Future wife

The girl in my bed was not my girlfriend.

That much I knew before I fully opened my eyes. The smell was wrong for one thing. Not the sharp strawberry shampoo Priya used but something warmer, like vanilla and something else underneath it. Something expensive. I kept my eyes shut and ran through the possibilities. Wrong room? No, this was my room. My Metallica poster, my desk buried in engineering textbooks, my window with the crack in the corner from the cricket ball I hit last summer.

So. Wrong girl in the right bed.

I turned my head slow, like moving through water. The morning light came gray through the curtain, and there she was, lying on her side facing me, one arm tucked under the pillow, watching me with eyes the color of bottle glass. Green. Actual green, not the muddy hazel you see on most people. Her hair spilled across my pillow in waves, auburn, too red to be natural but too perfect to be fake. A small dark mole sat just below her left eye like someone had placed it there on purpose.

She smiled when she saw I was awake. Not a nervous smile. Not a stranger-in-your-bed smile. A smile like she'd been waiting for me to catch up.

"Good morning, Saikat."

I sat up fast. Too fast. The room tilted and I grabbed the edge of the mattress.

"How do you know my name?"

"You told me." She stretched, lazy, unhurried, and the sheet slipped down her shoulder. She was wearing a black slip of a dress, the kind that costs more than my monthly allowance. "Well. You will tell me. You've got a few years yet."

I stared at her. My brain did what it always does when things don't make sense. It went straight to the practical. "Did we meet at a party? Did I do something stupid?"

"You do plenty of stupid things. But no. We haven't met. Not yet." She sat up and crossed her legs, and I noticed her feet were bare, her toenails painted a deep red. "I'm Sheila."

"Sheila."

"Say it again. You always say it like you're testing whether it's real."

I didn't say it again. I got out of bed and stood with my back to her, pulling on the hoodie from the floor. My heart was doing something uncomfortable, a fast shallow beat that had nothing to do with fear. Or maybe everything to do with it.

"You need to leave," I said. "My parents are downstairs. My mom makes breakfast at seven."

"It's six forty." She said it like she knew my mother's schedule better than I did. "We have twenty minutes. Plenty of time for you to ask me the real question."

I turned around. "What real question?"

"Not who I am. You already decided I'm either crazy or a dream." She tilted her head. "The real question is why I'm here."

"You're here because you broke into my house."

"I didn't break in. I arrived." She said the word like it had weight, like it meant something specific. "I'm from the future, Saikat. Your future. And before you say anything clever, I know how it sounds. I've had this conversation with you before. From my side, anyway."

I laughed. It came out wrong, too loud, and I glanced at the door. "Okay. Sure. Time traveler. That's a new one."

"You're eighteen. You're in your second year of engineering because your father told you it was the safe choice and you didn't know how to argue. You write poems at night and delete them in the morning. You've been in love exactly once, with a girl named Priya who sits two rows ahead of you in thermodynamics, and you've never told her because you're afraid she'll laugh."

The laugh died in my throat.

"You think I'm a stalker now," she said, not unkindly. "That's fair. But a stalker wouldn't know what I know. You cried at your grandfather's funeral and pretended it was allergies. You keep a list in your phone called 'things I'll say to her someday' and it's got forty-three entries. You're going to add two more before the month is out."

I sat down on the edge of the desk chair because my legs had gone unreliable. "How."

"You told me. On our third anniversary. We were drunk on cheap wine and you cried again, and you told me everything, all of it, every embarrassing detail, because you trust me." She looked at me and something in her face softened. "You're going to trust me. That's the part I'm here for."

"That doesn't make sense."

"None of it makes sense. That's the point." She stood up and walked toward me, and the dress moved with her in a way I tried very hard not to notice. She stopped a foot away. Close enough that I could smell the vanilla again. "I came back because I wanted to see you. This you. Before all the weight settled in. Before the mortgage and the arguments about whose turn it is to do the dishes. I wanted to know the boy who wrote poems and deleted them."

"You're saying you're my wife."

"I'm saying I will be." She reached out and touched the faint scar above my left eyebrow, a light fingertip, and I flinched. "You got this falling off your bike when you were nine. You told me the story so many times I could recite it. The neighbor's dog chased you and you panicked and forgot how brakes work."

I caught her wrist. Not hard. Just enough to stop her. "If you're from the future, prove it."

"Prove what? That I know you? I just did." She didn't pull away. Her pulse was steady under my fingers, and mine was not. "You want me to tell you something that hasn't happened yet. Something you couldn't possibly know."

"Yes."

She thought for a moment. Then she leaned in, close to my ear, and her breath was warm. "In three days, Priya is going to ask you to help her with the thermodynamics assignment. She'll come to your desk after class and she'll touch your arm when she asks. You'll say yes before she finishes the sentence. And you'll spend the whole night staring at the same page, thinking about her hand on your arm."

She pulled back. "That's not the future. That's next week."

"It's still the future from where you're standing."

I let go of her wrist. My hand felt cold without it.

Downstairs, my mother's voice called my name. Breakfast. The clatter of plates. Normal sounds, ordinary sounds, and here I was in my room with a woman who claimed to be my wife from a time that hadn't happened yet, telling me things about myself I'd never said out loud.

"You should go eat," Sheila said. "Your mom made parathas. You always said you missed her parathas when you moved out."

I stood there, caught between the door and her, between the life I knew and whatever this was. She sat back down on my bed, crossed her legs again, and looked at me with those impossible green eyes.

"I'll be here when you get back," she said. "I've got nowhere else to be."