The Angle We Stand On

The first time I saw the crack in the sky, I was late for a date.

It hung above the intersection like a seam someone forgot to finish stitching. A thin, silver tear running vertically through the blue. Cars drove under it. People crossed the street without looking up. A man argued into his phone about insurance deductibles. The world continued with the stubborn confidence of a place that had agreed not to notice.

I stopped on the curb and stared.

Through the crack, I could see a different sky. Darker. Star-sick. Something moved behind it, slow and tidal, like an ocean trying to remember how to be air.

My phone buzzed. A text from Iris: I’m already here. Don’t ghost me on our first real date.

I typed back: Two minutes.

The crack pulsed. The air tasted metallic. A woman brushed past me and walked straight through the silver line. For a second her body doubled, two versions misaligned, then snapped back together. She didn’t break stride.

I told myself I was tired. I told myself the city did strange things to light. I stepped under the crack and felt my bones hum, like a chord struck in a room too small to hold it.

Then I kept walking.

The café was warm and overlit. Iris sat by the window, tapping her fingers against a chipped mug. She smiled when she saw me, and the room rearranged itself around that smile. It had that effect: a gravitational pull disguised as kindness.

“You look like you saw a ghost,” she said.

“Just traffic,” I answered, sliding into the seat across from her.

Outside, the crack in the sky was visible through the glass. It had widened. No one else reacted. A barista laughed. Someone spilled sugar. The universe peeled open above them and they debated oat milk.

Iris followed my gaze. Her expression didn’t change.

“It’s getting bigger,” she said conversationally.

My heart stumbled. “You see it?”

“Of course,” she said. “It’s been there all week.”

“And you’re just… drinking coffee?”

She shrugged. “I have work in the morning.”

I laughed, a brittle sound. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not,” she said gently. “If we panicked every time reality developed a structural issue, we’d never get anything done.”

There was a tenderness in the way she said it, like she was explaining a rule to a child. I stared at her, at the ordinary curl of her hair, the freckle near her left eye. She reached across the table and took my hand.

Her skin was warm. Solid. Real.

“Breathe,” she said.

I did. The café settled back into focus. The crack was still there, but it felt… distant. A painting of a disaster rather than the thing itself.

“I’m Theo,” I said suddenly. It felt important to reintroduce myself, to anchor my name to the moment.

“I know,” Iris said, smiling. “You told me last week.”

Right. The bookstore. The accidental conversation in the philosophy aisle. The way she’d laughed at my joke about time travel and overdue fees. The world had been intact then. I was almost sure.

We talked. About work. About a movie we both pretended to like. Every few minutes, I glanced outside. The tear in the sky lengthened, a zipper coming undone. Through it, I could see stars that didn’t belong to this season. They watched me with patient interest.

Iris squeezed my hand whenever I drifted too far.

After the café, we walked. The city felt thinner, like a set built over a void. Streetlights flickered in colors I didn’t have names for. A building across the street repeated itself: the same window, the same woman watering the same plant, over and over in a vertical loop.

“Doesn’t this bother you?” I asked.

“It does,” Iris said. “But you get used to the angle of it.”

“The angle?”

“Reality tilts sometimes,” she said. “Love is what lets you stand.”

I stopped walking. “That’s a terrible metaphor.”

“It’s not a metaphor,” she said softly.

The ground rippled. The sidewalk flowed like water, and for a heartbeat I saw the city from above: a map of lights folding in on itself, streets connecting to places they had never led. Time buckled. I saw yesterday bleeding into tomorrow, strangers wearing the faces of people I hadn’t met yet.

Iris held my face in her hands.

“Look at me,” she said.

I did. The world snapped back to her eyes. Gray. Steady. The only fixed point.

“I’m here,” she said. “Stay with me.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” I whispered.

“You don’t have to,” she replied. “You just have to decide where to stand.”

The crack in the sky tore open.

The sound was silent and enormous. The air peeled away. Above us, the other side spilled through: a cathedral of stars and dark geometry, shapes that bent around the idea of direction. The city’s buildings stretched toward it like melted wax.

People kept walking. A couple argued about dinner. A bus passed through a wall and reassembled itself. No one screamed.

I did.

Iris pulled me into her arms. The embrace was fierce, human. I buried my face in her shoulder and inhaled the scent of soap and sweat and something unmistakably alive.

“This isn’t real,” I said into her skin.

She laughed softly. “Of course it is.”

“It can’t be.”

She leaned back and cupped my jaw. “Theo. Reality isn’t a promise. It’s a habit.”

The sky poured down. Stars fell like rain and dissolved on contact with the pavement. Where they landed, the ground sprouted impossible flowers: blossoms that opened into small, echoing rooms. I saw myself inside one, older, reaching for someone I couldn’t quite see.

“I’ve seen this before,” Iris murmured.

“When?”

“In another version,” she said. “We always end up here.”

A cold thread slipped through my chest. “End up where?”

“At the place where you choose,” she said simply.

“Choose what?”

“Whether you love me,” she answered.

The horror of it wasn’t the sky. It was the calm certainty in her voice.

“This is about us?” I asked, incredulous.

“It’s always about us,” she said. “Time and space just dress up for the occasion.”

The city folded again. I saw us in fragments: kissing in a kitchen that hadn’t been built yet. Fighting in a room with no walls. Growing old on a bench that floated between planets. Each vision tugged at me, sweet and unbearable.

“And if I don’t choose?” I asked.

She smiled sadly. “Then we try again. Another crack. Another city. Another you, pretending not to notice.”

The stars pressed closer. I felt them in my teeth, a vibration that wanted to shake me loose from myself. I could step into them. I could dissolve into the geometry and escape the terrible weight of being one person loving another in a world that wouldn’t hold still.

Iris’s hands tightened on my arms.

“Stay,” she said.

The word was a plea. A command. A promise of pain and laughter and mornings that smelled like coffee instead of cosmic dust.

“I’m scared,” I admitted.

“Good,” she said. “That means it matters.”

The sky roared. The crack widened until it was everything. The city thinned to a sketch. There was only her face, luminous against the collapse.

I thought about the versions of me reaching through time, always arriving at this moment. I thought about the quiet the stars offered: a love without friction, without gravity.

I chose the weight.

I kissed her.

The universe lurched. The geometry recoiled. The stars screamed in a language that tasted like regret. The crack shuddered, shrinking around us. The city slammed back into place with a sound like a door closing.

We stood on an ordinary sidewalk. Streetlights hummed their familiar yellow. A car honked. Someone laughed too loudly.

The sky was seamless.

I pulled back, breathless. “Did we—”

She pressed a finger to my lips. “Don’t look for proof,” she said. “It hates being checked.”

I laughed, shaky and alive. “That was… a lot for a first date.”

She grinned. “Second,” she corrected. “You still owe me dinner from the first timeline.”

I looked up at the intact sky. It watched me with practiced innocence.

“You think it’s over?” I asked.

Iris slipped her hand into mine. Her grip was warm, stubborn.

“It’s never over,” she said. “That’s the point.”

We started walking. The city breathed around us, pretending to be stable. I felt the faint tremor of something vast shifting just out of sight, waiting for the next seam to split.

I held her hand tighter and let the world tilt, trusting the angle of her beside me, the horror and the romance braided so tightly I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. And for now—just now—that was enough reality to stand on.