Chapter 29
NATE
“Gosh, this is so breathtakingly beautiful,” Vivienne says in awe as she stands near the edge of the cliff.
Infinite white dots litter the darkened sky, the stars scattered across it like tiny diamonds, glistening in the moonlight. And while it’s a gorgeous sight, it doesn’t quite compare to when Vivienne turns around, her smile wide and her eyes just as bright.
I lean back on my hands as I admire the view, legs dangling from the open tailgate of the truck I borrowed for this surprise.
With an air mattress snugly set up in the back, it was the perfect spot to lie down and stargaze. But in true Vivienne fashion, she was too excited to see where we were and jumped out of the car the second I put it in park.
“What’s that?” she asks with a point of her finger when she finally notices.
I shrug with a smirk, trying to act as casually as possible. It’s then that she dashes, colliding into me hard enough that we both stumble back. Her loud giggles mix with my laughs of disbelief as I lie there, the air mattress bouncing lightly beneath us.
“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,” Vivienne squeals as her arms wrap around my torso.
A warmth fills me from the inside out as my heart patters against my rib cage.
Everything about this moment felt right—from the scent of her citrus shampoo to the way she held on to me like I was her lifeline. Getting everything organized on time had been a hassle, but her reaction made it all worth it.
“Congratulations on making your compound,” I whisper in her ear as my fingers pass through her dark brown strands.
It’s then that Vivienne pulls back from me, glassy eyes meeting mine as a soft smile tugs at her lips. “Thank you,” she whispers, slowly shuffling up my body until our faces are just inches apart.
Her lips brush mine in a delicate peck, and I linger in the sensation. So plump. So full. So utterly mine. I’m not sure what she put on them, but she tastes like a cinnamon roll.
“What made you want to come here?” Vivienne asks as she rolls off me, falling on her back to admire the night sky.
I grab one of the pillows I tossed in the back, tucking it beneath her neck before draping a blanket over her.
“They reminded me of you,” I say softly.
“Who?”
“The stars.”
Her brows pull together tightly. “How?”
I can’t help but grin. “What can I say? You’re a shooting star. Every time I see you, a wish comes true.”
Vivienne swats my side in disbelief, but I catch the flush creeping up her cheeks.
Flirty words aside, the comparison was much deeper than that.
In the daylight, when the sun shone bright, you couldn’t tell that something else was shining in the sky. It’s only when everything dimmed down and the world quieted that you could see it.
Vivienne is a little like the stars—glimmering with an extraordinary brightness whenever she sets aside her uncertainties.
She broke down so many self-limiting barriers to get to where she is now. Compound synthesized. Invited to a huge chemistry conference. She’s always shone. She just never realized it when she got caught up in her mind.
Owls howl in the night, the sound mingling with the soft whooshing of the wind passing through the trees. A silence settles between us as we listen to nature, but it grows heavier. Her shoulders tense. Her eyes fall shut. And her hand draws circles on the wool of her jacket.
She doesn’t need to say anything for me to know what’s on her mind. I heard the crack in her voice when she mentioned it over the phone.
“I don’t know if I can do it, Nate,” Vivienne admits on a heavy sigh.
I wrap a hand around her waist, squeezing tightly as I pull her body closer. Her chest presses into mine, and I hook one of her legs around my hip so I can look her in the eyes.
“This is the biggest opportunity of my academic career, and I’m thinking of turning it down because I’m still hung up on the past.” She lets out a sigh.
But honestly, she isn’t giving herself enough credit.
A mere three months ago, she couldn’t stand the sight of a plane without running away, and look at her now. She made it through the Aviation Global Forum, let me explain my project to her, and even sat in on a few talks. That’s a vast improvement by itself.
“You can do anything you set your mind to,” I assure her.
The small breath she releases—forming a faint mist in the cold November air—tells me she doesn’t truly believe it herself. And I hate that. I just wish she’d see herself the way her loved ones do.
“You did it once, and you can do it again. Baby steps. I’ll be there with you the whole way.” Her glassy doe eyes meet mine with pursed lips. “I’ll help you get over your fears. We’ll start small, then work our way up.”
“You would really do that for me?” Vivienne asks in surprise.
The question sends a squeeze through my chest. I can't fathom how anyone could have hurt this girl so bad that even the simplest things leave her shocked.
“I would do anything for you,” I confess.
Vivienne’s breath stills, and mine does too, as if all the air has been pulled into a vacuum. That’s one loaded confession to tell your fake fiancé, but it’s the truth.
We’re supposedly going with the flow, but I’d be lying if I said the flow isn’t nudging me toward real commitment.
I sleep better when she’s next to me. I’m my happiest when she's around. The tumultuous, crazy world we live in feels calm with her.
Vivienne has her fears, but it seems I have my own as well.
This girl has been sleeping in my bed every night for almost a month, nuzzled next to me for heat, yet I’ve been too scared to come clean about my feelings.
I don’t want to see this fall apart before it even has the chance to take off. Some things work out, and others don’t, and I would hate for this to fall into the latter.
“You know what I was thinking about today?” She lifts her head off my chest, meeting my eyes. “Where would we be if no one cared about us?”
