shepard’s magazine, Mystical Miracles. I just hope he’s interesting enough to keep me awake when all I want to do is sleep this whole miserable weekend away.
I learn exactly three things during Phil’s interview: his magic power isn’t premonition as much as it is a sort of weather control — when he predicts a longer winter, he just extends it himself. He’s pretty smart for a rodent. And, most importantly, I hate the walls of this place.
Phil even makes himself wrong on purpose some years to keep suspicions low. “Why would I want more Speakers snooping around?” he sneers towards the end. I don’t get why he’d let Baz interview him if he hates mages so much, but I’m not an immortal talking groundhog, so maybe I don’t have room to talk.
The rest of the morning is a disappointing blur. Baz gets onto me while we’re at the actual Groundhog Day event in the main square. I’m supposed to be getting B-roll for the website. “Why are you focused on the other news crews?” he hisses in my ear at one point, dark eyebrows crushed over his eyes. “Focus on Phil, please.” I adjust the camera. I can’t do that right either.
“This whole weekend—” I start after Baz’s third redirect, but I cut myself off, the ring humming against my skin through the front pocket of my trousers. When Baz tilts his head at me, I shrug, backing up a half step, and pretend not to notice the hurt that darts across his face before it melts away. “Nothing. It’s nothing. I’ll do better.”
“Okay,” Baz says slowly, like I’m an easily spooked animal. Maybe I am. Maybe I always will be. “Sure. I love you.”
“Love you,” I mumble back, knowing his ears are the only ones that can pick it up.
…
“Oh, you. You’re not like the other one,” Phil says the moment I approach his cage after escaping this ridiculous town’s ridiculous celebrations. I think he means Baz—Baz who I left at a cafe a mile back because I couldn’t handle the look in his eyes anymore. “You don’t reek of magic.”
This old wound barely hurts. “I’m not. Magic.”
“No one is magic.”
“I was.”
“Whatever,” says the groundhog, waving me on. “I don’t care. Why are you here?”
There’s no one else I can say this to. No one in this town knows me, and no one has given me the time of day since we arrived anyway. Penny isn’t here, Shepard’s hanging out with some demon or another, and Baz is Baz. Might as well confess to the groundhog. Might as well have someone know who isn’t me. “I was going to propose this weekend.”
“To who? The vampiric one?”
My neck bristles. “Who told you that?”
Phil grins, showing off his teeth. “You, just now.”
The anger comes over me in a rush. I spit back, “Is that your stupid power, then? Tricking people into telling you things? Some magic you’ve got.”
Phil’s eyes flash, and I know I’ve made a mistake.
“Okay, Normal boy,” Phil says, which hurts a little, “how would you like an exclusive?”
“No, thanks,” I try to say, but the magical groundhog is already waving his paws in the air like he’s trying to pull the clouds out of the sky. I glance up, searching, but we’re still inside, so I don’t see the weather change, but I do feel the pressure shift in my head. My ears pop, my eyes blur; my nose burns. When I bring the back of my hand up to wipe at it, my skin comes back wet and red.
I find Phil’s stare again, and I swear I can make out an inhuman smirk on his stupid, magical mouth.
“I don’t control the weather,” says the groundhog, still twirling his little paws in the air like a witch stirring a cauldron. (A myth; a stereotype. Penny would be in a strop by now.) “I control the time the weather exists in. I can make this thing go on as long as I want. Hope you’re ready to stay here until you do what you came here to do.”
I try to ask him what he means, but the words are snatched out of my mouth as Phil jerks his wrists, and the world drops away from me.
…
BABY YOU LIGHT UP MY WORLD LIKE NOBODY ELSE—
I turn over in bed, slamming my hand down onto the radio until it stops singing at me. I’m not daft enough to think that was a dream—there’s a phantom burn in my nose like I’ve just stopped a bleed.
The groundhog and the small-town festivities are gone, and the clock tells me it’s the arse-crack of dawn again. My mobile confirms it. Same date, same song, same ring chirping to me from my unpacked bag across the room — this is not good.
“Darling?” Baz asks blearily when I shoot to my feet and shove on my boots. His hair fans out around his head like a dark halo, and I stop to kiss him at his widow’s peak just like I did the day before. If Phil has messed with time, I want this to be one of the things that stays the same. That I make time for Baz. That I give in to him.
