Chapter 14
Stargazing
The second big date happened almost by accident, born out of Beck mentioning, offhand, over dinner one night in early February, that he'd never actually seen a meteor shower despite growing up two hours from a state park famous for them, his family having never quite gotten around to the trip during any of the years it might have mattered.
"That's unacceptable," Tessa said, echoing his own words back at him from the rink weeks earlier, setting down her fork with real conviction. "We're fixing that. This weekend. There's a shower peaking Saturday night, I already checked."
He borrowed Jax's truck, packed it with every blanket either of them owned plus two more Jax reluctantly contributed after significant negotiation, a thermos of coffee, and a grocery bag of snacks that leaned heavily toward things Tessa had mentioned liking in passing months ago and apparently never stopped being catalogued somewhere in his memory — sour gummy worms, the specific brand of chips her family always had in the house growing up, a box of the cheap bakery cookies she'd once admitted, sheepishly, late one night, to being embarrassingly attached to since childhood.
"You remembered all of this? All of it, specifically?"
"I remember everything you tell me," he said, like it wasn't a big deal, like it was simply the baseline requirement for paying attention to someone you loved, not some grand romantic gesture but just basic, ordinary care.
"Turns out that's kind of the whole trick to this, to any of it.
People tell you exactly what they need if you're actually listening instead of waiting for your turn to talk. "
They drove forty minutes out past the edge of campus lights, past strip malls and gas stations that gradually thinned into dark countryside, to a field Jax's family owned out past the county line, and lay in the truck bed bundled in blankets, waiting for the sky to do something spectacular, breath visible in the cold air, the Milky Way slowly emerging as their eyes adjusted to the real dark, the kind you never got on campus with all its lights.
It took almost an hour before the first streak of light cut across the sky, and Tessa gasped out loud, grabbing his arm hard enough to leave marks, and he laughed, delighted, more at her reaction than the actual meteor itself, turning to watch her face instead of the sky for a moment.
"There's another one," he said, pointing. "And another, look, right there. Okay, this is actually incredible, genuinely incredible, why did nobody make me do this sooner, this feels like a crime that I lived twenty years without ever seeing this."
"Character building. You had to earn it, apparently, through twenty years of not knowing what you were missing."
They lay there for two hours, counting streaks of light until they lost count somewhere past thirty, trading half-serious wishes on each one — hers mostly about school, about her family, one, whispered so quiet she wasn't sure he heard it at all, about her aunts finding their way back to each other someday, a wish she hadn't fully admitted to herself she was still making.
His were sillier, mostly about hockey, a championship, a specific save Jax needed to stop blowing in practice, until the last one, right before they packed up to leave, when he went quiet and serious in a way that made her turn to look at him properly.
"What'd you wish for, that one?"
"Can't tell you. Rules of wishing."
"That's not a rule, you made that up just now, on the spot, I watched you invent it."
"Fine." He turned onto his side, facing her fully, moonlight catching the side of his face, illuminating an expression more open than she'd seen from him before.
"I wished I get to keep doing this. Whatever this is, between us.
For a long time. That's it. Not very exciting as far as wishes go, no championship attached. "
"That's the most exciting one all night," she said, meaning it completely, and kissed him under a sky still streaked with the last fading light of the meteor shower.
She had never once in her whole life felt safe and electric at the exact same time. She was about to have to learn how to hold both feelings at once, permanently.
? ? ?
He picked her up on a Tuesday night in early February, no occasion, no plan beyond his truck bed lined with every blanket he owned and a cooler full of the specific snacks he'd catalogued as her favorites months ago, and drove them out past the edge of town to a hill overlooking the whole quiet valley, campus lights spread out below them like something scattered on purpose.
"This isn't a date," he said, spreading the last blanket out with unnecessary care. "This is just — I wanted to be somewhere with you that wasn't a party or a restaurant. Somewhere quiet. Is that weird?"
"That's the least weird thing you've ever said to me."
They lay back against the truck bed's rear window, tangled together under the blankets, the night sky enormous and close in the way it only got out past the streetlights, and for a long time neither of them said anything at all, just existing together in the quiet, his fingers tracing slow shapes against her hip.
"I don't think I've ever felt like this before," he said eventually, voice low, more serious than his usual easy tone.
"About anyone. I keep trying to figure out how to say it without sounding insane, and I don't think there's a way, so I'm just going to say it.
I think about you constantly. Not in a casual way.
In a way that's honestly a little disorienting, if I'm being fully honest."
"I feel that too," she admitted, turning to face him properly. "It scares me sometimes, how much."
"Good scared or bad scared?"
"I don't actually know anymore. Maybe both. Maybe that's just what it feels like when it's real."
He kissed her then, slow and unhurried, one hand coming up to cradle the back of her head, and she felt herself melt into it the way she always did with him, like her whole body had been waiting for exactly this.
His mouth moved from hers to her jaw, to the sensitive spot below her ear that made her gasp every single time, and when his hand slid up under the hem of her sweater, warm against her ribs, she didn't stop him, didn't want to.
