Chapter Six
Emma tells me about the distance between planets, how long it would take light to travel from the sun to each one.
Mercury, barely a breath. Neptune, over four hours.
And beyond the solar system, the nearest star — Proxima Centauri — four light years away, which means the light reaching us from it right now left there four years ago.
We are not seeing the universe as it is, she says. We are seeing it as it was.
I look up at the stars and consider this. Everything above us is the past. The further you look, the further back in time you go. “So, when we look at the furthest stars,” I say slowly, “some of them might not even exist anymore.”
“Some of them definitely don't,” Emma says.
The light leaving four years before anyone down here realises it's gone. That feeling is familiar, though I've never had an occasion to apply it to astronomy before.
We stand in silence for a little while. The group drifts around us. Neither of us moves with it. Gabe's voice carries occasionally, pointing out something new. The French man murmurs to his wife.
Emma glances at me, her eyes moving over my cardigan, my bare ankles, the thin linen of my skirt. “Are you warm enough?”
I make a sound that means yes. The cold has deepened considerably. But Emma is warm beside me, and I do not move away.
“The moon next,” she says quietly, walking towards the telescope. “Come on.”
The moon fills the viewfinder and a small, involuntary sound escapes me that I immediately wish hadn't.
It is half — only half of the sphere showing, a line dividing the lit from the dark — but the half that is there is the brightest thing I have ever seen.
Blindingly, unreasonably bright in all the surrounding dark, every crater and ridge thrown into sharp relief.
It looks impossible, hanging up there in the same sky I have been seeing all my life through bedroom windows and car windscreens and on walks home from work in the dark.
I stay at the eyepiece longer than is polite. A person waits behind me in the queue, and I stay anyway, for one more moment, and then one more.
When I finally straighten up, I say nothing. Emma is watching my face. Whatever she sees on it, she holds it a moment before looking away. I am glad she doesn't comment.
Gabe then announces the star cluster — the Pleiades, the seven sisters next, though in the telescope they are not seven but hundreds, maybe more, thrown together in a sparkling, blazing handful against the dark.
Each one distinct, white and silver and faintly blue, packed close as though for warmth.
It is the kind of stunning that arrives before language does.
I file it under the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed, stand up from the eyepiece and rejoin the world.
Emma steps forward, looks, and makes the same small, involuntary sound I made at the moon. I am unreasonably pleased to have heard it.
She reaches for her phone. “I want to try —” she says, more to herself than to me, and carefully angles the lens of her phone towards the eyepiece.
She tries several times, adjusting, tilting, trying again to capture it.
I watch her do this with focused patience.
Emma knows exactly what she wants and is prepared to work for it.
“I don't think —” she starts.
“Let me see.”
She hands me the phone. The photos are imperfect, slightly blurred, the brightness bleeding at the edges, but in two or three of them, the cluster is there.
“These two are good,” I say.
She looks over my shoulder at the screen, her cheek nearly touching mine. “Oh, that one's actually —” Her hand reaches past me to tap the screen. “Yes. Yes, that's it.”
“Could you send those to me?” I ask. I say it lightly, as though it is a practical request about photographs and nothing more whatsoever.
Emma takes her phone back, the corner of her mouth lifting briefly before she speaks. “Give me your number.”
I tell her. She types it in, and a moment later my phone vibrates in my bag.
We stand together in the dark and look up. The sky continues being what it is, vast and indifferent and full of things that have been burning for longer than we have language to describe.
We have moved, without deciding to, a little apart from the group.
I'm not sure when this happened — whether Emma guided us there or I did, or whether we simply drifted in the way that two people drift when they are paying attention only to each other.
The darkness out here at the edge of the clearing is deeper, the voices of the group a low murmur somewhere behind us, Gabe's laser a faint green thread against the sky.
“This has been…” My sentence leads nowhere.
Emma turns to me. I am looking up, but I sense it; the shift in her attention, the way it lands. “Beautiful,” she says. Simply. As though she is telling me something I already know, something that doesn't need to be complicated.
I look at her then. Even under the night sky, her hazel eyes find the light — green and gold, warm and sparkling against the cold of the mountain.
“You’re beautiful,” she whispers.