“Sorry, babe,” I say quickly, slipping out of the door. “I’ll be back!”
Then I run.
“What did you mean?” I ask the groundhog when I come storming through his town hall. “About doing what I came here to do?”
“Oh, that.” If groundhogs can shrug, I think he does. “You’re a smart chap, right? Figure it out.”
I’d be smoking by now if I still had my magic. I clench my fists together and tongue at my front teeth, just to have something to do with the tingling in my body. “No. This wasn’t supposed to be—this was supposed to be a good weekend.”
Phil peers at me, blinking his eyes rapidly. Cute bastard. “Who says it won’t be? You have all the time in the world to get it right.”
I grunt and stomp my foot, then do it again when Phil doesn’t say anything else. Eventually, he sighs. His whole small body seems to deflate with the motion.
“In order to get out of the loop,” he says calmly, “you just have to do the thing you meant to do.”
“Which is what?” I ask, but the bloody floor’s opened up again, and I tumble through it a second time.
…
BABY YOU LIGHT UP MY WORLD LIKE NOBODY ELSE, THE WAY THAT YOU FLIP YOUR HAIR GETS M—
“A time loop.”
“Yeah.”
“Like a real one?”
“What do you mean, like a real one?”
“Well—”
“Your immortal groundhog cursed me.”
“Simon—”
“He said I have to do the thing I meant to do, whatever in bloody hell that means.”
“Okay, then—”
“You believe me. Right?”
“Of course I believe you.”
…
“I think his magic works on you because you don’t have any.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s kind of like—it’s kind of like you, actually.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like the Humdrum.”
“Blleeuuugghhhhh.”
“Not exactly like it, you dramatic numpty. I just mean—a loop is like a circle, and a circle is like a hole.”
…
We spend all day trying different spells. (Baz does. I just stand.) Nothing feels like it works; there’s no static or sparks, no fog or glitter.
Apparently, the floor only swallows me like that when Phil wants it to. This loop’s ending is dull: I watch from the corner of the bed as the time flips all the way to 11:59, and then I wake up tucked into Baz’s side, listening to One Direction blare at me from the side table. Right back where I always start.
…
BABY YOU LIGHT UP MY—
This time, I go along with the interview. I get Baz up on time. I film it. I glare at Phil, and he winks back.
By the time the interview is done and we’ve got the footage we need of the actual ceremony, I’m dead tired, and I just want to lay down. I pull Baz against the side of a building and tell him the same stuff I told him last time. I try to, anyway—this loop, there’s a freak blizzard that separates us when we try to walk back to the hotel, and my wings start to ache. I know it’s that damned groundhog’s fault, but I can’t be arsed to go back and interrogate him.
When I arrive at our hotel room, another hour has passed, and we just wind up doing the same things that already didn’t work. I’m too tired to argue with Baz about spells I haven’t touched with a wand since third year. I fall asleep on top of the covers. I wake up under them.
…
BABY YOU LIGHT UP MY WORLD LIKE NOBODY ELSE, THE WAY THAT YOU—
I slam the alarm so hard that my hand smarts. I stare at the ceiling for a minute before rolling over to kiss Baz on the forehead. It doesn’t ever feel like a real day until I do that, although in this case I don’t know if it counts as a real day anyway.
I can’t do this again. I’m stuck here in this fucking town with a name I can’t spell, and if I have to watch this fucking groundhog interview again, I might explode. I’m never going to get out of this loop. Okay, I actually probably will, because I’m dating the cleverest man alive, and I’m sure he’ll figure it out with me one of these days. One of… this day? But for now, I might as well see what else I can do with my time.
“Baz. Don’t forget your interview. I love you.”
He groans at me sleepily and pulls the covers over his head as I grab my coat, shove my feet into my shoes, and slip out of the door.
…
I think about trying to see how the day would pan out if I just walked around in my skivvies, but about ten steps outside of our room I realize that would probably be some kind of criminal offense, so I turn around and go back to the room to get dressed.
…
“Have you ever had deja vu, Agatha?”
There’s a pause over the phone. “Simon, I can’t really talk right now. I’m late to meet Niamh.”
“I’m stuck in a time loop in rural America. What should I do today?”
Another pause. “How far are you from New York City?”
…
New York City is a lot bigger than I expected. And this was a very expensive Uber ride. How mad would Agatha be if I Venmo requested her?
