Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Clementine
“Okay,” I call out. “Has everyone got their star maps?”
A chorus of small voices all say “Yes,” with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Most of them are into it, though there are always a few whose parents dragged them out here when they’d rather be watching TV.
“Great!” I say. “Now, who can find Mars?”
I like to give them a pretty easy one first. If I ask where the moon is right away, everyone over the age of about seven rolls their eyes and thinks this is kid stuff. But Mars is easy enough to find that they can do it, and hard enough that they don’t think I’m making fools of them.
A whole bunch of fingers point in the general direction of Mars.
“Exactly!” I say. “If you look a little to the left and up, now that your eyes are adjusted you can really see the Milky Way.”
I sweep my arm up and over my head, indicating the broad swath of stars that speckle the black sky.
This is one of the best places in the country for stargazing — the closest city is Missoula, which isn’t very big or very close.
Other than that, it’s small towns like this one and nothing but wide open sky, with hardly any light pollution for miles.
Especially on a clear night, like tonight, with just a sliver of a moon, it feels like you can see the whole universe from here.
Sometimes, I really understand how people used to think the earth was the center of the universe. It sure feels that way.
“...So when we look at the Milky Way, we’re actually seeing the flattened disc of our own galaxy,” I’m saying, the words pretty much on autopilot. “Like being in the center of a frisbee and looking out toward the edge.”
Lots of small, thoughtful faces look upward, craning their necks.
“Now,” I say. “Can anyone tell me which way is north?”
A bunch of hands point. Several of them are even pointing north, but something’s caught my eye: a figure, walking through the parking lot and toward the field where we’re all standing.
It’s Hunter. I can barely see his outline, and I can’t see his face at all, but there’s something familiar in the way he walks, his hands in the pockets of his jacket. I can’t help but smile.
“That’s right!” I say.
I keep talking about the north star and the big dipper, but I’m not really paying attention.
I’ve got this on autopilot. Instead I’m watching Hunter walk up and stand way, way in the back of a group of kids.
In another minute he’s following along as I talk about the constellations — Orion, Sagittarius, the Pleiades — and I just think, he came.
At the end of the naked-eye portion of the evening, I clap my hands together and then rub them.
“Who’s ready for telescopes?” I ask.
A couple of kids run for the telescopes set up at the opposite end of the field, each manned by a volunteer. Most of the kids just walk. It’s probably not very cool to get excited for telescopes.
Hunter waits until they’re gone, hands in the pockets of his Carhartt jacket, then walks to meet me.
“You picked stars over beers?” I ask.
“I can drink beers anywhere,” he says. “I don’t get many stargazing invitations.”
“You could just look up.”
He smiles.
“Smartass,” he says. “Fine. I see too much of those guys and figured I’d spend time with an old friend instead. Happy now?”
There it is again: old friend. He came all the way here, away from a pub crawl to see me. An old friend.
“Cool!” I hear a really enthusiastic kid shout.
“Happy that I dragged the truth out of you?” I tease.
“Kicking and screaming,” he says.
Be sincere for one second, I think. I swallow and look straight into his eyes.
“Thanks,” I say. “It’s good to see you again.”
“It’s good to see you too,” he says softly.
I can’t help but smile. I almost say I didn’t think it would be, because the last time we talked, over video chat, I alternated between sobbing and shouting for two hours.
But there’s no point bringing that up now: he’s here for a couple of days, and it’s nice to see him again. As friends. The past is past.
“I’ve gotta go monitor the telescope situation,” I say, nodding my head toward the circle where people are gathered. “But you’re welcome to hang out if you want.”
“I CAN SEE THE RINGS!” shouts the same kid, who sounds almost too excited.
“That is why I came,” Hunter says, his drawl dusky, his blue eyes sparkling even in the dark.
“C’mon,” I say. “I’ll show you some cool planets,” I say.
Instantly, Hunter grins a huge, shit-eating grin, and I sigh. I know what he’s going to say. I roll my eyes.
“Don’t,” I say, trying not to laugh.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t say the thing you’re about to say.”
His eyes glitter.
“Am I gonna get to see...” he says, still grinning. “...Uranus?”
He looks so pleased with himself that I have to bite my lips together so I don’t laugh.
“What is it I’m looking at again?” Hunter says, looking carefully through the telescope. It’s set up for someone about two-thirds his height, so he’s crouched down and looking up, which is a pretty awkward position.
