Selene was perfectly willing to not interfere with her bladder’s natural inclination for frequent expulsion after copious amounts of tea, for now. She wished she’d never decided to be accommodating and let this man-baby have any of her time.

He had gotten more and more tedious and entitled the more time she spent with him, and the last two dates had been spent dodging his “subtle” advances.

Thankfully, after tonight she was going to put her foot down and go back to her comfortable solitary lifestyle. She would skip dessert here, they didn’t have any of her particular favorites anyway (he’d picked) and she’d grab some tubs of ice cream from the store on the way back, and she and her twin would commiserate about how difficult humanity could be to interact with.

And then she had a nice busy slate of patients to help over the next week. She was well on track for her usual quota of a thousand lives saved in a year, and her research had been noticed and would be spread around the world to allow others to better save lives without her direct intervention. Which was good, because she only had another month on this version of Earth before she needed to make her next jump towards home.

She got back to their table at the restaurant again and checked her phone (she really should just bring it with her next time and take longer in the bathroom).

Her thoughts: {{So my calculations are off? Really? We’ll see about that when I get back home. It’s spring cleaning again? I’m missing out on so much, I have been gone for too long, I can’t wait to get home again. Shrunk?! Leave tonight? But my patients…. I need to get there and confirm things one way or the other, I love my patients dearly but they do not come before getting back home to my dearest friends and the version of Earth that I’ve spent so much time improving.

He grabbed my wrist. He dared to physically impede me from leaving? Me? It’s ridiculously easy to get free, but that he would try that makes me lose what little respect for him I had. I don’t have time for this nonsense. }} She stormed out after giving him a piece of her mind and paying for her own food with a sizable tip, (it wasn’t the fault of the waitstaff that she hadn’t had an enjoyable experience after all) and took off for the apartment she’d been calling home for the last two years. Her twin opened the window by the fire escape for her and handed her a set of calculations.

She scrutinized them minutely, but he apparently did know how to show his work appropriately after all this time, and it checked out. A variable in the multi-dimensional paths of creation had been overlooked when she’d made her itinerary before, and this route would cut off forty years of lived experience and six months off her arrival time back home to her friends.

“Wow, this looks like a big oversight, can you show me the sim you used? I can’t believe I missed that.”

“No problem. Here, I’ll pull it up.” Golden light cascades out of his hand as he gestures and forms into patterns around the twins. “See that little one there, behind the big anchor world? It’s barely visible from behind the penumbra. That’s your missing variable.”

“Oh wow, I see it now but you’re right, I hadn’t registered it before. Thank you so much for spotting that.”

“I’ll stay behind and get your affairs in order for your patient’s sake and catch up with you later.”

“Really?!” She says in excited surprise, looking up at him.

“Yeah, your neighbor, Sophie, came around asking if we had baking powder and we hit it off, so I want to stay a while and get to know her better”

“So much for not thinking with your dick”