Stars shimmer on the restaurant's ceiling against a deep, deep black. Normally, this is my favorite feature. Tonight, though, I feel like a white dwarf, my light sputtering, lost in the overwhelming void. A comet streaks across the ceiling toward the bar. I follow it.
       Only a half-dozen of the twenty tables and booths are occupied, yet The Fourth Dimension feels crowded, compressed. Sweat springs free of my palms. I find my pockets and thrust my hands into hiding, wishing I could slip them into Rebecca's hands instead. This was her favorite venue. The bar's atmosphere has always been cozy--the beau monde clientele not so much. They'll pass judgment down their plastic-perfect noses at what I'm about to do.
       Maybe Rebecca would have too, but . . .
       I walk past two people at a booth moving in a near-blur, surrounded by a gas-fire shimmer, their voices high-pitched drones like crickets. Even with a few extra grey hairs or a new wrinkle, acceleration is addictive; the privacy it offers is precious.
       I round a table of three on my way to the bar. Two men--father and son--sit with a young woman, all moving and talking in slow-motion. Plate to lips, the woman's fork takes ten full seconds. She chews like a sloth munching leaves. The turmeric and coriander aroma is enticing, but I can't stomach anything right now. I pause to listen, knowing the diners won't notice.
       The old man's words drag, his voice low and deep. "The Victorian-era catering will cost forty grand extra, but if it'll placate your mother's reception demands, it's worth the price." A dreamy smile crawls across the young woman's face while the young man's head bows like a bodhisattva. The father is rich. Money like that buys connections to extraordinary time access.
       Unobtrusive jazz plays in the background. Bartender and owner Celeste has a taste for young Duke Ellington. This tune, sometime in the late 1920s, is from a show that was never recorded. Celeste prides herself on acquiring the rarest tracks from chrono-couriers. Her epochal business permissions don't extend to personal time-travel for herself.
       None of ours do. Not the ordinaries. The citizens. No hoarding the monthly black hole harvests down here, just meager tastes of time in strictly licensed speakeasies--that's us.
       Celeste sips a green glass decanter she keeps tucked beneath a bar top as sleek as black bone. The liquid is cobalt-and-emerald, all sheen like an aurora borealis trapped in a bottle. She moves faster, voice pitching up slightly while chatting. She knows her limits, though, and stays reasonable, stays relative to her surroundings. I watch her flit between patrons, her afro bouncing, the finger of drink giving her an efficient edge. She churns out cocktails with quick-fire ease and even works her own backbar. Two seats down from me, a freckle-shot man in a chestnut corduroy sports jacket orders port with a splash of Zepp's Caesura. Celeste has a full crystal dessert glass in front of him before he can say please.
       I drop onto a leather-topped stool next to Freckles, who sips his port. The taste gives him pause. "Aged tawny?"
       "Yes," Celeste says.
       "10-year or 20?" he asks.
       "It's a 10. You want a few extra on it?" Her words are jacked up but controlled, easy to understand.
       The man nods. Celeste fiddles beneath the bar. Click. A latch releases. She pulls out a brown square bottle like an ink pot. I squint at the label--tempus fugit. Time harvested just before the event horizon. She pours a single viscous drop into the man's glass, hand steady despite the time-laced cyclone she drank trying to tear the bones from the skin of her fingers.
       The man swirls it like molasses in the liquid umber of his glass. "To your health," he says to me with a grin, then takes the drink in one slug. He sighs through it, movements slowing to near-perfect stillness, fat-lipped grin lingering like a dent in a face gone iron. A crimson hue surrounds him.
       Celeste turns to me. "Alright Charlie, what's your chronos?"
       I look her in the eyes, wondering what she sees in mine. I don't know what she sees. Not stars. Maybe a comet adrift, but no good soul.
       "Give me a Full Nova."
       Even moving in accelerated time, Celeste stops.
       A sharp inhale. Her fingertips tap a samba on the countertop. "How about a Mercurial instead? Today's special. My own recipe. Sends you off on random intervals of blips and forevers. You'll come back exactly on time, no older than you oughta."
       "No--no thanks."
       "How about an Inverse Senescence? You come out a little younger but with all your memories intact. Only works once, but I'll make it extra strong. Take the salt out of your beard."
       I shake my head. "I know what I want, and it's not memories."
       Celeste's lip twitches. I know this hurts her, but I'm hurting much worse.
       "Alright," she says quietly.
       My feet find the floor beneath the stool again. "You want me to go in the back?" A Full Nova in the common area would make an unnecessary spectacle.
       Celeste surprises me when she shakes her head. She points to a small couple's booth. "Just take the corner." I hesitate toward it, then slip into just the right spot where the indent perfectly matches my backside. My elbows settle against the table, the vibrations flickering the small oil lamp's gentle flame.
       Celeste sets to making my drink, shot glasses clinking on the bar top beside a tumbler. Her measurements and timing are exact. Deliberation infuses her every movement, each color in the glass changing to cue the next ingredient. I look for the same tempus fugit extract, but she pulls out a hinged wooden box from beneath the counter instead. The bottle inside is tiny, delicate. The liquid pours oily black, a quarter-ounce at most.