“The bright blob with stuff around it,” I say. “If you really look close, you can make out the rings, though not the individual ones.”
It’s an hour later, and most of the kids are gone.
Just a few are left, including the eleven-year-old who got so excited about Saturn’s rings.
He’s been quizzing one of the volunteers about the asteroid belt for about ten minutes now, and before that, he talked my ear off about the differences between Mars’s two moons.
His dad is standing nearby, looking tired and ready to leave.
Hunter’s quiet for a long time, peering into the telescope. Then he backs away, blinks and shakes his head.
“Maybe I should look at another planet so I can see the difference,” he says.
“That one’s got Jupiter,” I say, pointing at a different setup.
Hunter walks to another huge telescope, crouches down, and looks up.
“Which one is it?” he asks.
“The big, bright one,” I say.
“There’s two of those.”
“Let me look,” I tell him, and he steps aside, but not quite far enough. I bump into him as I crouch and look up through the telescope, and I can almost feel the warmth from his hard, solid body through both our heavy jackets.
I have to fight the urge to reach out and put one hand on him to steady myself. My body refuses to listen to my brain when I’m around him, because I keep telling my body it’s over and it’s been over for ages, but I still have the urge to reach out and hold his hand, touch his arm, lean into him.
I know better than to kiss him, but all those little, intimate touches between couples? Those are what I can barely keep myself from doing out of sheer habit.
It doesn’t help that I’ve got a very, very clear memory of everything else we did.
Half-clothed fooling around in the back seat of a car?
Check. Getting eaten out in the basement of my parents’ house while they were watching TV upstairs, holding a pillow over my own face so I wouldn’t scream? Check.
Fucking in the back of his pickup truck, parked behind the barn, underneath the stars on a warm summer night, my nails raking down his back? Definitely check.
Sudden arousal prickles through me at those memories, and I wonder if I remember a little too well. Obviously I’m just remembering my first through rose-colored glasses, right?
“You can’t tell either, huh?” Hunter says, his slow voice coming from above me.
Right. Jupiter.
“It’s on the left,” I say, and stand.
As I do I can feel his hand brush my back, his fingertips running from my shoulder to my hip. It’s casual, almost automatic, and I wonder if he even meant to do it.
Hunter bends down and looks back through the telescope again. I shove my hands into the pockets of my jacket and step away so I’m not tempted to touch him again.
“Okay, got it,” he says, after a moment. Then he walks to the other telescope and looks up.
The excitable kid is finally being walked off by his dad, even though I can still hear his excited yelping from where I stand. I wave to Albert, the last volunteer who’s still around.
“You want help putting the telescopes back?” he calls.
I glance at Hunter, still folded in half and staring up through the telescope.
“Go home,” I call back. “We’ve got it.”
“See you around,” he calls, and walks toward the parking lot.
Just like that, it’s me and Hunter alone in a circle of big, powerful telescopes. I wander back to where he is and look up at the stars, mentally ticking through the constellations.
“I think I can see them,” he says. “They’re real faint, but there they are.”
He stands up straight and then squints at the sky.
“You can’t see them without the telescope,” I say.
Hunter just looks at me with a no shit, Sherlock look on his face, and I laugh.
“Sorry,” I say. “I explain a lot of things to eight-year-olds.”
“I assumed that was why I was looking through a telescope,” he says, a smile in his voice.
He’s standing up straight, his hands in his pockets, gazing intently at the horizon. After a while he points.
“It’s one of those, right?” he says.
He’s pointing at a sky full of stars on a dark night. It’s hard to tell which one he thinks it is.
“It’s sort of down there,” I say. “See Mars?”
I point. He moves in, closer to me. My stomach flips and I swallow.
“It’s the one that’s a little bit red,” I say. “Right near the horizon, right above the branches of that tall tree that got struck by lightning a couple years ago.”
“Because I know which tree got struck by lightning.”
“It’s the one without leaves on top,” I tease. “I thought one of the Canyon Country Hotshots might know what a struck tree looked like.”
“It’s full dark with no moon, you know,” he says.
He moves closer, standing behind me. We’re not touching, but it’s just a technicality, because he’s leaning over my shoulder and so close I can feel his body heat.
Then, after a moment: “Okay, I think I’ve got it. That one?”