Sliding Sideways - Sex Stories

Sliding Sideways

“It’s like I’m sliding sideways through time and space,” Quentin explained to Vivienne. “You might have seen that movie with Gwyneth Paltrow, or maybe, in this continuum, Renee Zellweger: Sliding Doors. Only for me, it’s all the time. The way I understand it is like what Stephen Hawkings explains. You know, that we live in an infinity of parallel universes. Only that while most people stay in one spacetime continuum all their lives, I’m constantly sliding through all of them. I don’t go backwards and forwards in time. I just go forwards, but the universe I’m in changes around me. And I’ve got no control of it any more than most people have any choice about which parallel universe they spend the whole of their lives in.” “Go on,” urged Vivienne, as Quentin paused to assess her reaction. Was she humouring him? Quentin wondered. He often felt the urge to confess his predicament, knowing that the Quentin who would have to live with the consequences of it was the Quentin whose body he was currently occupying and who would, no doubt, be thoroughly confused by the memory of this occasion. But Quentin had long stopped caring about what the Quentins he lived in might think. After all, they weren’t always that kind to him. He had several times suffered venereal diseases, war wounds, and even an uncomfortably generous waistline that had been bequeathed on him for the moment of his residency. “Are you sure?” Quentin asked. Most women he’d spoken to on this matter (almost always women ...

... and almost always when, as now, he was vaguely tipsy sitting on a bar stool) would ask “What you on?” Or they would simply pretend not to have heard anything. “Yes. It’s fascinating,” said Vivienne, puffing smoke from her cigarette, and running a long fingernail along the rim of her wine glass. “I’ve seen so many different worlds,” Quentin continued. “There are those where the Cold War continued with the Soviet Union under Andropov until the present day. There are those where President Kennedy was not assassinated at Houston. There are those where the Sex Pistols never existed. There’s even one where some Arab terrorists flew Boeing 747s into the World Trade Center.” Vivienne raised her eyebrows at that. “I can’t believe that! It’s like imagining that Sir John Lennon had never become the world’s best selling novelist.” “I’ve seen that. He was assassinated, in fact,” Quentin admitted. “I’ve even been in a universe where the richest man in the world was that geek who runs Microsoft.” “I can’t believe that, either! How would IBM, Sun or Lotus have allowed that to happen?” “It’s like everything since the time I was born in the early 1960s that could happen has happened. Everything before then, the date of my conception, not of my birth, is the same in all the universes I’ve inhabited, but after that it sort of diverges.” “No nuclear wars?” “Not ones that I’ve survived, though there was a small one in the Middle East in the 1970s that led to universal disarmament. It’s amazing what ...