“Then where the heck are you taking me?”
“Remember the other night when I said we should go look at the stars and you told me to fuck off?”
“I’m painfully familiar with the incredibly embarrassing moment.”
“Well, this time I’m taking you by force.”
“Why?”
“Because nothing tops the end of a night like staring up at the sky, looking at God’s handiwork. If we’re lucky, a shooting star’ll streak by.” He sounded earnest, like he actually believedstargazing could fix all the world’s problems. I watched his profile in the faint moonlight—stubborn, ridiculous, sincere—and for the first time since he’d pulled out of my driveway, I didn’t argue with him.
The longer I watched him in silence, the more I realized he wasn’t the young Jace I remembered from when we first met. His jaw had hardened, muscle had filled in where he used to be all angles, and his trimmed facial hair gave him a weathered, tasteful kind of maturity. It suited him.
His truck came to a quick stop, pulling me from my trance.
“We’re here,” he announced, parking his truck. “Let’s go, sugar.”
As I climbed out—my legs still not working at full strength—Jace lowered his tailgate with a clank.
“Hop up here,” he said, motioning for me to sit.
“Jace, if both of my feet aren’t planted firmly on the ground, there’s a one-hundred-percent chance I’m going to face-plant,” I admitted, laughing drunkenly.
“Here, let me help you.”
Without warning, his hands gripped my hips, lifting me as if I weighed nothing at all. In one easy motion, he set me on the tailgate, gentle as though I was a piece of fragile glass.
A moment later, he slid up beside me, laying on his back, his eyes fixed on the endless black sky above.
I laid down next to him, crossing my arms across my chest.
“It’s beautiful,” I whispered. The sky looked like someone had spilled a bucket of silver dust and let it scatter around until it found its own rhythm. The stars shimmered so brightly they seemed alive, stitched together by soft rivers of light that swirled across the darkness.
“It doesn’t even look real,” I added, shaking my head. “Like we’re sitting in some kind of dream.”
“Nothing centers me more than coming out here, staring at the starry sky,” Jace said.
“What made you start coming here?” I asked, wondering how he had even found this spot in the first place since it was tucked so far off.
“A couple years ago, I had to do a lot of soul searching, and something,someoneled me out here. I was out driving one night and turned down this back road. I was drunk and I had no business driving, but that’s the truth, that’s what I was doing. I pulled off this dirt road to kill some time and sober up, found this spot, and laid in the back of my truck, staring up at the stars. I stared at the stars for hours. They felt like a magnet to my mind. The longer I stared, the more my thoughts stopped racing, and I started thinking more clearly. That was the first night in a long time that I’d felt like I was in control again. Whenever life gets hard, I come out here and think—find myself again when I feel lost.”
I sat there for a moment, stunned by Jace’s intimate confession. Something about the way he talked made me think there weren’t a lot of people who knew where this spot was or what it meant to Jace. I wasn’t even completely sure what it meant to him yet.
“Have you ever brought anyone else out here?” I asked, giving in to my curiosity.
“Nope, just you. I’d never bring someone here who might jeopardize what it represents to me. This place means to me what your coffee shop means to you—everything you’ve overcome represented through one single place in this endless universe.”
I’d never thought about it like that, but Jace was right.
The longer we stayed out here, the smaller I felt—but in an empowering way. Like the energy from the stars was charging me to become greater than what I thought I could be on my own.Maybe that was the same feeling Jace got when he needed it all those years ago.
I wondered why Jace needed it in the first place. Most people knew him as the rough and rowdy second McKinley son, tangling the sheets with a new girl every weekend. But the more time I spent with him, the more I felt like he was hiding something from me. Like he wasn’t showing me his true self, just the image he wanted everyone to see. He was holding something back, I just wasn’t sure why yet.
“So, this is your super-secret hangout spot, huh?” I teased, trying to change the subject to something a little less serious. “What if I decide to steal it?”
“Pinky promise me right now you won’t,” he said with a serious look, holding up his finger. “Promise you’ll never come out here without me. And just so you know, I take a pinky promise very seriously.”
I looped my tiny pinky around his strong one. “I pinky promise I won’t come out here without you, no matter what.”
