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“Please tell me I don’t see that thing…moving.” I swallow hard, and Barrett laughs.
“You mean the surface of it?”
I struggle not to shudder. “Yes.”
I’m tempted to pull the goggles away from my face, because something about seeing the sun’s shifting surface makes me want to hurl.
“I think that’s supposed to be the fun part.” Barrett laughs.
“It’s…creepish. It looks kind of like… What are those little lines? It almost looks like geysers shooting up.”
“Sun spots? Or solar flares? Haywood had a long monologue written out on cue cards.” He laughs again. “Kind of like a tour of space. I guess he would go through it while guests looked through the goggles like you’re doing.”
I peek out from behind the goggles. “Do you remember any of it?”
“Some.”
Or maybe all. I remember how he didn’t have to write my phone number down on the porch that night as Barrett gives me what I’m sure must be Haywood’s geeky guided solar system tour, verbatim. The wording doesn’t sound like his, and sometimes after dropping a hardcore nerdy fact on me, I think I can hear him smirking.
I find myself giggling around Jupiter. A second later, I feel Barrett’s big hand on my knee. I draw the goggles away from my eyes and find him looking at me with arched brows and a shaming look.
“Are you laughing at your celestial tour guide?”
I wrap my hand around his. “Maybe.”
I’m hoping he’ll lie down beside me. Instead he moves his hand and changes my view again, zooming out so I can see the big dipper. About which he knows all the things.
When he’s finished unloading more data on me, I smile and hand the goggles to him. “I’m not going to ask how you know that stuff, you dork.”
“Nav,” he answers. His tongue darts over his lower lip. “Navigating.”
So, by constellations, I guess. “Were you a navigator in the Rangers?”
His eyebrows lift, his features making a poker face. “I was a lot of things.”
I want to ask—like really want to—but I’m not about to pry. There’s been enough drama tonight between the two of us, and despite how solicitous he’s being now, I don’t trust him not to go all moody on me again.
“That fits with my impression of you as a closet geek,” I tease.
His hand comes around my thigh, the fingers squeezing gently at a spot that makes me giggle. “You better watch yourself,” he teases.
It’s my turn to watch him as looks through the goggles for a few minutes, sitting cross-legged beside me. I make him tell me what he’s focused on, and this time I get the long, tragic tale of Artemis and Orion—Zeus’s daughter and her mortal human lover—and Scorpius, the scorpion Zeus used to kill Orion, who, as a mortal, was not supposed to cavort with royal Artemis.
“The story goes, Artemis flew away with Orion’s body and tossed him into the sky—but nowhere near the scorpion that killed him,” Barrett finishes.
“Scorpius…”
He brings the goggles down off his eyes. “Yeah.”
“Wow. That’s impressive storytelling, geek boy.”
He sets the glasses on his knee and leans back on his hands, his back to the left panel of glass. I don’t expect the heavy sigh that comes from him, nor the way his eyes squeeze shut just briefly before he says, “I haven’t told that story in a long time.”
“Yeah?” When he just blinks at me, I add softly, “Who’d you tell it to last time?”
I see his chest inflate with breath before he says, “My brothers.”
Brothers?
