DECEMBER 14, 2015
I NEVER PLANNED ON SPENDING so much time with Hudson. Or in Florida, for that matter. Five months to be exact. I went there to clear my head before the start of a new project. Not to find myself in another relationship. Actually, I didn’t know how to label us. Lovers? Too emotional. Friends with benefits? Too casual. No matter how much time we spent together, neither of us brought the subject up. A subject I found myself dwelling on more often than not as of late.
He had this way of making me forget.
With him, I forgot about the real world.
I forgot about my rules.
I forgot about not getting too close.
We were in his car, windows down, driving toward a surprise. Hudson liked to surprise me… a lot. He’d surprise me with coffee whenever I was out recording. He’d surprise me with a kiss whenever I was editing the small jobs I’d commissioned to keep a steady income flowing. He’d even surprised me with Oreos when I was stressing over editing my latest piece I’d be using for submissions.
“Where are we going?” I asked for the millionth time as the salted breeze drifted through the car.
He chuckled, the sound soothing and warm. A sound I’d grown too accustomed to. “Your lack of patience is alarming,” he teased. “It’s a wonder you’re able to edit for long periods of time like you do.”
“I apply patience to the visual aspects of my life whereas, currently, I’m visually impaired. Therefore, patience can kiss my ass.”
I scratched at the blindfold he’d wrapped around my head. It was satiny smooth. I thought it was one of his ties, but he’d appeared behind me and put it on too quickly for me to tell.
“We’re pulling in now,” he said as his hand slid over my thigh and squeezed.
His voice seemed deeper, gruffer with my eyes closed. It made me feel like putty. And why did my skin react that way every time he touched me? He’d touched me at least a thousand times since we first hooked up, but it still caused this weird, confusing, fluttering feeling in my stomach. I felt like a teenager who couldn’t get my shit together.
A second later, I was blinking from the light, trying to clear my gaze as he untied the back of the blindfold. I glanced down. It was a tie.
“Where are we?” I asked, looking at clearing in the woods in the middle of nowhere. “Don’t tell me… is this the part where you pull out a chainsaw and tell me to run?”
He laughed and reached behind him, into the backseat. “If by chainsaw you mean picnic basket, then yes. This is the part where I tell you to get out of the car, so we can have our date.”
“Oh… this is a date then? You know we’ve moved past the stage where you have to impress me to get into my pants, right?”
He rolled his eyes, his grin in full effect. “Shut up, Hartley, and get out of the car.”
“I like it when you’re bossy,” I said as I got out. We met in front of the hood.
“Good. Spray this on,” he commanded, handing me bug spray.
“Why?”
He smoothed the pad of his thumb over my collarbone. “With skin as sweet as yours, you’ll surely be a mosquito lure.”
I sprayed myself down, nearly gagging when I forgot to close my mouth. I was a mess.
“This isn’t exactly my idea of a date,” I said as he took the spray and then reached for my hand.
“I have something special planned. You’ll love it. Trust me.”
The problem was I did.
WE WERE SPRAWLED OUT IN front of a fire he’d made from fallen branches. It took us an hour to collect enough. An hour in which I learned he was resourceful. He knew all kinds of things about everything. It was like his brain was where encyclopedias dumped themselves when they were traded in for Google.
“I’m stuffed,” I said after I took the last bite of my sandwich Martha had made for us. “If I could afford it, I’d steal her and hire that woman to be my personal chef.”
He took my plate, and then put it back in the wicker basket before pulling me close against him. We were underneath a blanket. It wasn’t freezing, but it was cold enough for a blanket. Winter wasn’t the same in Florida. One day, it could be a comfortable sixty degrees, and the next, it was eighty-two.
“Or you could stick around.”
He had to notice when my muscles tightened, but he didn’t let me go.
“Honesty?” he asked a second later.
My stomach swooped. I was stuck in a balancing act between happiness and regret. The first expectation of his could knock me over.
“Sure,” I said as I peered down at my shoes. I wore my Nikes. Good.
“I like you, Hartley. More than a lot. I know we said we wouldn’t put conditions on whatever is happening between us, and I’m cool with that. I just want you to know what I feel for you is the realest thing I’ve ever felt, and if you decide you don’t want to run anymore, I want to be the one you stay put with.”
He was good. Picked a place where I had no idea where I was, making it hard to get up and go.
“You don’t mean that,” I said as I shimmied out from under his arm. I needed to put inches between his scent and his heat.
“But I do,” he admitted. “And that look of fear on your face tells me you do, too.” He was so sure of himself.
That was another thing that unnerved me about him. Why was it so easy for him to make up his mind about something? I still couldn’t decide if I liked strawberry or vanilla ice cream better, and I’d been eating it my whole life. How did he know he liked me enough to want to invest in me? Sure, we’d spent nearly every day together for the last three months, but three months wasn’t enough to dig the ugly out of someone.
“Why did you choose here?” he asked as he took my hand in his.
I didn’t pull away. Damn it.
“I pulled up a map, closed my eyes, and this city was where my finger landed.”
“Sounds so simple.” He ran his finger over the grooves in my knuckles.
“That’s because it was. Not everything has to be thought out.”
“Do you think it’s coincidence?”
My eyebrows dipped. “What?”
“That you ended up here… with me?”
I knew where he was going with this.
“The spoon dropped. Remember?” he said, recalling that first day in the diner.
I did remember. And I should have ran then.
“It’s a superstition, Hudson.” I was trying to downplay it even though my heart was beating out of sync.
His gaze captured mine, holding it, refusing to let go. “Maybe… but it came true, didn’t it?”
A glimmer caught the corner of my eye. I turned from his fire-lit face, and my jaw dropped open. Meteors fell around us. It was breathtaking… like sitting in an amphitheater surrounded by streaks of light falling to a tune only the night could hear. They were everywhere. No certain point to fasten my gaze to. And there the thin, crescent moon sat, like a conductor watching his masterpiece.
“It’s like the sky is crying diamonds,” I said, laying back with him, letting him tuck me close to his side.
There were no words for what I felt then. Just this intense desire to freeze time. To thank every bad moment for allowing me to fully feel the beauty of what was happening.
He handed me my video camera, which he must have hid in the basket. I didn’t deserve this… him… this moment. It was overwhelming, like sinking further and further into unknown waters. I was in this thing with him deeper than I understood, and I realized I had set us up for more than just heartbreak.
“December brings the Geminids shower,” he said as my eyes did their best to take in all the meteors I could. Every time I gazed one way, another fell the other way. It was magical. Breathtaking. A videographers dream.
“Silas loved star gazing,” he continued, his voice softer beneath the moonlight. “My mom always made time for us to catch a meteor shower. Coming here makes me feel closer to them.”
I glanced up from the camera. His skin was kissed with an orange sheen from the fire. I felt so connected to him, and to those meteors. Weren’t we all constructed from hardened layers of time, safeguarding our precious interiors?
“Make a wish,” I said, caught up in the intensity of his gaze.
His eyes never left mine. “I think it already came true.”
WE MADE LOVE UNDER THE meteor shower, and I gave myself to him in a way I never had with anyone. Burning up in each other’s atmospheres as we pummeled toward the unknown with a force that couldn’t be stopped. Our love a star bursting in the sky, fading over billions of years.