He turned and looked at me.
For a long moment he just — looked. Like he was checking something. Making sure I was still the same person he’d always found here.
I was. I always would be.
“Your family,” he said. Then stopped. Shook his head like he was editing himself.
“What?”
He looked back at the sky.
“Nothing.”
“Cassian.”
A long pause.
“They’re the reason I —" He exhaled. Slow. Careful. “I don’t know what I would’ve done without them. Without your mom and her hugs and your dad’s terrible jokes and — all of it.”
His voice had gone low. Almost rough.
“I don’t know who I’d be.”
• • •
The words landed somewhere deep. I didn’t trust myself to speak for a moment.
“They love you,” I said finally. “You know that, right? It’s not — they just love you.”
I love you. I didn’t say.
He didn’t answer.
But something in his face shifted. Something that looked almost like relief.
• • •
We stayed up there until the stars were fully out. At some point we’d migrated closer together without deciding to — his knee against mine, our shoulders touching, the warmth of him solid against my arm in the cooling night air.
He was pointing out constellations with the wrong names, completely confidently, and I was letting him because I liked the sound of his voice when he was like this. Unhurried. Here.
“That’s the Big Dipper,” I said.
“That’s what I said.”
“You said Big Dripper.”
“Same thing.”
“It’s really not.”
He shoved me lightly with his shoulder and I shoved back and we were grinning at the sky like idiots and I thought — this. This is what I’d choose. If I got to choose anything.
This exact thing.
If it was up to me.
Which it never was.
