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Okaaaay. Well, what the heck else was she going to do? She made her way down the dim stairwell and stopped at the bottom in front of a classroom door not unlike the dozens of doors she’d walked through for her own classes. What was going on?
Oh. She couldn’t prevent a gasp. “Planetarium,” she said, reading aloud the word on the sign outside the door.
Then, again, because she couldn’t quite believe it. How had she not known about this place? “Planetarium.” The word felt simultaneously familiar and strange in her mouth.
Her reflex was to tell herself to fake it till she made it, but for once she thought she might be facing a situation in which faking simply would not work. So she just took a deep breath and pushed open the door, stepping into a giant, dim classroom. Inside was a big puffy black dome made of some kind of inflatable material. It looked like a bouncy castle you’d see kids jumping on at a fair.
It had a door. A door she was obviously meant to walk through.
So she conjured Brave Cassie, the one who’d quit in order to start living her life in the here and now, and walked through it.
She stepped into the night sky.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. It was so beautiful, yet so impossible. Her legs started to shake, like they didn’t know whether to buckle or to bolt.
“Cassie.”
Without even taking her eyes from the stars, she knew it was him. Of course she did. She’d known from the moment she saw the sign on the door that he was behind this, hadn’t she? It was what she wanted and what she dreaded, at the same time.
She dragged her eyes from the pinpricks of light on the ceiling. There wasn’t enough light to really see his face, but he held up a palm, his hand a pale presence in the dark. And the smell of him—the lemon tree in the bog—was an assault in the enclosed space. How had she ever thought she could get over this man?
“I have two things to say.” His gravelly voice unsettled her, scraping over exposed nerves. “Let me say them, and then you can leave if you want.” He didn’t wait for her acquiescence, just started talking, both of them standing under the strange little black dome. “One. I read your text messages to Danny about Brian Wexler. I thought they were about me.”
Her hand flew to her mouth as she struggled to remember what exactly she’d said about Brian. He made her feel like a whore; she couldn’t wait to stop pretending. Oh, my God, she’d referenced him making her say his name. The enormity of the misunderstanding hit her, a knockout punch of regret. And something else—hope. She bit the insides of her cheeks and looked up at the stars, which had grown fuzzy. “And the second thing?” she whispered.
He didn’t hesitate. “The second thing is, I love you. I don’t know how to be without you.”
She wailed then, and she could only hope he recognized it as a wail of joy. She started to crumple, but he caught her and hugged her so tight she thought her ribs might snap.
“I love you, too,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, pulling back enough to frame her face with his hands.
They were close enough that she could see he hadn’t shaved in days. His eyes were filmed with liquid, but he was smiling a small, lopsided smile.
“I didn’t think Toronto had a planetarium,” she croaked, which was a ridiculous thing to say, but there it was. She remembered the big McLaughlin Planetarium from her childhood. It had closed to make way for condos, and even as a girl, she had lamented its loss.
“Just this little one, right here under your nose all this time.” He tapped her nose, as if to illustrate his point. “They use this for educational purposes, which is why it’s a weird inflatable thing inside a classroom—it’s portable. They only do public shows once a month.”
She cleared her throat, trying for levity. “And why do I suspect tonight is not one of the public shows?”
He answered with a question of his own. “Do you have Christmas Eve plans?”
“No. Do you?”
He grinned. “I do now.”
She looked up at the projected sky, the impossibly gorgeous sky she always knew was just above the clouds and the city lights. The sky she had not seen like this until she’d visited the island with him. “What about the rules?” she asked.
Nothing about his stance changed. He kept standing there a foot away from her in the dark. She felt his face change more than she saw it, felt his eyes slide down her body, just like they had that first night at the bar. “Fuck the rules.”
All right then. She closed her eyes. It was almost too much. To go from dejection and heartbreak to wild, almost-painful joy in the space of a few minutes…well, she needed a moment.
