I Love You To The Moon And Back

Spencer’s mouth is curved in absent-minded affection as he takes advantage of the opportunity to study you up close with darting eyes, entertaining your girlish flirtation, and you in turn get to admire the starlit flush of his cheeks, the way his hair falls around his face and thick eyelashes frame irises that could melt ice. You’re not entirely conscious of the huge grin that cracks open your face, but you suspect its presence when his own lips part, still smiling, like he’s maybe going to say something sweet. Or teasing. 

“You’re drunk.”

At this absolute and unarguable truth, you frown. He’s grinning now as he adjusts the thick scarf around your neck, shielding your ears and neck further from the chill that the open car door can’t block. 

“No I’m not.”

“C’mere,” he murmurs, and before you can process it he’s leaning down, so of course your eyes are going to flutter shut and of course you’re going to kiss him back. The gentle ferocity of it only has you stumbling in place a little bit, and he steadies you with hands around your waist. It’s over entirely too soon. You blink up at him, your shock and fluster betrayed by the visible huff of air dispelled as soon as he pulls away. He’s smiling even wider now. Vindicated. Eyes sparkling. “Gin? Wow. You are drunk.”

It takes you a moment longer than it usually would to decipher how he figured this out. 

“So you just kissed me to prove your theory right?”

The sparkling satisfaction from his indictment softens around his eyes. 

“I knew you were drunk when you almost fell down the stairs a minute ago. The kiss was purely selfish.”

“It’s icy,” you defend, and your heart flutters as he comes in for another kiss. It’s soft and still shockingly deep for being on the street, where anyone could see—although everyone smart is inside, and anyone else is too drunk to care that his mouth is open against yours and the heat of it is translating deep in your stomach. You’re dizzy by the time he laughs quietly against you. 

“What college student is pounding gin and tonics at a frat party?”

The thick wool of his coat bunches under your searching fingers. 

“Me,” you whisper. “I was classing up the joint.”

The final kiss he presses to your lips is sweeter and half smile. “Drunk.”

The murmured accusation shouldn’t make you feel so giddy. Maybe it’s all the gin. 

“Not.”

Another little chuckle warms the tip of your nose and your lips as he breathes it out.

“So you’re good to drive us home?”

You itch to kiss him again, but instead, you respond, “One person dies every thirty nine minutes in America from drunk driving.”

“Good job. You passed.”

The praise is accompanied by a thumb rubbing at your hip through denim. He probably thought you weren’t listening when he’d spouted that particular statistic a few hours ago. 

“Do I get a gold star?”

He kisses your head. 

“We’ll see. Get in.”

On the way home, that last shot hits you. You slump down in your seat and hide your face in your hands. 

“Oh, Spencer. I’m… I’m drunk.”

You feel him glancing at you before he sets a concerned hand on your thigh. 

“You okay?”

Morosely you nod. 

“Yeah. I took a shot with this… Delta Phi Epsilon guy, right before you got there. I wasn’t gonna, but he was like, no, you have to! And now I realize that was dumb.”

Spencer’s hand finds the back of your head, stroking your hair. 

“Do you know what I’m going to say about frat boys pressuring you to drink?”

“It wasn’t like that. He was really nice.”

“I’m sure he was,” Spencer says dryly. “Lots of men become really nice when they think they might have something to gain.”

“I thought he was gay!” You laugh, uncovering your face. “Sorry, dad. I won’t drink alcohol or talk to boys anymore.”

Spencer makes a face and you know you’ve successfully traded pounds of flesh. 

“If you call me dad again I’m making you take an abnormal psych class.”

You give him a lazy smile which he only takes his eyes off the road for a few seconds to admire. 

“I’d take abnormal psych if you were my professor.”

That perpetual upturn at the corners of his perfect mouth flickers wider. 

“Wow. Does gin make you sexually frustrated?”

“It makes me lazy. The professor-student thing is really low hanging fruit.”

“Yeah, it is. You know I’ll expect better material from you once you’ve sobered up.”

You sigh and let your head loll to the front again, studying the tunneling road through the windshield. A few flakes slash the headlights. Your mind wanders. You don’t bother reeling it in. 

“I’m really glad I’m not your student. I’d have the worst crush on you.”

Spencer casts you another side-long glance before adjusting the rear-view mirror. 

“You don’t have a crush on me now?”

“Of course I do. But you like me back. If I was your student you’d never look at me like that. I would just have to pine after you and fall in deep unrequited love like all your other female students.”

He hums skeptically. 

“I don’t know what I’d do. I can’t imagine not being in love with you.”

“There are universes where you’re not. There are infinite realities where I am your student and you don’t like me back and you’re dating other girls who aren’t me and you’re saying this exact stuff to them.”

“True. There are also infinite realities where I find you and I fall in love with you.” Spencer reaches over again, taking your hand and settling them, joined, in your lap. “For each trillionth of a billionth of a second of the life I’ve lived thus far, there are infinite universes which exist solely so I can fall in love with you in a new way. Over and over again. There’s not a choice I could make in any timeline, or in any universe, that doesn’t lead an infinite number of me’s to an infinite number of you’s.” 

The engine hums. The tires roll. 

Other than that—it’s dead silent. 

Because how could he ever expect anyone to respond to that?

You slink low in your seat and bring his hand to cradle your face, warm against your cheek. 

