Chapter 9 – Cassie #2
“Because nothing tops the end of a night like staring up at the sky, looking at God’s handiwork.
If we’re lucky, a shooting star’ll streak by.
” He sounded earnest, like he actually believed stargazing could fix all the world’s problems. I watched his profile in the faint moonlight—stubborn, ridiculous, sincere—and for the first time since he’d pulled out of my driveway, I didn’t argue with him.
The longer I watched him in silence, the more I realized he wasn’t the young Jace I remembered from when we first met. His jaw had hardened, muscle had filled in where he used to be all angles, and his trimmed facial hair gave him a weathered, tasteful kind of maturity. It suited him.
His truck came to a quick stop, pulling me from my trance.
“We’re here,” he announced, parking his truck. “Let’s go, sugar.”
As I climbed out—my legs still not working at full strength—Jace lowered his tailgate with a clank.
“Hop up here,” he said, motioning for me to sit.
“Jace, if both of my feet aren’t planted firmly on the ground, there’s a one-hundred-percent chance I’m going to face-plant,” I admitted, laughing drunkenly.
“Here, let me help you.”
Without warning, his hands gripped my hips, lifting me as if I weighed nothing at all. In one easy motion, he set me on the tailgate, gentle as though I was a piece of fragile glass.
A moment later, he slid up beside me, laying on his back, his eyes fixed on the endless black sky above.
I laid down next to him, crossing my arms across my chest.
“It’s beautiful,” I whispered. The sky looked like someone had spilled a bucket of silver dust and let it scatter around until it found its own rhythm. The stars shimmered so brightly they seemed alive, stitched together by soft rivers of light that swirled across the darkness.
“It doesn’t even look real,” I added, shaking my head. “Like we’re sitting in some kind of dream.”
“Nothing centers me more than coming out here, staring at the starry sky,” Jace said.
“What made you start coming here?” I asked, wondering how he had even found this spot in the first place since it was tucked so far off.
“A couple years ago, I had to do a lot of soul searching, and something, someone led me out here. I was out driving one night and turned down this back road. I was drunk and I had no business driving, but that’s the truth, that’s what I was doing.
I pulled off this dirt road to kill some time and sober up, found this spot, and laid in the back of my truck, staring up at the stars.
I stared at the stars for hours. They felt like a magnet to my mind.
The longer I stared, the more my thoughts stopped racing, and I started thinking more clearly.
That was the first night in a long time that I’d felt like I was in control again.
Whenever life gets hard, I come out here and think—find myself again when I feel lost.”
I sat there for a moment, stunned by Jace’s intimate confession. Something about the way he talked made me think there weren’t a lot of people who knew where this spot was or what it meant to Jace. I wasn’t even completely sure what it meant to him yet.
“Have you ever brought anyone else out here?” I asked, giving in to my curiosity.
“Nope, just you. I’d never bring someone here who might jeopardize what it represents to me. This place means to me what your coffee shop means to you—everything you’ve overcome represented through one single place in this endless universe.”
I’d never thought about it like that, but Jace was right.
The longer we stayed out here, the smaller I felt—but in an empowering way. Like the energy from the stars was charging me to become greater than what I thought I could be on my own. Maybe that was the same feeling Jace got when he needed it all those years ago.
I wondered why Jace needed it in the first place.
Most people knew him as the rough and rowdy second McKinley son, tangling the sheets with a new girl every weekend.
But the more time I spent with him, the more I felt like he was hiding something from me.
Like he wasn’t showing me his true self, just the image he wanted everyone to see.
He was holding something back, I just wasn’t sure why yet.
“So, this is your super-secret hangout spot, huh?” I teased, trying to change the subject to something a little less serious. “What if I decide to steal it?”
“Pinky promise me right now you won’t,” he said with a serious look, holding up his finger. “Promise you’ll never come out here without me. And just so you know, I take a pinky promise very seriously.”
I looped my tiny pinky around his strong one. “I pinky promise I won’t come out here without you, no matter what.”
“Good girl.” His smile stretched wide across his face. I giggled in response as I laid there, still staring at the stars half drunk.
By the time Jace and I decided it was time to head back, I was barely hanging on. Sleep was pulling at me adamantly. I couldn’t tell if I was actually tired or if the liquor was making me drowsy.
After Jace pulled into my driveway, I attempted to step out of the truck on my own, but my legs were working about as good as Jell-O would at keeping me upright.
Jace immediately noticed, so he put one arm behind my back, the other arm swooping me up by the legs, as he carried me up the porch, through the front door.
Damn.
Ellie would have been so proud of me right now. I was letting a man whisk me away like Cinderella, and I wasn’t even two seconds from kicking him in the balls.
Guess there was a first time for everything.
“Which room is yours?” Jace asked, walking from my entryway up the hallway, looking left and right, trying to find his way through the maze that was my house.
I pointed lazily to the right. I needed my bed, and I needed it quick. The room was starting to spin, and if I didn’t find somewhere to lay perfectly still, it would only be downhill from here.
Pushing my bedroom door open with his foot, Jace laid me gently on the bed, peeling off my denim jacket then my shoes next. Without thinking, I pulled my pants off, wanting to be comfortable when I fell asleep—which would be in a matter of seconds.
After being gone for a few minutes, Jace returned, handing me the bottle of ibuprofen he found in my medicine cabinet and a bottle of water from the fridge.
“Here, drink this. It will help you not have a raging headache when you get up in the morning,” he said, twisting the cap off the bottle of water for me.
My arms were about as useless as my legs at this point, but I managed.
“How do you know so much about this?” I asked. “Oh wait, never mind. You’re Silver Creek’s biggest playboy. I almost forgot. Drink alcohol, fuck women, repeat,” I said drunkenly, turning over in bed.
He didn’t crack a joke like he usually did when I talked about his wild ways.
Weird.
It wasn’t until Jace gently closed the door and walked away that the slow-motion reel in my head caught up with me in real time, and I realized I had just taken my pants off in front of him.
Oops.