Twenty-four times.

It's not the longest day I've ever had but it's enough to have me tired and weary for the next day. Everyone in the group must know, and then again, they can't possibly know, and the disparity between these things is cause alone for a kind of seizure. I run a few fingers together as if to start a fire out of my flesh, and I end up staring at the web of pink flesh between the digits as we enter the next town. These days it feels like we're just bouncing between them, and make no mistake, I'm glad to be out of the last one, but going to another one makes me want to throw up. I can see the sun fall between the buildings, its yellow fingers tenderly grasping everything as it uses them to make its descent, and I feel my muscles moving out of routine.

Dylan has his hand on my shoulder. The conversation between him and Kali, which is about something mundane-- Mary, probably-- drones on around me, their voices like a warm blanket. I feel Dylan's grip tighten and lean into it.

"You should be getting more sleep," Dylan says, tenderly, and I murmur quiet assent.

"He slept through all last night and then took the girls out in the morning," Kali says, her ice-blue eyes fixed on me. They have a way of flaring up when she's enraged for some reason or another, although I couldn't care less about what I've done this time. Her lips aren't twitching, her nose isn't drawn back, therefore, she's not about to go Veritas or blast someone, and if no one's being overtly dangerous, I don't need to be worried about them.

Apathy holds me like ivy. It binds the streets together until they are teeth in a mouth, their edges touching, and then all the buildings blur together. Dylan speaks with Angel quickly, winking all the while. I can see his long lashes even in my delirium-- they're copper, and they have the same beauty as a thin wire might, glistening in the light. I imagine having such a wire around my neck and feel guilty as much as I feel empty. I think he's trying to help but I can't figure out what to say to assure him that I don't need it.

Dylan and I are on a different street, alone.

"Dylan," I complain.

"Relax, it's just going to be a few minutes," he smirks, showing the extended canines that have always bothered me. I touch his mouth to poke them back in, and drag my hand up to where his horns would be. They're still there, just covered by his jungle of unruly wavy hair.

"You're going to get us killed one of these days," I mutter. People have to be, must be watching on the streets, but we're in a shopping center in a small town. It's more likely that the only people watching us are the others, probably behind a dumpster or something equally befitting of our collective character.

Adaline's watery eyes are two moons in the back of my mind, still watching as the darkness creeps from them, becoming thousands of reaching hands that coalesce into antlers. The whole world gets very bright with the effort of my labored breathing and I cover this up as delicately as possible, stumbling. Dylan pauses, and I see him as much a fox as a human, ears tilted my way and hair ruffling slightly in the dry winds.

"I'm sorry. We've been walking since we woke up and I'm exhausted," I lie. It's hardly the hardest day we've ever had, far from it, but it's been enough of a strenuous, continuous walk, given that no one seemed to want to hunt, so we just kept walking. Mary's been cold since we left. Angel is between the girls again, which is troubling, even if Adaline is better, because I'm over here expecting, waiting on a relapse.

It's fine. I can fix it.

"We're humans," Dylan says, flashing fixed teeth. "You're my..."

People get finicky when we say that we're in love.

"We're friends," I say.

Dylan exhales. It's a compromise. With the same glimmer in his eyes that makes me want to tear down stars for him, he suggests, weakly, "Friends with benefits?"

"What benefits?" I ask.

"Oh, I'd love to tell you all about benefits." His face cuts open as if someone had torn it asunder with a knife.

Dylan's usually safe, I remind myself as the metaphor raises every hair on my arms. Kali's massive coiled body in the burning building reminds me otherwise. I've seen those teeth close around his neck, and I was less than happy to see her dozens of mornings ago. My face twitches at the edge, looking around, seeing no one, and reclining back into the lie. "I guess you'll have to catch me up as I walk," I croak.

Dylan has my arm. We take the city, entering the first store we find, which turns out to be a photo shop that looks about as alive as the dry, dusty ground outside the town. Dylan pretends to examine the photos on the wall, nodding intently, and he says, finally, "We should buy a camera sometime."

"Alex takes photos," I say, hoping I'm pronouncing the strange digital terminology correctly. "Dylan, you know we uh..."

Dylan practically rolls his head back, lazily. His face is a mask of smug self-assurance.

"There has to be somewhere more practical we can go to loiter," I say.

"Alright. Keep it real." Dylan flashes what I hope is a friendly, non-provocative gesture at the bored man at the counter, whose eyes are almost closed and teeming with red.

"Dylan," I say as we exit.

His smile is unfaltering. "You pick next, then, if you're so good at this."

