“Do not,” I say.
“You do, though.” She tugs at the drawstrings of her hoodie, hiding her smile. “It’s cute. Like a kid who’s about to show off his best Lego ship.”
I turn up Los Feliz, aiming for the hills, and say, “I will not be showing you my Lego ships tonight.”
“Is that a euphemism?”
“You’ll never know.”
We’re both laughing as the car starts its slow climb toward Griffith. By now, the sunset has done its work, and the city is black lace threaded with orange. You can see the Observatory perched up there, glowing like a spaceship, and I hope she gets it right away. She doesn’t, not at first. She hums along to my playlist, asks a few more deliberately annoying “is it this” questions (Paintball? Goat yoga? Live-action role-play of the Cuban Missile Crisis?), but I can see her relax into the idea of not knowing.
I park at the edge of the lot, so our hike is long and private. The sky is navy, the kind of night that makes you believe in alien abductions. There’s a faint smell of sage, dead grass, and distant skunk. I’d forgotten how unromantic the crush of LA can be. There are couples everywhere, holding hands, posing for selfies, the local astronomers lugging their enormous telescopes on carts like suitcases at the airport.
Emma hesitates as we reach the steps. “Okay, what’s the catch?”
I take her hand. My palm is sweaty, but hers is cool and dry, and the fit is so easy it’s almost muscle memory. “Star party,” I say. “I bribed the observatory people to let us up before hours. Total nerd move, but I have a sneaky suspicion that you’d enjoy this.”
She stops, letting our interlaced fingers stretch between us. “You don’t have to try with me, you know. This would have worked even if we just went to Home Depot.”
“Home Depot closes early,” I say. I want to make a joke about finding the best lighting for hostage photos of her, but the moment is sweet, and I’m so rarely sweet these days, I don’t want to spoil it.
We make our way up spiral stairs to the rooftop, dodging the world’s most awkward first date in the shadow of the dome. Two interns in Caltech sweatshirts meet us at the top; they give us the ‘this is so cool, but you’re famous, and I’m not allowed to talk to you as a person’ look. The older one shows us the first telescope, trained on something that looks like a smudge of chalk.
The intern clears his throat. “M82,” he says, voice cracking. “Cigar Galaxy. Four-point-six megaparsecs away.” He steps back from the eyepiece with a jerky nod that seems to say both look and please don’t talk to me. Emma presses her eye to the lens. Her breath catches, sharp. It’s one of those sounds that means a lot—not awe, but a kind of reverent humility at being so small.
She steps back and gestures for me to come in. I look, and the galaxy is barely there, faint as a rumor. The air smells of dust and ancient machinery.
We move from scope to scope–a nebula, Jupiter, a double star in Leo. We’re both shivering after the hour, but not from the cold. Up here, the city is so far below that it could be another planet. Up here, we’re just two people who like to ask dumb questions about the afterlife of stars. At some point, I forget why we started this. I forget the point of the charade, because this is—I am so painfully aware—better than anything I’ve done in years.
We sit on the edge of a concrete barrier, feet dangling into the darkness. The telescopes are mostly packed up. The interns are sharing a thermos and talking about orbital decay.
Emma tilts her head back and says, “I used to want to be an astronaut. Did I mention that before?”
“No, but I believe it.”
She smiles into the dark. “I liked the idea of being untethered. Like, your world literally has to shrink to what’s in your capsule, or what you can see through your viewport. I think about it a lot. How simple it must feel to be alone like that.”
I let the silence stretch. I could kiss her now, if I wanted to, and it would be real, and maybe that’s the only thing I’m scared of. “You’re not alone, though. There are… cosmonaut colleagues. Out there in the darkness with you.”
“Statistically, one of them will try to kill you eventually.”
“Or fall in love with you. Or, if you’re Asher Dixon, probably both.”
She nudges my foot, so gentle it almost breaks me. “You’re better than people think, you know.”
I look at her. “How do people think I am?”
She shrugs. “Arrogant, shallow, probably illiterate. Here you are, driving me up a mountain to look at dying stars.”
“I could be doing it for the headlines,” I say, because it’s true.
She looks at me so directly that I have to look away. “Are you?”
I want to lie. Yes, because that would keep us neat, safe, and straightforward. But Emma’s made me honest in that way that only someone who doesn’t care about your myth can do. “No,” I say. “I just wanted to see what you looked like when you weren’t pretending to be someone’s girlfriend.”
She snorts. “Joke’s on you. This is mygirlfriend persona. Ruthless, manipulative, obsessed with galaxies. If this oversized hoodie doesn’t scream “come hither,” then I don’t know what does.”
We lapse into silence, and it feels earned, not awkward. I can feel her shifting beside me, like she’s gathering the courage to say something else, something bigger, but the moment passes. She points at the faint horizon, where the city bleeds into the dark. “If you could go anywhere,” she says, “real or fake, where would it be?”
