Forever Innocent
Page 13He held out the stick and closed one eye. His arm really wasn’t too high, but still, I reached out and lowered it to the optimum level for calibration, my hand burning where it connected with his skin. He sucked in a breath and I knew he felt it too. How could he not, with all our history?
“Did you make your map yet?” he asked.
“No.”
Without the least hesitation, he took my hand and led me to my backpack, scooping it up, then around the rooftop to the far corner. No lights were hooked up there, so it was quiet and dark. “Lie here with me,” he said and set his backpack on the ground. He squeezed my fingers as he let go, and I wished we had walked some great distance, just to feel his hand on mine a little longer.
I laid my pack next to his and we stretched out on the bumpy surface, staring up at the stars.
“So how long have we both lived in the same city and not known it?” he asked.
“I got here a year ago.”
“A year.”
I couldn’t believe he was here the whole time. “It’s a big city, I guess.”
“Doesn’t seem big now. Do you work?”
“Yeah. At a coffee shop on Broadway. You?”
He shifted next to me. “At a garage. Changing oil. Easy stuff.”
“Hardly.”
A breeze kicked up and our papers fluttered. I pressed down to keep them from flying away. “I guess we should do the lab.”
He pointed to the sky. “There’s the Big Dipper.”
“We should measure it,” I said, but neither of us made any move to fill out our worksheet.
This was so easy, lying next to him, just being.
“Did we ever do any stargazing when we were kids?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Should’ve.”
“Yeah.”
“Not like we were in some metropolis.”
“Nope. I remember the stars.” I shifted on the rough roof, the bits of asphalt biting into my shoulders. Still, I swear it was the happiest I’d been in a long time. Stupid. Ridiculous. But true. I tried to think of Austin passing the note across to me at the coffee shop, but he was nothing, just no contest compared to all the emotions that surfaced with Gavin.
Even though he left.
If he had all the facts, he’d leave again.
Go away, I told those thoughts. Live in the moment. Feel something for once.
I closed my eyes, reveling in the warmth of Gavin next to me and the comfort of sharing space with someone who knew me.
“Corabelle?”
My name sounded familiar when he said it, as though no one had used it since him. “Yeah?”
“Seems like the world wants us to at least be friends again.”
I didn’t know which words to get stuck on. Friends. Or at least. “Seems like it.”
“You think we’re the only ones who still think about Finn?”
Just hearing his name out here, in the open, with the heavens opened wide, made my throat close up. “I don’t know.”
He turned his face to me but I kept my eyes up on the stars. The Big Dipper rested neatly in the sky, surrounded by lesser bits of light, and I understood how it all fit together. Some moments of our lives were vivid and strong, hanging among all the other memories, not to be forgotten. Our baby was that constellation for us, and no matter where we looked, no matter what other stars dotted our sky, he would always be there, the biggest and the brightest of them all.
Damn, this worked.
I made sure I kept my head straight, no worries about tomorrow. Just the night sky, the Big Dipper, and Corabelle next to me.
Something had shifted in her. I could see it, feel it. And as soon as I realized she wasn’t going to go away, that she’d reconciled with us being around each other again, I’d adjusted too.
She lifted her arm to point at the constellation. “I’m still reeling from the lecture on those stars.”
“Really? Why?” I’d been so distracted during class that I just transcribed the words, barely letting them penetrate. Corabelle had been so close, and I’d been so anxious to get to the TA and switch labs.
“He said two of them were Horse and Rider, orbiting together.” She dropped her arm. “They look like one star but really are two, endlessly circling each other.”
I figured Corabelle was using metaphors, like she always had. We’d been as close as one person until I’d walked. Or possibly she was just talking about stars.
“If you’d been listening today,” she went on, “you’d know that after all these centuries, a couple other astronomers decided that there were actually three. They discovered one more small star in their gravitational pull.” Corabelle still looked at the sky as she said all this, but the emotion was thick in her voice.
“That was 2009,” she said, barely holding it together, and my urge to pull her close was crazy strong. “They discovered this exactly four years ago.”
I felt the punch in my gut. That was when we last saw each other. When Finn was born. When he lived and died in his little plastic bed. I could hear the beeps of the monitor again, a steady stream of his heartbeat and random alarms. The only thing worse than those sounds was when they stopped.