Trying way too hard. He's nervous, but I can't let him know that. "I want... to go back to the others." The dusk sky pours out all its color like a pierced egg, the sunset extending far across the horizon. The soft hue of dusk is a good look for Dylan, but I'm too busy to appreciate anything about it, my stomach twisting into a snake inside of me.

"Come on," Dylan says. "Come on."

"Is there a cover up you're not telling me about?" I ask.

"Er, no. I wouldn't collaborate with them against you," Dylan's voice softens, "You know that."

"What's your motive?"

"We're humans. No motives. Only the ephemeral push of the wind as it guides us through short, pedestrian lives." Dylan's arm seizes my shoulder. I put my hand to my face and knead my forehead. He looks dead serious, which is the most obnoxious part of the charade. "What store, Red?"

I point blindly. "There we go. That one."

"Antiques. That's a little extra," Dylan says, slapping my backside. "I like that in a man."

"'Friends' do not slap each other in public," I remind Dylan, "Your charade is poor and you should be embarrassed."

"Because you're so good at pretending to be human," he cackles back. Middle of a public place.

I push him forwards and we enter the 'antiques' store, which is filled with old human artifacts that no other humans seem to be interested in. I have never seen anyone enter one of these shops in my life. The air is rich with the smell of rotting wood and carpeting, the former so distinct from its wild counterpart as to be its own, mystical entity. "Been a while since we were in one of these."

Dylan nods, quiet as a predator before the hunt.

We wander the store in silence, becoming lost in backalleys. There's only the steady tick of clocks and the creak of our own feet against the ground. Everything else becomes lost to the outside world, the cars receding, pedestrian noise vanishing, and even the rasping breath of the man half-asleep at the counter becoming little more than background noise.

Dylan picks up a delicate glass figurine of a woman with wings. She reaches a hand skywards, a serene expression gracing her face. "Look," he whispers, "Mary."

"That's what you're breaking the silence for?" I ask.

Dylan puts the strange winged human down. He tilts his head in my general direction, like an animal, and my heart catches. I take in a long breath, which fills me so thoroughly that I think I might choke. He smiles again.

"You don't have to keep doing this," I say. "I'm happy."

"Two humans," Dylan says.

My eye twitches.

We turn the corner into the far back, greatest wilds of the antique store, and it stares us in the face, clanging with anger as we usurp its domain. I stare up at the clock, whose ornate, carved face stares back. I watch the hands tick forwards, knowing that its knowledge is far past me, and feel my heart stop dead in my throat.

"We were right here," Dylan continues. "It was four years ago, to the day. You were having an episode and I slammed you against the wall and--" He leans over and I fall against the clock, his lips locked with mine, his hand holding my chin upwards. It's as good as the first time and every subsequent time, and I want his air, his clothes, all of him. It's taking all my self-control not to ask him to go further and I don't know what further is for humans. Hilarious. We are an absolute breach of alibi.

I express this to him.

"Red," Dylan rolls his eyes. "So, as ourselves, and as two humans, being friends with benefits in the back of an antique store... dinner?"

I pause. We can't have been gone that long but Mary gets up to the worst in cities. Adaline isn't stable yet. Elle has been sneaking out and attempting to make contact with humans, which she'd been hiding for the whole group for too long for me to restart over. Kali is Kali. (Nothing ever really becomes of that but a personal rule of mine is never to take my eyes off her, because when she flies off the handle, things get bad.) All of these notions are truer than the air around us, press down on me with a ferocity greater than that which chains me to the earth, and I offer only, "I don't know if I can..."

"Red, please. For me?" Dylan's voice is soft as the sea on the East Coast. It dawns on me how much I miss home, now, even though I've never considered it anything of the sort.

The red sun setting heavy in my heart, I nod. "There's probably nothing around here."

Dylan puts a hand against the back of the antique store, effectively trapping me. "Guess I could always eat you."

"Dylan." I put a finger to his nose and he smiles wickedly.

The both of us take the long way around the single employee, whose snores convey he might be asleep. We wander out towards the highway that cuts the middle of what can loosely be called a 'town', if not a bypass on the way to nowhere, and stand beneath the streetlights as the stars rise and Dylan locates a restaurant. It's slim pickings, mainly consisting of the chains where they give you the food in five minutes, and I figure when Dylan says dinner, he means Dinner.

Dinner so happens to be a dusty store that reminds me of the antique store upon entry, with possibly four distinct tables of customers inside. Dylan sits down there like he belongs, bobbing his head to the harsh, whiny music they have in there (I haven't the slightest why this instrument, accompanied by no words, is considered pleasurable to human ears). A woman rushes by and hands us two papers. I glance at them, resenting myself for everything, and say, "Nice job."