…
I spend the next 30 or so days trying to determine the optimal way to wake Baz up. This just feels like good information to have, in case we ever actually do break out of here and, you know, get married. Most of the optimal ways involve my mouth and very few clothes.
…
BABY YOU LIGHT UP MY WORLD LIKE NOBODY ELSE, THE WAY THAT YOU FLIP YOUR HAIR—
I slam my hand on the alarm clock to turn it off. The mattress has not gotten any more comfortable. I roll over and look at Baz, who has the covers pulled up over his face. I sigh and tug them down.
“Don’t forget your interview,” I tell him, half-hearted. He mumbles something in return and pulls the covers back up. I can’t find it in me to fight him. What does it matter if he misses his interview? He can just do it tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. Because apparently we are never getting out of fucking Pennsylvania.
Eventually he stretches and pokes his head out from under the covers.
“What time is it?”
I shrug.
He frowns at me and turns over to look at his phone.
“Great snakes, Simon, it’s nearly seven! How long have you been up?”
I don’t bother responding, as he’s already jumped out of bed and is hurrying around the room, trying to pull on his trousers and comb out his hair at the same time. He sort of succeeds, but gets stumped when he realizes he put his trousers on backward. He shimmies out of them and pulls them on right.
It’s not until he’s buttoning up his shirt and checking his hair in the mirror that he seems to notice I haven’t moved.
“Simon, come on, we’re going to miss him completely!”
I shrug, but I’m not sure he sees it because he’s glancing down anxiously at his watch.
He looks up at me again. “Simon?”
“Go on,” I tell him. “I’ll be here.”
He takes a step toward the door, then stops and turns around. His face is steely.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Go do your interview.”
He huffs, and his nostrils flare.
“Why are you being like this? Are you ill?”
This feels like a fight already, which is so pointless when he won’t even remember it in twenty-four hours. I groan and pull a pillow over my head.
“Just go.”
He doesn’t. I hear him cross the small room to the side of my bed.
“Babe,” he says, and somehow the pet name just makes me feel worse. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say from under the pillow. “Nothing matters.”
Part of me knows I’m not being fair. I can already hear him thinking back to all those months I spent lying on the sofa. This isn’t like that. Well, not really. This time I have a fucking groundhog to blame.
“Talk to me,” he says, and his voice is close, like he crouched down next to the bed.
I don’t know how to make him leave without being horrible to him, and I don’t even have the energy to do that.
Without moving the pillow, I say, “I’m stuck in a time loop, okay? So nothing matters.”
He’s quiet for a minute.
“As in, a metaphorical time loop? A cyclical feeling, like you’re not making any progress?”
I sigh.
“No, a literal time loop. Your precious Phil put some sort of spell on me, and now I’m cursed to live this day one million times or however long it is until he’s decided I’ve learned my lesson, or whatever. Fuck if I know.”
This was so stupid. Baz was never going to believe me. Why had we never come up with a secret code to let the other know we were in a time loop? We should do that as soon as we get home. If we ever get home.
“Okay…” Baz says. “Well, I suppose that’s not entirely impossible, given the nature of Phil’s magic.”
Wait, he believes me?
I pull the pillow away. Baz’s face is just inches from mine, and his perfect dark eyebrows are nearly touching with how hard he’s frowning.
“Why didn’t you tell me this to begin with? We could have already been working on a solution.”
I groan again and retreat to my pillow cave. “We’ve already done that. Nothing worked. We couldn’t figure it out.”
He hmphs.
“Fine,” he says. “Then I’ll just have to join you.”
I think he means coming back to bed, which sounds fine by me, but instead he pulls the pillow and covers back and yanks me up out of bed.
“Hey!”
“Get dressed,” he says. “We’re going to the Punxsutawney Library. And I’m calling Penny.”
…
An hour later, Baz has cast Time after time to put himself into my time loop. It seems like a terrible idea to me - what if we’re just both stuck in here forever? But at the same time, some selfish part of me is excited about the idea of a Baz who actually might actually remember all of this tomorrow. No one tells you how fucking lonely a time loop is.
We spend the rest of the day researching, the interview with the stupid magical groundhog all but forgotten. The incredibly blond and short librarian pulled a face when we mentioned time magic. He was lounging behind the desk with his feet in a chair, tossing what looked like a lacrosse ball with one hand and reading what looked like Twilight, of all things.
