Page 9 of Mister McStudmuffin

“My arm is real,” he says.

I roll my eyes at him. “You know what I mean.”

He takes a sip of his whiskey, then nods towards my right arm. Where my own Terminator tattoo sits. “You want me to talk to Zane? See if he can come up with something this cool for you?”

I give him the side-eye. “Absolutely not!”

“What?” He almost looks offended.

“Because your sleeve is a dude tattoo.”

He quirks an eyebrow. “A dude tattoo? What does that even mean?”

“It’s a tattoo that looks great on a guy but would look…” I trail off, trying to think of a not-sexist way to say this. “Just not great on a straight woman.”

He laughs. “You’re saying tattoos have a sexual identity.”

“No! I’m just saying that some tattoos look great on men and…” I scrunch up my nose, imagining the hard “metal” lines of his tattoo on my skin. “…not great on a woman.” He looks about to protest, but I hold up a hand to cut him off. “Trust me on this. I looked long and hard for a Terminator themed tattoo that would look good on me and the best I could come up with was a quote.”

“Long and hard, huh?”

His voice is pitched low and those words take on an intimacy that just about lights my panties on fire. Thank God they’re damp enough to put out a fire.

I suppress a shiver and try to steer the conversation back to neutral territory. “Do you ever wonder what starts the cycle?” I blurt. “Of Terminator, I mean. Obviously, there’s the whole John Connor sends Kyle Reese back to save Sarah Connor. And then Kyle and Sarah fall in love. So that’s a loop. But how did it start?”

He seems to consider my question, nodding. “Because there are multiple timelines? So, there must have been a point of origin? Before the timelines branch off? Before the knowledge of Judgement Day starts changing how Judgement Day goes down?”

“Yes, exactly! I mean there must have been an original timeline where John isn’t Kyle’s son. Where Kyle and Sarah just fall in love completely on their own, right?”

I glance over at JD, partly to see if he’s even following my train of thought. Because when I start going down these rabbit holes, sometimes people start spacing out. Not JD though, he’s watching me with that same intensity that always makes my breath catch and my heart race.

I clear my throat. “I think that timeline is the most sad.”

“Why?” he asks, totally serious, treating this like it’s a real discussion and not me chasing down fan theories.

“Because without Sarah’s foreknowledge of Judgement Day, John—the John who was fathered by someone other than Kyle—wouldn’t have had the knowledge and training to give the humans a fighting chance. Not a real one. In all the other timelines, the ones that come after, at least humanity has hope.”

He nods slowly, considering my words. “But all they have is the timeline they’re in. They don’t know any different.”

“True.”

“Would you want to know?” he asks. “If there was some other timeline where things were different in your life, would you want to know about it?”

I consider for a second and then laugh. “Would I want to know about a parallel universe where Skynet destroyed civilization back in 1997? No, thank you.”

He chuckles. “That’s not what I meant. Just a slightly different timeline. For example, one where you and I met before you met Mike.”

I nearly choke on the sip I just took, but manage to swallow it, then set the glass down on the window sill next to me. I force a laugh. “Thank God that didn’t happen.”

JD’s features shutter and his scowl slides into place. “Would that have been so terrible a fate?”

The seriousness in his tone makes my heart pound. JD is always flirty with me. It’s his way. I’m certain he’s like this with all the woman at the company, though I’ve never really seen it firsthand. That could be because he rarely interacts with anyone else other than me and Hayes and Helen.

“There is no fate, remember? But for argument’s sake, if you had met me when I didn’t have a boyfriend, I wouldn’t be here today. We wouldn’t be friends and I wouldn’t work for H & J Funds.”

“How do you figure all of that?”

“Well, even if we would have first met here, just like we did that day in the bullpen, eventually you would’ve hit on me and I would’ve caved. We’d have slept together, and then I would’ve been fired and forced to find a new job that wouldn’t have paid for my master’s degree. Then my entire life would’ve gone off the rails.”