Page 79

“Not ready for the night to end?” Grayson teases.

I look over at him.

His arm is across the back of my seat, his body turned toward me, and he is looking at me like he has been waiting to say something.

“Nope,” I say, popping the ‘p’.

“Do you want to see the stars?” he asks, tucking a curl behind my ear.

I look up through the windshield at the sky above the farmhouse, the stars visible from here, scattered and bright. “I can see them from here,” I tell him.

“There is a better view,” he whispers, dragging his fingertips across my thigh. “Trust me.”

“Always do,” I whisper.

He drives without telling me where we’re going. The road climbs, cutting up through the tree line on the south side of the property, the truck’s headlights carving through the dark, and then the trees thin and the road levels, and we emerge onto a flat clearing at the top of a low ridge overlooking the whole cove.

The sky from up here is something else entirely.

No trees. No ambient light from the town, which sits on the other side of the ridge and might as well be on another planet from up here. Just the full August sky spread out overhead, so thick with stars that the dark between them seems incidental, and below us the cove lying flat and black and mirror-still, the stars reflected in the water.

“It’s beautiful,” I breathe.

“Yeah,” he says, leaning forward over his wheel. “I would come here to escape during high school.”

I turn in my seat, a shit eating grin on my face. “Is this the famous Grayson Douglas hook-up spot?”

His cheeks tint a soft pink. “You heard about that?”

“Yeah,” I whisper, leaning in forward. “I wanted you to take me here so bad. It’s literally where I wanted to lose my virginity.”

He looks at me for a long moment with the radio still playing low between us. “You shouldn’t have wanted to come here back then,” he says.

“How could I not?” I murmur, leaning closer.

“Sienna, you’ve always been too special to me to bring you to some random hook-up spot,” he points out.

My heart races and I see the want crossing his ocean eyes.

“But if that’s what you wanted. I can show you what I always wanted to do with you here. And this spot will take on a whole new meaning to me,” he mutters, guiding his palm up my thigh.

I look at him through my lashes, trying to control my breathing.

“The view is better in the back,” he says, low.

I hold his gaze for half a second. “I would love to see it.”

He chuckles, clicking his door open. I follow his lead and hop out of the truck. He drops the tailgate and we climb into the bed, the same way I’ve been doing since he drove Iris and me to parties in high school, and we sit with our backs against the cab and our legs stretched out in front of us and the whole enormous sky overhead.

I cannot stop looking at it.

It does something to me, the sky. When I was a kid and everything felt too big and too loud and too much, I used to climb the oak in Grandma Mary’s backyard and look up, and the bigness of the sky made the bigness of everything else feel less personal. Like the universe wasn’t specifically targeting me. Like I was small in a way that was a relief.

“How did you find this place?” I ask.

“My father used to bring Iris and me up here,” he replies, his shoulder warm against mine. “When we were kids. He enjoyed salvaging old treasures and had this old telescope he bought at a yard sale when I was about seven, the kind you have to fiddle with for twenty minutes before you can see anything through it, and he would load it in the truck and bring us up here and we would take turns looking at the moon.” He pauses. “He always let Iris go first.”

“Of course he did.” I smile.