His thumb traced slow circles just beneath her breast, patient, waiting, and when she arched into his touch instead of pulling away, something low and pleased rumbled in his chest against hers.
They stayed like that a long while, tangled together under a February sky, his mouth finding new places to memorize — the curve of her throat, the soft skin just above the waistband of her jeans, the spot behind her ear that made her fingers tighten in his hair every time.
Her hands mapped the solid warmth of his chest and shoulders in return, sliding beneath his shirt to feel him shiver under her palms, and when he finally pulled her fully into his lap, both of them breathless, foreheads pressed together, the cold night air did nothing to cool the heat building steadily between them.
Everything unhurried and thorough in the way that had become entirely his signature — nothing rushed, nothing taken, only ever given and received in equal, careful measure.
When they finally slowed, breathless and flushed despite the cold, she pressed her face into his neck and felt his heartbeat still racing beneath her palm.
"I've been with people before," he said quietly, into her hair.
"I want you to know that's not what this is.
I've never once lain in the back of my truck and just wanted to talk to someone as much as I wanted anything else.
That's new. That's completely new, and it's because of you specifically, not just because it's you in general. "
"I don't have a smooth response to that. I just know I feel the exact same way."
They stayed until the cold finally won, driving back to campus with the heat blasting and her hand resting on his knee the whole way.
She had never in her life felt this specific, terrifying, wonderful combination of safe and entirely undone.
She had no idea how soon that combination would be tested by something with a lot more consequences than a truck bed on a cold night.
? ? ?
It happened on an ordinary Wednesday in the dining hall, the kind of lunch that had become so routine neither of them thought twice about it anymore — until a guy from the football team, someone Tessa vaguely recognized from a shared lecture, slid into the empty seat beside her uninvited while Beck was up getting seconds.
"Tessa, right? I've seen you around. You should come to our thing Friday, it's gonna be a good time." He leaned in a little closer than the conversation required, his eyes dropping, obvious and unapologetic, to her chest before flicking back up.
"I'm actually seeing someone."
"That's not really what I asked." He smirked, leaning in further. "I'm pretty good at juggling more than one thing at once, for what it's worth. Multitasking's kind of my specialty. Especially with a chest like that to keep me motivated."
The words landed in the middle of the table like something physical, and Tessa felt her whole face go hot, humiliation flooding up her throat before she'd even fully processed what he'd said.
Beck arrived back at the table at exactly that second, tray still in his hands, and heard the last half of it.
He didn't say anything first. He set the tray down so hard a glass toppled, and then he was across the table, hauling the guy up out of the chair by his collar before Tessa could even get a word out.
"What did you just say to her?"
"Chill, man, it was a joke—"
Beck's fist connected before the guy finished the sentence, a single, brutal crack that sent him stumbling back into the next table, plates and trays crashing to the floor, half the dining hall going silent and then loud all at once, phones already coming up around them.
The guy came back swinging, catching Beck across the jaw, and then it was a real fight, both of them grappling into the closest table, chairs scattering, Jax shouting something from across the room and shoving through the crowd to pull them apart, two other teammates right behind him.
It took four guys to finally drag Beck off, chest heaving, knuckles split, a dining hall employee already on the phone with campus security.
"Are you insane?" Tessa hissed, mortified, aware of every single phone still pointed at them, aware of the whole room watching. "Beck, you can't just—"
"He said that about you in front of everyone and you want me to just sit there?"
"I want you to not get suspended from the team two months before the draft over a comment from an idiot who isn't even worth the bruise on your knuckles!"
Campus security walked them both out separately, Beck still glaring over his shoulder, the guy from the football team holding his own bloody nose and already loudly performing outrage for an audience.
Tessa sat on the curb outside the building afterward, face still burning, humiliated in a way that had nothing to do with anything she'd actually done and everything to do with becoming, for one horrifying lunch period, the entire dining hall's live entertainment.
"I'm sorry," Beck said finally, sitting down beside her, knuckles already swelling, voice much quieter than it had been ten minutes earlier.
"I know that was insane. I know I probably just handed campus security a very easy afternoon.
I just heard what he said and something in me went somewhere I didn't have any control over. "
"You can't do that every time someone's disgusting, Beck. You'll get kicked off the team. You'll get expelled. And I have to sit there afterward and be the girl who caused a brawl in the dining hall, which, incredible, exactly the reputation I was hoping to build for myself."
"You're right." He took her hand, careful of his split knuckles. "I'll figure out a version of defending you that doesn't end in a police report next time. I can't promise I won't want to. I can promise I'll try to actually think first."
She didn't fully forgive him until that evening, and even then only partway, but some small, quiet part of her — the part that still occasionally flinched at raised voices, that still sometimes braced for someone to defend the other guy instead of her — understood exactly what she'd just watched happen, and what it meant, even wrapped in something this reckless and humiliating.
Nobody had ever thrown a punch over her before.
She wasn't sure that was something to be proud of.
But she also wasn't sure she'd ever forget the look on his face in the half-second before he did it.
That, she thought, watching him steal a fry off her tray like nothing had happened at all, was worth more than any grand gesture he could have planned in advance.