By “no one,” she obviously means the media—the very thing that brought us together.
And while the thought sounds pleasant, I can’t see it play out any other way.
She once said everything happens for a reason.
I didn’t believe her at the time, yet now it feels like one of those reasons was to bring us together.
“I think we would have never gotten to know each other,” I start. “You’d go about your life still hating me and thinking I was the man who spilled coffee on you. But I’d like to think you still made your compound, overcame your fears, and did what you set out to do.”
A weak smile forms on her face, and by the looks of it, I don’t think she really believes it. Like I said, baby steps. Her doubts are fewer now than they were before, and that's all that matters. They won’t disappear overnight.
“Me? I think I would still have found myself in a controversy over the spark incident. Maybe I would have landed the SkyWay Airlines deal if we had figured out the problem quickly. And my mom would definitely still be trying to set me up with her friends’ daughters.”
Her eyes soften at the mention of my mother’s friend’s daughters, but she doesn’t comment on it. She only meets my gaze as she says, “We have three months left in our deal.”
It’s a statement, but it almost feels like an open-ended question—one that sounds a lot like“where do we go from here?”
We’re almost through with this arrangement. We spent three months together, and we have the next three. The only problem is that, in such a short time, this girl has rooted herself in the deepest parts of my heart.
Six months had seemed like a long time, but now it feels impossibly short when I want much longer.
I don’t have the time to say any of that, though, when a dull roar grabs our attention. We both look up, the white glow of the stars broken by the flashing red-and-green lights of a passing plane. Vivienne’s breath stills in her lungs as another flies over. And then another.
They come two to three minutes apart, seemingly taking off from a nearby airport. And while she grew to be okay with the sight, I think the heaviness of her looming fears may be taking a toll on her.
Vivienne snuggles up to me, wrapping her arms around my neck as a single tear presses against my skin. “You know what I’ve always wanted to do?” she murmurs.
I look down at her, watching the sweep of her lashes against her heavy-lidded eyes. She seems at peace on the outside, yet I can’t shake the sense that something deeper stirs beneath the surface.
“What is it?” I ask in return.
“Sleep under the stars.”
I smile at the confession, passing my arm under her trench coat and sweater. My fingers run up and down her spine, tracing the curve of her back as she melts closer into me.
“We can make that happen,” I say, eliciting a sleepy smile from my girl.
We lie there in silence, time slipping away, the quiet broken now and then by the distant roar of a plane. It’s when tears darken her lashes that my previous suspicions are confirmed.
“Tell me a story,” she asks with a sniffle.
“What kind?”
“Something with a happy ending.”
Story time isn’t exactly my specialty, as I once was told by my three-year-old niece, but for Vivienne, I’d bend over backward to be good at anything she wanted me to.
“Does a fairy tale work for you?”
She nods against my chest, eyes still closed.
We’ve come so far—both together and in our personal lives—and I think it’s only right I find a way to give homage to that.
“Once upon a time, there was a prince who was relatively well known across the kingdom.”
“Was he a hot prince?” Vivienne pops open an eye to look at me. “I don’t want to hear this story if he’s not hot.”
I can’t help but chuckle.
“Extremely hot. Don’t worry about it. Whenever the evil queen asks her mirror who’s the hottest of them all, a picture of his face pops up…followed by a wildfire.”
“Good.” Vivienne nods in satisfaction, her eyelids fluttering shut as a contented smile spreads across her face.
“Every year, he hosted a gala to showcase the villagers’ creations. He thought it was nice seeing people’s ideas come to life, but his mother, the queen, only hoped that the prince would finally find his one true match.”
“Was there a reason the prince”—Vivienne yawns loudly—“never settled down?”
I nod. “Yes. He never really thought the girls from the nearby towns were after him for the right reasons. He told himself that he would rather die alone than spend his life with someone who loved him for his title rather than his heart.”
“Oh… that’s really sad,” she mutters, her breathing beginning to slow down.
“In some ways, it was, but in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter because it all changed that night.
On a breather walk from the commotion inside, he ran into the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen in his life.
At first, he thought she was flirting with him, and naturally, he was too.
It was going well until she unleashed her anger on the scary beast that pushed them both into the nearby pond, soaking them from head to toe. ”
Another roar of a plane passes by, and I feel Vivienne tighten in my arms. A single tear traces the length of her cheek, and I can’t stop the wave of sadness in my chest as I wipe it away with the pad of my thumb.
“At that moment, he fell—literally. What he never anticipated, though, was that the more time he spent with her, the more he would fall figuratively.
Her one tear turns into two, and the two turn into three until waterworks erupt. There’s no way to ask what it is she's thinking about when she’s asleep, but something tells me it’s related to her parents.
The mystery of their plane crash still lingers in the back of my mind—and I suspect it lingers in hers as well.
Needing to get to the bottom of it, I make a mental note to call my private investigator.
Then I start thinking of all the ways I’ll help her get past her fears. It’s ingrained in her—the fear of the unknown, the outcome if it all goes wrong, but never the possibility if it goes right.
I’ll be patient. We’ll navigate it together. And soon enough, she’ll be crushing it at the conference in Italy.