“I hate you,” you mumble. Spencer strokes your jaw absentmindedly, not at all concerned by your dramatics. 

“You hate me? I just said I love you.”

“No, you did not. You said th—I don’t even wanna call it romantic. Romantic doesn’t—I don’t even know what that was. You can’t just say things like that, Spencer! You can’t just casually say stuff like that to me, and especially not when I’m drunk, because I’m gonna start crying!” 

The last word pitches up and perfectly illustrates your point as tears begin to roll down your cheeks—still nipped by the cold. 

Spencer quickly pulls the car off to the side of the abandoned road. 

He’s all affection as he twists to face you and take your face in his hands properly, thumbing away tears. 

“What? What’s wrong?” 

“You j-just love me so much,” you sob.

“Yes,” Spencer laughs like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I do. I love you so much. I didn’t mean to make you cry, sweetheart.”

“You—you don’t even realize, that you said the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to anyone, and you love me more than anyone’s ever loved anyone, and—and—”

You cut yourself off with another hot wave of tears and a shuddering cry. 

“Oh, my girl,” Spencer coos through an adoring little laugh as he pushes hair out of your face. “You are so drunk, baby. Come here.”

You let him undo your buckle and pull you across the console-less seat (thank you, vintage car) into his arms. For a minute or two you can hardly speak, crying into the warmth of his jacket as he holds you. 

Eventually, you manage to raise your head and pull back enough to look at him. Immediately he’s assessing you with those soft eyes, watching how you wipe away whatever tears didn’t soak into his clothing. Under his watchful gaze, you exhale a sniffing laugh. 

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.”

It’s so immediate you’re knocked off balance again. “Well—you were just being nice, and I—”

“I do love you more than anyone has ever loved anyone.”

Usually, you dislike being interrupted. 

In this instance, you’ll let it slide. 

It’s simply too earnest, too honest as his eyes dart between yours like he couldn’t contain it. Like you said it and the thought struck him right in the face—an obvious truth he hadn’t considered before. 

“In infinite universes?” You sniffle. 

“In infinite universes,” he agrees. 

Both of you notice the snow has started to come down outside. Over the course of a few silent minutes, it gets heavier and heavier—a soft hail, sheets of whispering white. 

You’ve never been afraid to break the silence with him. 

But maybe if you weren’t drunk you could keep your questions to yourself. 

“How many snowflakes are we looking at?”

Spencer hesitates, drawn from some kind of hypnosis. 

“Hard to be sure. Heavy snowfall like this could easily put us at six inches within the hour. In that case we’ve watched around point two inches fall. Visibility is probably reduced to about a quarter mile… point two inches across a square quarter mile is a hundred and seventeen thousand five hundred square feet of snow, average density of flakes at this temperature being about three kilograms per cubic foot of snow, and a snowflake weighs maybe… point zero zero zero zero zero two kilograms, so, roughly… very roughly… we’re looking at one hundred and forty two million snowflakes. That’s my best guess.”

You look up at him from where you’d been resting your head on his shoulder. 

“You’re the coolest person ever.”

He blushes. 

Tries to reply. 

Looks back out the window and huffs a nervous laugh, like you’ve flustered him. 

“Lots of people could do that. The math isn’t too complicated. It’s also probably wrong.”

A slow smile blossoms on your face. 

“You’re never wrong. So… what percentage of infinity is a hundred and forty two million?”

“Uh… undefined,” he laughs, looking back down at you. “But… in tangible terms, which is inherently contradictory because infinity is completely intangible, and actually pretty meaningless to mathematicians—more of a philosophical concept than a numerical one… it is a very small fraction. It’s nothing.”

“I don’t want philosophical,” you murmur, reaching up to graze your knuckles along his cheekbone. “I want hard numbers.”

He catches your hand and holds the tips of your fingers to his lips as he thinks, watching hundreds of millions of snowflakes falling from the wide black heavens through narrowed eyes. 

“A googol is written as a one followed by a hundred zeros, and a googolplex is a one followed by a googol of zeros. That’s the largest named number we have. It surpasses the estimated number of atoms in the universe. It’s too large to conceptualize. Mathematicians don’t really have any practical use for numbers above one trillion, but the largest number you’ll find in a dictionary and which might be formally accredited is a centillion, which is a one followed by three hundred and three zeros. It’s bigger than a googol but hardly a fraction of a googolplex. But—okay, we’re setting aside the conceptual numbers. What was your question?”

Your head spins as you laugh. 

Too much gin. Too many IQ points. 

“Infinity divided by, uh… the number of snowflakes I can see right now.”

The engine is still on—heat blows steadily, warming your arm through a coat and sweater, and whatever it can’t reach is warmed by Spencer. 

“Right. Okay. Well—to put it into perspective, with snowflakes, you have around one septillion that fall each year. That’s twenty four zeros, so… a lot. Are you with me?”

“No.”

“Great. So, a hundred and forty two million is basically infinity.”

This earns a clumsy, drunken laugh from you, and he smiles like he’d been hoping for that. 

It’s so warm in the cab of his car. It’s so warm under his gaze. 

Outside, the snow continues to fall. 

For each flake, there is a world where you and Spencer fall in love. And in the grand scheme of things, you’re not looking at very many. 

In infinite universes, you’ll find each other. For eternity.