“Time magic?” the librarian said. “Is one of you stuck in a time loop?”
I frowned at him. “How’d you know that? Are you in cahoots with that groundhog?”
He’d given me a look that could have melted steel if I cared, which I didn’t. My hand went instinctively for my sword, and he clocked the motion and raised an eyebrow, which glinted with a little silver piercing I hadn’t noticed at first.
“You’re supposed to go back to the start,” he said. “Right your wrongs, yadda yadda.”
He turned back to his book as if he was going to ignore us.
Baz wasn’t going to take that, though. He planted his hands on the checkout desk and leaned over it to bare his teeth at the guy. I thought that was a little far, until I saw a flash of silver and suddenly the guy had a knife in his hand. Who wears knives to work in a library?
Anyway, I pulled Baz away and we found the section we were looking for on our own. They weren’t books on magic, per se, seeing as how Punxsutawney is a Normal town, but they were fantasy, so probably some of it was true.
Now, three days later, Baz has found a spell he could use to break the loop, which is nice, but it only works on him, which is not so nice.
He’s left me behind twice now – he didn’t try the loop-breaking spell until day two, to make sure that getting himself into the loop worked, which it did. And so both mornings since, I’ve had to debrief him and drag him to the library, which is really the fastest way to make him believe that he’s done all this before, because he knows I would never go to the library on my own.
He decides not to try casting the reversal spell today. We spend the day in the library, working until the librarian (who despite his threats barely comes up to Baz’s shoulder, so I think we could take him) comes to kick us out. We grab dinner and go back to our room. I shuck my clothes and leave them on the floor even though it annoys Baz, because it’ll all be back in place tomorrow – one benefit of a time loop, I suppose.
We crawl into bed and just l on our sides looking at each other for a while.
“I’ve missed you,” I tell him. “Time loops suck.”
He burrows into my chest so I can wrap my arms around him. I do, and I bury my face in his hair, which smells nice.
“We’ll figure it out,” he says.
I believe him; I have to. I sigh and kiss his forehead. “And then we can go home?”
He tilts his head up so he can kiss me on the mouth. “And then we can go home.”
…
BABY YOU—
I knock the clock radio to the ground by accident trying to turn off the alarm, and somehow the blasted thing is still going. When I’m out of this time loop, the first thing I’m doing is running the radio over with the rental car so that it’s gone for good. I vibe with 1D as much as the next bloke, but everyone has their limits, and I reached mine dozens of loops ago.
Baz and I spend another day in the library under the watchful glare of the little librarian guy. But his vicious glares aren’t enough to spook an answer out of any of these books, despite Baz’s best efforts to coax them out.
“I’m absolutely certain that it has to be related to Sir Ivan’s Theory of Magickal Cause and Effect,” Baz is saying. It’s a bit muffled, because I have my head down on my arms and my wings tucked in close. “If Phil has tied the loop to your completion of whatever task, then all we have to do is find a spell that tricks the loop into thinking you’ve done it already.”
I’m only half-listening. At some point, Baz must notice that I’m either not answering or just going “uh-huh” over and over, because I feel him gently thwack the top of my head with a book. “Ow! What the fuck?”
“You’re sulking,” Baz says.
“I am not—“
He raises a single eyebrow.
“—okay, I am, but can you blame me?”
Baz huffs, like he wants to say “yes, I can,” but is choosing to be benevolent and not answer that. Instead he goes, “All right then. I was getting a bit peckish anyway—let’s have a change of scenery.”
I grumble something or another when he drapes my big stupid coat over my wings to get us past the librarian, who has that funky lacrosse ball again and looks like if I twitch incorrectly he’ll fastball it toward my skull. We end up at a nearby café, tucked away in a little corner.
It’s not the first time we’ve been here—it’s the same few people as there always is, and the same oddly homoerotic firefighter show on the telly, and the same coffee and lemon pound cake that Baz plonks onto the table in front of me when he comes to join me with his own cuppa. “Perhaps we’ve been going about this wrong,” he says.
I nibble at the cake. It’s good, though nothing like Gran’s. Though now I’m thinking about Gran, and the day she dragged me shopping for a “proper ring to propose with, really, Simon!”, and the ring that’s not getting any use because I’m stuck in godawful Pennsylvania being tormented by a horrible groundhog instead. “What do you mean?” I ask, the cake making it sound more like “Wodduyamin?”
