”Logan, there’s been an accident… I saw it on the news… It’s Dylan’s car, Logan!”

For an instant, time stood still.

The longest hand on his watch kept ticking on and the red-lighted 7 on his alarm clock changed to an 8.

And yet, time stopped. A pallid stillness suddenly stifled the passage of one moment to another.

For that instant in eternity, there was no sound, no sense, no movement; and then-

Dylan.

His heart seized; cramping and contracting within his chest as an immeasurable weight crushed it. Fear gripped his every nerve-ending as it made the blood flow faster in his veins than his heart ever could have.

That one name, that one word, crashed through the silence and exploded into his reverie.

And then there was no time; he had no time.

Dylan. Oh please God…

He barley noticed himself dropping the phone. He barley felt his legs move as they rushed down the stairs and out the door. He forgot that he had a perfectly well-working car standing in his driveway as he ran past it. He noticed nothing but the screaming of his insides; the mind-numbing fear driving though him, the desperation and panic and pain of exhaustion throbbing in every fiber of him. All he heard was the pounding of his feet against concrete as he brought himself closer to the one person who could keep his world turning and his spirit breathing.

He had to know.

Every image of Logan’s reality shattered in the face of the wail of terror inside him, stretching back years; tearing at the fabric of memory as it smashed through every wall of glass erected between him and Dylan.

God... Please… Don’t… Don’t let…

The hourglass had been bolted to the table, its grains of time systematically, indifferently, flowing though its neck to be lost forever.

They cascaded down upon each other in an ever growing heap of life already lived; a collection of moments that could never be recaptured; seconds and minutes and hours and days forever gone.

Those were the instants in time when he could have changed everything. Every moment that he didn’t say what he felt, that he could have asked Dylan to stay. Those few seconds when he could’ve held on instead of let go.

Soft, delicate moments in time he should have used to say those three little words that had always been in every touch, every breath and every single syllable exchanged between them.

Dylan. I love you.

All was now lost beyond retrieval.

He fumbled with his phone as he ran; somehow incapable of working its buttons as he battled against the panic which incapacitated his fingers. His body was on fire with it. The name flashed on the screen as he managed to find his contact list; burning the letters into his retinas until they ceased to be single entities, so familiar in their unified state.

DYLAN.

He pressed the phone to his ear, listening with his pulse beating his ear drum as the dial tones stretched on in eternity. And eternity he didn’t have.

The grains of sand continued falling through their never-ending cascade of past, present, future.

When he heard a familiar voice in his ear a flash of electricity shot through his body, radiating from his heart as it exploded into every extremity and back again in seconds. His heart erupted with pure, unadulterated joy only to crash again as his rational mind registered that he had heard these words before.

It was just a recorded memory. Nothing more than Dylan’s phantasmal voice telling him to ‘please leave a message’.

Logan swore, almost choking on the words making their way out his throat as he once again hit the call button. And again. And again. He could no longer wait for the five rings but punched it repeatedly as if every time he did would make the call louder, more insistent, more frantic.

Fuck, Dylan, please pick up, please please please pick up… I have to know…

Logan suddenly became aware of the increasing thickness in the air, filling his nostrils and working its way up to his tearing eyes.

Smoke.

He looked up from his cell phone, and saw the apocalypse.

Time seemed to stop once again as the image was branded into him with white hot precision.

Then the wails filled his ears. Loud noises from emergency vehicles scratched his eardrums as the blinding lights split the darkness into blue, red, and white. The acrid smoke, thicker now, burned his throat as it snuck in during a terrified gasp for breath. It tasted of death.

Dylan, where the fuck are you?

His alarmed gaze swept over the chaos around him, searching for the familiar face but finding none.

“DYLAN!” he screamed, his voice breaking on the name as his throat burned again with smoke. Fuck.

Along with the steady trickling of sand through the passage of time, the possibility of finding Dylan alive and unharmed was escaping as well. Like water it slipped through his fingers; unable to be retained or recaptured.

He searched desperately through the smoky darkness; feeling his fear radiate off him only to ricochet back at him from the frightened faces of the men and women involved. But none were Dylan. He watched the images of horror in front of him, blood, injuries, burning, death; but was unable to process them, his fear turning him blind as he could concentrate on nothing but finding his lover.

To make things worse, he could feel tiny pieces of his own hope leaving him with each passing moment; matching the falling grains of sand through the present and into the irretrievable past.

Dylan… Please…

A flash of brilliant, white light erupted into the darkness as a beacon on an ambulance flashed his eyes; and it brought with it an equally brilliant flicker of hope. His hyposensitized eyes locked onto, through the light, a silhouette, a figure, a face.

Was it…?

He dared not make a sound, irrationally afraid it would show to be a ghost, an apparition, an illusion and fade away into the opaque darkness to be lost forever. He knew he would not truly believe it until he had touched him, felt him. He reached out his hand, terrified it would dissolve through his fingers; and as his fingertips gently brushed the soft fabric of Dylan’s favorite sweater he felt, for a moment, the strange sensation that he’d just touched the wing of an angel.

He crushed the material in his fist, and when he pulled, a real and solid body came with it.

The grains of sand slowed in their descend as a pair of arms came around his neck and a soft warm breath of life brushed his cheek.

Time stopped again as sheer, gut-wrenching relief broke over Logan so powerful he had to fight for his claim on reality.

Logan held on tight as familiarity settled in him again; the placing of Dylan’s body against his, the feeling of Dylan’s fingers in the nape of his neck, the sounds Dylan made in the back of his throat as they embraced.

For a few seconds Logan refused to let go; vowing that he would never again allow so many precious moments to escape him and be lost in the complexities of time and circumstance.

The hourglass wobbled where it stood, tilted, and fell silently on its side. Slowly, it began to right itself the other way up. Resetting the clock.

Those sand grains of missed opportunities, of chances he’d had but neglected to take were no longer in the past but once again waiting to fall through time.

And this time, Logan would capture them.