“I’ve always wanted to do this,” I tell her. “There are usually way too many people here.”
Gemma huffs from a few feet away, hands in the pockets of her joggers and staring at me from beneath her black baseball hat.
“Have you ever seen a sky like this?” I ask.
She takes a couple of steps towards me. “Yeah. Out at Joshua Tree,” she says.
“Do you camp?” I ask.
She snorts. “No,” she says, shaking her head. “I mean, I have, but I’m not serious about it by any means. Views like this, though… I might go camping again for this.”
“Zeb likes to camp,” I say.
Gemma smirks. “That doesn’t surprise me at all.”
“He’s always wanted us to go to Joshua Tree. Says we’ll have an out-of-body experience there. Aliens and shit,” I go on.
“Okay, I take it back. I’d go camping just to hear his take on all of that,” she says when she reaches me.
I snicker. “I’ll tell him to plan a trip. That could be a fun way to get out of our heads with the album, too.”
“Do they make national park horror movies?” Gemma asks.
“I feel like the answer to that should be yes. Especially the chasing part. Big open fields. Aliens. Wild animals.”
“Plenty of places to bury the bodies,” she adds, and I grin.
“How many people do you have to get rid of?” I ask.
She chuckles. “Ah… three,” she tells me, and I halfway wonder if it’s a joke or not.
Her smile widens upon seeing my obvious confusion. “Girl has to have enemies, right?”
I eye her. “Do they, though? Is that like a normal thing?”
“I think it’s hard to go through life without having at least one grudge,” she says.
“Like the people who make it all the way to adulthood without any kind of trauma,” I say.
“That is a special kind of life,” she agrees. “I wonder what it’s like to hold onto innocence for that long.”
“I feel like I was born guilty,” I say. “Like I never even stood a chance. There was always something that was going to fuck me up.”
“Life is shitty like that,” she says, smirking.
I beam. “I love finding other cynical people,” I say. “No grass is greener or toxic positivity. The world is a pile of shit. We’re just lucky enough to find the patches of wildflowers every now and then.”
“The occasional mushroom growing on top that gives you delusions,” she jokes.
A soft snicker leaves me. “You get it,” I say.
Gemma pauses when her chest brushes mine. The pull between us overwhelms all of my senses. It feels like she’s already holding me in her arms, already kissing me deeply as if the stars might rip me from her grasp if she doesn’t.
And yet, she remains centimeters away.
I pathetically lean toward her when she wraps my hair around her finger, gaze searching my face like she feels the same pull.
“One day, I’ll kiss you under the actual sky like this,” she says as she tips my chin back.
