Page 59 of True Colors

“It’s incredible.” He turns to me. “Thank you, Anouk, for bringing me.”

My cheeks warm. “You asked.”

“Best decision I’ve made in a long time.”

The lights dim, and we sink back into the reclining seats. A soft anticipatory hush ripples through the dome.

There aren’t many people here today, just a handful of astronomy nerds scattered like constellations around the room, which means Luther and I have an entire row to ourselves.

He shifts beside me, the leather creaking softly. Our arms brush—just for a moment—but the spark it sends down my side lingers long after the dark settles in.

Up above us, the dome goes completely black—and then, almost in slow motion, a single star flickers to life.

All at once, it’s just the universe…and us.

A man’s crisp voice comes through the speakers. “Welcome, explorers. Tonight, we journey beyond our solar system, to worlds shaped by light we can’t see, and atmospheres we can only imagine.”

A soft hum of ambient sound swells—something between a low orchestral drone and the whisper of distant wind.

Then the starfield blooms.

Soon, visuals of exoplanet atmospheres, rendered through spectroscopic mapping, cascade across the dome like liquid light.

Bands of color ripple outward—violet haze, emerald clouds, threads of gold where alien suns filter through gases humanity has only ever seen as faint signatures on a graph.

At one point, the dome bursts into a swirl of nebulae, and I hear myself exclaim, without thinking, “I want to live there.”

He looks at me, then, surrounded by the stars, and my entire chest tumbles in on itself. He puts his hand on mine and entangles our fingers. “Me, too,” he whispers.

His touch, for the first time, past perfunctory and professional, is erotic. I stop listening to the nice man talking about exoplanets and simply feel. He’s just holding my hand, but the intimacy of it is profound.

When the show ends, he lets go, and we walk out into the afternoon sun filtering through the academy courtyard.

Children run around the fountains.

Couples take selfies by the Living Roof.

Everything is normal.

Except it’s not because for fifteen minutes, a man held my hand, a man who isn’t Finn, and my mind is still buzzing because of it.

Luther tilts his head. “Hungry?”

I should say no, say I need to get home, and remember professional boundaries.

But I’m not ready to give up on the closeness I just experienced with him.

“Yes,” I say instead. “I am.”

He steers my bike and walks me out to the Music Concourse parking garage.

“I know a place, but we have to drive,” he tells me.

“My bike⁠—”

“It’ll be fine,” he cuts me off.

When we reach his car—a sleek black Audi—I notice something strapped to the outside of the trunk.