Page 58 of True Colors

I roll my eyes.

He clinks his bottle against mine. “Cheers, man. And welcome to the ‘fucked-up man in love and trouble’ club.”

I take a swallow of my beer, unable to stop smiling.

Yeah, Luther, man, you’re in trouble.

CHAPTER 13

Anouk

Spring in San Francisco is indecisive—fog in the morning, sunshine by noon, wind that tries to steal my scarf by five—but today feels charmed. Or maybe that’s just me because I’m walking toward the California Academy of Sciences, and Luther is waiting by the entrance, leaning against a railing with his hands in his pockets, looking like a man who shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public without a warning label.

Wow! He’s so hot!

He’s in jeans and a dress shirt, what he usually wears to work, but the shirt is unbuttoned, and underneath is a Grateful Dead T-shirt. Instead of dress shoes, he’s got sneakers on. His hair is rumpled. His blue eyes are brighter because the sun is clear. The man is handsome. Sinfully so.

He straightens when he sees me.

“Hi,” he says, a little breathless.

“Hi,” I echo, definitely not just a little breathless.

We walk inside together, as I tell myself to breathe, to act normal, to remember he is my boss and this is not a date, no matter what the butterflies in my stomach or Finn think.

“So, what you’re saying is that he asked about your plans and then said he wants to join you?”

“Yep.”

“That sounds like a date,” Finn declared.

“No. He said he was interested in exoplanet atmospheric signatures using spectroscopic mapping.”

He stares at me like I’ve switched languages. “Annie, no one is interested in exoplanet whatever.”

“He said he was and⁠—”

“It’s a date.”

“It’s not.”

But when Luther’s hand brushes against my back as we pass through the dim hallway toward the planetarium, guiding me gently, the butterflies in my stomach scream, “Yes, this is a date,” in twelve different dialects.

The Morrison Planetarium is one of my favorite places in the city. The massive dome, the soft darkness, the illusion that you’re suspended inside a starfield—it loosens something tight in my chest that almost nothing else can reach.

When I was a child, I used to look up at the night sky and try to count the stars, even though I knew I’d never get close. The sky was endless and mercifully indifferent to everything happening in my life.

When you look at something that vast—when you feel how enormous the universe is—you can’t help feeling small. But it’s the good kind of small—the kind where your problems shrink with you, where the world stops pressing quite so hard.

The planetarium gives me that feeling every single time.

“Wow,” Luther breathes as he looks around, his head tipping back to take in the dome and the galaxy blooming across it.

The awe in his voice reminds me of the year Finn and I spent Christmas at Miss Helen’s house. She let us decorate the tree—our first real tree—and when Finn plugged in the lights, the whole room erupted in color.

He’d stared at it with that same expression Luther wears now, as if the world cracked open just enough to let wonder spill out.

“It’s beautiful, right?”