In the dark her face is all pale light and shadow. She isn't smiling. She isn't performing it. She says it the way she says most things — directly, with the confidence that honesty is simpler than the alternative.
“Thank you,” I say.
Emma's gaze drops, just briefly, to my mouth. Then lifts again. The thought of kissing her arrives a moment later, fully formed. My body leans towards her a little before I realise what I'm doing.
I stop. Straighten. The air between us is very still.
Emma's breath catches. “You can.”
“Hm?”
“You can, Cathleen.”
I open my mouth. It is unclear what is about to come out of it. “Can I kiss you,” I say. It isn't quite a question.
Emma looks at me for a moment that lasts considerably longer than a moment, then closes the inches between us.
Her lips find mine in the dark. Tentative at first, the lightest press of them.
A kiss that leaves room to step back from, that could be explained away if either of us needed to explain it.
I do not step back. I press into her, my hands finding the front of her hoodie. I feel her stomach beneath the fabric, firm and warm, and my hands move around her waist and stay there.
Her lips are softer than I was prepared for.
She takes my top lip first, then the bottom, deliberate, unhurried, which is exactly how I should have known she would do this.
Both her hands come to my jaw, holding my face to hers.
Her tongue runs slowly along my lip, and I open for her.
The kiss deepens as the cold of the mountain and the heat of her mouth become two entirely separate and simultaneous things, and somewhere in the depth of it, she makes a small sound against my mouth. A small groan that moves through me.
I press closer, into the solid warmth of her. Emma kisses me with a certainty that undoes something in me I hadn't realised was tied.
Of course, I think. Finally.
“How romantic,” a voice murmurs not far from us.
My eyes open, and I catch the smell of Emma’s shampoo; vanilla mixed with the faint cold of the night air on her. And then we breathe, the two of us, in the dark.
The group is closer than I realised. The voice doesn't repeat itself and I don't look to find its owner.
The sky is as it was, the stars continuing with the same vast indifference as before. This is, for reasons I will examine later, an enormous relief.
Emma's forehead tips forward and rests against mine. Her breath is warm in the cold air between us. “I've been wanting to do that since dessert.”
A small laugh escapes me that is mostly air. “But I was my awkward, horrible self,” I say. “More so then, even.”
Emma pulls back just enough to look at me. “You were gorgeous,” she says. “And intriguing, and funny.” A pause. “I couldn't believe my luck when I saw that chair was free.”
A sound escapes me, undignified and involuntary.
She grins. “What? I'm serious. Thought Monica Bellucci had snuck onto Gabe's excursion.”
“Stop it,” I say.
Her smile doesn't leave but she looks at me more directly as her thumb brushes my lower lip. “You didn't hesitate,” Emma says. “With the kiss.”
This is considerably more difficult to deflect than the joke. “I'm aware.”
“Is that unusual for you?”
“I don't have a comparison point. I've never —” I stop. Start again. “I haven't done this before,” I admit, moving a finger in the air between us.
Emma pulls back slightly to look at me. Not with surprise exactly, more with the careful attention of someone who wants to make sure they've understood correctly.
“Kissed someone on a stargazing excursion?” she asks.
“Among other things,” I say.
Emma nods once and her expression shifts — not less warm, but more considered. More careful with me. “Are you alright?”
It is such a simple question. I look at the sky, at the dark outline of the volcano against it, at the lights of the coast far below, very small from up here — because it turns out that simple questions without agenda are considerably harder to receive than complicated ones.
“Yes,” I say. “Better than alright, I think.”
Emma smiles. Properly this time, the full weight of it, and even in the dark it changes everything in her face. “Good.”
We stay where we are though the space between us feels different. Somewhere behind us, Gabe addresses the group about the rotation of the earth. The normalcy of it seems distant.
I will need to think about this, I know.
At some point — on the coach, or in the hotel room tonight with the silence of being alone after this — I will need to sit with what just happened and work out what to call it and what it means and what, if anything, it asks of me.
There is a whole architecture of thought that I will need to build, about who I am and what I want.
But not now. Now, I am standing on the path to heaven with a woman who knows the names of all the stars, who kissed me without hesitation, and the sky above us is more than I was prepared for — and that is, for the moment, enough.