“We’ve been trying to find a magickal solution,” he says. “And while I’m still quite determined to find it, maybe we need to change gears. Figure out what the thing you’re supposed to do is.”
I groan. “I’m telling you, I have no fucking clue.”
“Come on, humor me.”
“Seriously!” I run my hands through my hair, I’m sure making my curls look deranged, but that feels fitting. “I didn’t even plan to do anything here. I didn’t even want to come.”
Baz frowns, and I realize what I just let slip. “Then why did you?” he asks lowly.
“Baz, come on, that’s not what I meant.”
“Then what do you mean?”
Maybe it’s the cake reminding me about Gran, or maybe it’s the couple over there looking goofy in love that looks like those two blokes from the new Star Wars films (which is now making me think about Ewan McGregor in the other Star Wars films, and goddammit, there’s another to add to the list of “how did I not know I was queer sooner,” and—FOCUS, SIMON) or maybe it’s just Baz, Baz, Baz, and before I can think better of it I’m saying, “Because I was going to propose to you this weekend, you wanker, except then you were going to America again and after that we had plans already and then it’s your birthday and I wasn’t going to be that guy who proposes on your birthday like an idiot, and—“
Baz has to shut me up by kissing me, which is honestly not at all a bad way to be shut up. “You absolute moron,” he says, and his voice has gone all gooey soft. “Propose?”
“Yeah,” I reply, proper embarrassed now. “Sorry.”
He laughs and kisses me again. “Don’t apologize, just do it properly.”
“I don’t even have the ring on me. It’s back at the hotel.”
Baz stands up and practically hauls me out of my seat behind him, I swear using his vampire strength despite being in a crowded café full of Normals. “Well then,” he says, “back we go.”
And so back we go.
It’s so dumb. It’s not at all how I wanted this to go. I had plans, you know? I had a whole day scheduled out to make it really special. It’s Baz. He deserves the most special proposal in the whole goddamn world. Not a blurted-out admission of guilt in a tiny American town I’d never heard of before this trip.
But when we’re back inside, and I pull out the ring and get down on one knee, Baz looks like I’ve just handed him the key to his wildest dreams. So maybe it did all work out.
When we eventually get around to going to sleep that night, I’m not even thinking about the loop. All I can think is, I can’t believe he said yes.
…
I wake up when the sun shining through the window gets uncomfortably warm on my skin. Baz is curled up behind me, a hand draped across my middle, adding to the heat. His hand twitches when I wriggle a bit, and the morning light glints off his ring in a way that makes my heart skip a beat.
Maybe the punch-drunk happiness and love for Baz that courses through me makes me stupid, but it takes me entirely too long to realize that we shouldn’t still be sleeping. The alarm — BABY YOU LIGHT UP MY WORLD LIKE NOBODY ELSE — should have gone off hours ago.
I bolt up in bed. “Oh my fucking god.”
The silent clock radio reads 9:03 AM, February 3rd.
Next to me, looking absolutely pathetic with his bed head and sleepy eyes, Baz grumbles, “What?”
“THAT FUCKING GROUNDHOG.”
Heedless of my rage, Baz turns over to go back to sleep. “Love, please don’t murder the magic groundhog. We don’t need to deal with that before the wedding.”
I hate that he has a point.
…
“I’m sorry again that you missed your interview,” I tell Baz as we finally, finally make it back to our flat.
“It’s fine.” He waves his hand like it’s not his concern, as if we literally didn’t just fly internationally to the country that is in and of itself his worst nemesis to perform a single task that didn’t even get done. “Shep was saying that, given the circumstances, perhaps Phil’s story is a better fit for a different magazine he knows.”
“Still,” I say. We get our stuff inside and pull the door shut behind us, taking a deep breath of home. “Kind of a wasted trip.”
Baz gives me a look. “Well, I wouldn’t say that. I did come back with a fiancé.”
Fuck, but I love the sound of that coming out of his mouth.
“Guess you did,” I tell him, and this is dumb, why are we just standing here? I pull him close, my wings finally unfurling and wrapping around us both. “Fiancé.”
“But if you really wanted to make it up to me…” Baz goes on, giving me a very familiar look that sets a fire ablaze in my chest. “I have a few ideas.”
I laugh, and follow him to bed.