"Follow my lead," whispers Dylan. He pretends to examine the menu and I do as well, occasionally pausing to consider an option. Dylan looks me in the face. "That looks good."

"What?" I ask.

Dylan's stare only intensifies. "That."

I resist the urge to throw the saltshaker in his face. This is Dylan: a lot of resisting silly impulses that his childish behavior tends to provoke in me. The woman comes around again, thankfully, and Dylan asks, "What's the house special?"

"Spaghetti with shrimp and a light dressing, accompanied by our house salad," the woman says. She's not looking at his eyes but rather the large patches of discoloration across his face, along with our mismatched outfits. She looks like she might be viewing roadkill instead of people. We are doing a bad job of passing.

"Sounds good to me. Red?"

"I'll have the same." I look up to Dylan, who flashes me a smile. It feels good to be doing this correctly.

"And water for the table."

"Why would you want to pour water on the table?" I ask.

Dylan looks at the waiter and folds his hands. "He's foreign," he explains.

"Ah," the waiter says, tracing Dylan's birthmarks with her eyes. Thankfully, she's just as soon gone, leaving us with the earsplitting music and dusk settling on the world outside. We are accompanied by two glasses of water, as soon as the waiter brings them back, and that leaves us, if I remember correctly, with way too much time.

I swirl the ice with my straw before taking one and cracking it in my teeth.

"Don't think you're supposed to do that, either," Dylan warns me.

"You need to tell me these things preemptively," I complain.

Dylan puts an elbow on the table. "Oh, sure."

The sun is good as gone. We sit in next to silence, the air warm but stagnant, and Dylan continues to make quips about the weather or our recent adventure. "I was covered in bags all day," he continues. "At some point I saw some tourists. They looked shocked, so I said, 'The department store's that way,' pointed, and ran for it. I don't think they bought it but I'm pretty sure, for what it's worth, that the joke landed. They are called department stores, right? With the clothing...?"

"Dylan, I don't know these things," I respond, still stirring the water. It reflects the table covering beneath us, which is a red and white banded pattern. "You know, if you ever have too much to carry, you can tell me. I'll go make one of the middle kids pull their weight."

Dylan bites the straw. "Just a joke."

The food comes. It's only been a million years. The spaghetti is excellent, covered in soft, crumbled cheese, and I've tried shrimp near the coast, but I'd almost forgotten them. Dylan finishes his own meal before I've taken more than five bites, and he's eying mine. I scoot closer to him, so that we're not across the table from each other, and he winds his fork through my spaghetti. He's not half good at using utensils, but if we eat with our fingers, we raise questions.

I put down my fork. "We need to go. They're doing something stupid right now. I can feel it."

"How do you know?"

I stop dead. The question rests on the table like a dead fish, mouth slack, rank, glistening in oil.

Dylan's eyes flick up, their mismatched colors boring into my own brown eyes, slurping an entire spaghetti into his mouth, and then he chews for what seems like an uncharacteristically long period of time. He pauses after swallowing. He pauses again, as if the food is stuck in his throat. "If there was something... you weren't telling me about your abilities, and I asked, you would just say so, right?"

Thousands of timelines, Dylan. Thousands of timelines, friend, lover, we've played out every scenario for us. I have admired your eyes, I've told you the truth and you've attacked me, I've told you the truth and you've been killed, I've told you the truth and you've told everyone. There is no way to tell what moment we catch on in the infinite string of possibilities. There is one commonality and that is that everything changes. My vision hazes gold with tears as I take us back before the moment, lip trembling. I need to divert the conversation.

He pauses.

"Red."

Changed script. Not good. Not good at all.

"Red."

I flick back to right before the moment.

"Red."

My breath quickens.

"Red, are..."

I can't let him finish. He can't say it.

"Red, are you..."

He's looking at my face. I must be close to sobbing.

"Don't say it," I whisper quietly. "Don't say it, please, you can't say it."

Dylan finishes, "Okay?"

I contemplate jamming the fork on the table into my hand. I don't have enough time to do something desperate and restart over it, which means that all the wounds are permanent. Instead, I let time continue in its inevitable march, knowing that everything will cascade into all the wrong places and all the wrong ways.

"I'm sorry I forgot our anniversary. That's all."

He grabs my hand beneath the table, tight. "We're not human enough to care, right?"

Dylan, I'm not human at all.

You don't deserve him.

Kali walks in. I catch her ice-blue eyes across the restaurant just as the whining instrument reaches a singular climax over the speakers. I hate myself enough to let the moment slide out from beneath us, to face her dead-on and ask, "What did they do now?"

Dylan sighs. Kali grips my hand firmly. Her fingers are so heavy that it seems she's trying to break open my hand like a blister.