“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 gotsoexcited 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 bodyit’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,veryclear 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 atthosememories, 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.
