Kairos

2.

By the time I got home, the aroma of rancid poultry and I had become old friends. Or at the very least, I had stopped paying attention to it.

The TV, still on from that morning, bathed the living room in eerie blues and twitching shadows. At least it saved me the trouble of finding the remote.

Some vapid celebrity chef started prep on a trio of autumnal meals while I shrugged off my jacket, kicked off my flats, and went through my nightly ritual of locking the door and sliding the heavy deadbolt—an additional security measure that probably violated my lease, not that I cared—into place. I belly flopped onto the couch with a groan, ready for an evening of living vicariously through people who ate way better than I did.

"The key to really good tortilla soup is the broth," the smiling brunette said from the TV. "I use bone-in chicken breast to make a hearty stock and it's fun to pick 'em out later!"

Never mind. Where did I leave the remote?

I patted around the coffee table blindly. Nothing. Then I weaseled my hands between the couch cushions. Still no luck. I grunted in frustration. Tearing apart my living room was the last thing I felt like doing.

The sudden buzzing of my phone threatened to vibrate my entire purse off of the table. I dragged it from my bag as though it were made of lead. "Hello?"

"Heya bosslady." Celena's Puerto-Rican-tinged Brooklyn accent had taken some getting used to when we first met, but I gladly welcomed the respite from wallowing in my own self pity.

"Hey, Cel. How'd closing with the new girl go?"

"It went fine." I could hear the purse of her lips in frustration. "Woulda went better if she could stop texting for twenty seconds, though."

"Oh. She's one of those." I heaved a deep sigh. "And she interviewed so well."

"Twenty bucks says somebody was texting her the right things to say." The statement was punctuated by a devious giggle. "Okay, okay, enough shop talk. Did you bag Mr. Darcy?"

I rolled onto my back, rubbing at a temple. "Ugh. I really don't want to talk about it."

"Aw, c'mon, you can't do this to me," Cel pouted. "Let me guess: You had a night of passion and now you're your own grandma."

"Okay, so maybe it wasn't that bad. The agency thankfully screens for things like that," I managed to say through sputtering laughter. "They just set me up with a total pig, that's all. One thing lead to another and now I smell like that mystery tub of chicken salad in the breakroom fridge."

"Hey, I'm telling you, it's not mine. I don't even like chicken salad."

"I seriously think it's been there longer than I have." A glance around the room showed no sign of the remote.

"Maybe it should be the bank manager. It has seniority," she said. "So like, how does it work? Do the bachelors sign up for a matchmaking service and they just don't know you're from the future, or what?"

"Not exactly." I considered how much effort it'd take to just get up and manually change the channel, but then immediately decided against it. "They don't know they're in the agency's database. There's too much potential for discovery. The agency vets them, though, and keeps tabs on their whereabouts in case they get picked from the pool of bachelors."

"Huh. That's a little creepy." She brightened as she continued, "Well, here's hoping the next one goes better, honey! It'd be pretty cool if you could bring somebody to the Halloween thing."

"Okay, two talking points," I said, finally resigning myself to the current channel. At least the chef had finished her tortilla soup and moved onto the most pretentious sweet potato casserole I had ever seen."First, it doesn't work like that. It's a one-way deal. I can go meet them, but they can't come meet me."