Chapter 14 #2
“I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through. But even if it’s selfish, I’m glad you’re here with me. I’m glad you made it to my world. Even if it’s just for a little while, I’m glad I met you, and that you’re in my life.”
I freeze. Because it’s the only thing I can do. I bite down on my tongue, and I roll my fingers into fists, and I don’t say a word.
And August’s face slips. He looks down with a wrinkled brow before he drops to the ground. So I drop with him, and I sit next to him in silence.
I don’t want to leave him.
I don’t want to hurt him.
“It must have been amazing to study astronomy,” he says, changing the conversation deftly.
He’s relaxed back onto his hands, staring up at the sky.
And he’s prettier than every sight the whole galaxy has to offer, I’m sure of it.
“I know what you said, that I’m better off not having gone to university. But I think I will always regret it.”
I mirror his pose, leaning as close to him as I dare to let myself, a hair’s breadth from contact.
“It was incredible,” I tell him honestly.
“It never stops being fascinating. The more you look into things, the more beauty you find. The more order you find, the more chaos, and deep within that chaos, order again, and on and on all the way down until you don’t know what’s what anymore. ”
“It’s terrifying,” he says, staring deep into the night.
“There’s something that makes me feel so small about the idea of a drop of methane rain into a puddle on the moon Titan.
The way no one’s there to see it. No one hears the sound.
No one experiences it. Snow drifts on Pluto, all the beauty and the grandeur, and it’s just lost in the dark.
” His gaze turns wistful, long eyelashes reflecting the glowing night.
“It’s too vast. It makes me want to cling on to Earth. ”
I glance down at his beautiful fingers, deep in the dewy grass.
“But it makes me want to let go too, you know? It makes me feel alive to know I’m so close to death. That all of everything out there has such beautiful promise, but that it would kill me in a heartbeat. That it’s so violent. That it’s so careless.”
“Careless?”
“Uncaring? Cold?” He looks over at me. “Why am I so attracted to that?”
Please don’t look at me like that.
I’m drowning in him.
“Maybe it’s worse than you imagine?” I suggest.
“I don’t think so. Sometimes I think it would be worth it.
” He stares back out at the infinite expanse.
“Do you remember a few years back they called for people to go on that mission to Mars? A one-way ticket, they said. You’d go, start a settlement, and you’d never come back.
Never set foot on Earth again. I thought really hard about that. ”
“It would be suicide.”
“It wouldn’t be. Not really. I wouldn’t be doing it for that reason.
But just imagine that whole world existing, forming in the black of space, having storms and oceans and maybe even life.
Billions of years of it, cyclones and tides and ice and springs.
Then all of it drying up, the core cooling down, the planet dying, and no one to witness its passing up close. ”
“You want to witness it?”
“I don’t know. I just feel like someone should be there, I guess.”
That thought is so incredibly beautiful to me. He’s like a flower in my chest, my heart blooming anew, some dead and decrepit thing, and he’s blasting life into me with every word he speaks.
“I sometimes think of what it would be like to drown in the seas of Europa. To be swept away in a storm on Jupiter.” His wistfulness drops back to bashfulness. “I know it’s silly.”
“I don’t think it’s silly.” Some magnetic draw pulls my fingers a little wider, splays them just out of reach of his. What I’d give to feel the slightest brush of his finger, half an inch away.
“I know you could never get that far out in space anyway. I know it’s all toxic air and impossible pressures and radiation and solar storms and death in every breath.
But it feels sad that no one witnesses it.
It’s the most gorgeous thing, the serenity and the violence in balance.
Like the most beautiful symphony. How can it be just playing out there, and no one ever hears it? It’s excruciating in its sadness.”
“I think you’re incredibly beautiful.”
His gaze cuts across to me, and I don’t think either of us can believe I just said that. His lips fall open the slightest touch, and they’re gorgeous, and he’s gorgeous, and I’ve never wanted anything as much in my whole life as I want him.
His little finger stretches out, the tiniest movement, and it’s like a live wire when his skin brushes mine.
This is the part where I tell him I adore him.
The part where I tell him he’s changing my life, he’s changing me.
That he’s made me feel things I thought I’d become incapable of feeling.
That he’s sticking this filthy, painful humanity back inside me, and I hate it, but I crave it when it comes from him.
That every time he’s close to me, it hurts.
That I’d give anything to know what he’s thinking right now…