       When Celeste comes back, she stares. I break eye contact first. She's one of the only people in the city licensed to make a Full Nova. There's guilt in this. Mine, certainly. Maybe her own, too, once this is over. I feel like I should say something, but don't. She's heard enough before--90-hour job, the PhD I gave up on, Mom's tumors. And Rebecca. More than all else, Rebecca.
       Celeste sets a tulip cordial glass in front of me and walks away. I stare at the Full Nova, at the concoction about to age me fifty, or eighty, or a hundred years--whatever I have left. The liquid continues to swirl well after it should have stopped. I take a deep breath and, like the freckled man in the corduroy jacket, toss it back. Lime, sugar, bitters. I sit waiting, waiting to sadden into an old man in my seat.
       Instead, I jerk back, punched in the sternum by a temporal fist. The restaurant whirls, people accelerating into one great smear. I slam my eyes shut. Nausea explodes up and down my throat, muscles shuddering. Something jolts into place, and the acid quits racing, and I'm sitting with eyes closed. The nausea passes.
       "Hey, cupcake, you made it."
       The voice is unexpected, familiar. I open my eyes. Rebecca is in the booth across from me.
       I am remembering how to breathe.
       "You okay?" she asks. She's leaning to one side oddly. "I know what I said, and I know we haven't talked in a few days, but this is important."
       I open my mouth to beg, then catch myself.
       "I quit my job," I say. "I want my time with you. No more weekend planning sessions or overseas meetings--no more late nights. In fact, no more nights at all, Becca. Just you and me."
       A partial truth. I did quit my job, but that was after. I never actually made it to this talk. I was working on some interest-before-earnings report I don't even remember the details of.
       Rebecca smiles. "Good. That's good."
       I stare at her eyes. "You're beautiful, Becca."
       Rebecca's smile wavers. She opens her mouth, but the words, my words, the ones I've been dreaming of saying for the past seven weeks, run all over her.
       "I've been absent, Becca. More than absent. I've been a hypercritical, unbearable corporate fuck chasing an aristocrat's fantasy. I thought that if I could make enough money, I could buy a century or two together for us, maybe more."
       Her smile returns full force, making my voice catch. "You were right to put the wedding on hold," I continue. "I'm not a man worth marrying. These last three years have been hollow, and it's my fault. Rebecca, I am so utterly sorry."
       Tears skirt her dimples. "Thank you," she whispers. "That's all I've wanted, Charlie. Just to live in the moment with the man I first met. Can you be that guy again? I miss him."
       I nod.
       "We don't need eons," she says. "We just need seconds, right? Something like that." She pauses, a grimace erasing the smile from her face. "I don't feel right, Charlie," she says. "My side hurts."
       "You'll be fine," I say softly, dreading what's about to happen.
       Her eyes wander nervously, searching. "I'm pregnant," she finally says.
       "I know." The pregnancy is what's causing the aneurism in her spleen. "It's a boy." I know the fetus is male from the autopsy report.
       She shakes her head. The motion is loose, wobbly. "I think it's a girl." Her speech is starting to slur. She smiles again, but it's lopsided this time.
       I slide around the booth's curved seat and pull her in. She's turning pale from blood loss, going into hypovolemic shock. I hold her and rock gently, like when we were first dating--like I've wanted these past seven weeks since she died.
       I can smell the coconut in her hair. "I'll be better for you--for us." My words are less than a breath, constricted by the demon seizing my throat.
       "Will you drive me home, Charlie, after our drinks wear off?" she asks, eyes already closed. "I just can't stay awake."
       "Of course."
       "I love you," she says in a sigh. The sound makes my body want to collapse in on itself. Makes me want to vomit for what I am doing. I put my hand in the curls of her hair and wait.
       Her breathing slows. And then it just . . . stops. She stops.
       A keening forces itself out my throat, past teeth trying to crack under pressure. Maybe it was a scream. A river. A howl. Then my arms are empty and the room is twisting, contorting around me again. The vertigo is easier this time, the gorge already in me. I blink and Celeste sits across from me, the table between us.
       The restaurant is quiet, empty, lights dimmed and fluorescent sign off. She slides over, silent as an alcoholic quitting church, and raises a hand to touch me but doesn't. I vomit on the table top. My eyes screech. My face drips. Drips. Maybe I'm dying. Celeste watches until the swell abates, opens her mouth to speak, closes it again. She slides out of the booth. A fresh, wet towel lands in my shaky hands. I bury my face in it, scrub away the slurry, scrub away the universe. The table is already clean when I look up.
       "That--" My voice catches. I force hoarse words out. "That wasn't a Full Nova."
        Celeste shakes her head, her afro a quarter-beat behind.
       "What?"
       "Something I'm not supposed to have or know how to make." She walks to the front door, holds it open. "Go home, Charlie."
       I unfurl from the booth and navigate the maze of upturned chairs, stopping at the door to look up. New constellations glimmer across the ceiling. Or maybe they've always been there, and I've just never noticed. The stars are beautiful.
       "See you tomorrow," Celeste says.
       I nod. "See you tomorrow."