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“It’s been a wee while for me, too,” Luke said. “Here. Let’s unzip one and put it on the bottom, then put the other one on top. Cozier, eh.”
“Right,” Hayden said. “OK.” Getting that tongue-too-big feeling again. But when he was lying on his back with Luke’s big body pressed up close and warm beside his, and they both had, yes, their heads stuck out of the end of the tent and were watching the night sky transform, he forgot it.
At first, it was only a few stars. As they watched, though, the sky darkened and more and more appeared. Not just pinpricks of light, but whole … whole waves of them, or clouds of them, some bright and some dim, blazing in the night like a million candles, turning the sky as much purple and blue as black. “The Magellanic Clouds,” Hayden told Luke, who’d said precisely nothing so far, “there, around the Milky Way. Not actually clouds, but whole other galaxies, very far away. Again, Isaiah.”
“Mm,” Luke said. “I don’t know the stars that well, especially in the Southern Hemisphere. I like them, though.”
“Want me to tell you?” Hayden asked. “The constellations and all?”
“Yeh,” Luke said. “That’d be good.”
“Jupiter and Saturn,” Hayden said, pointing. “There in the southwest, that very bright spot. They look like they’ve merged, but of course they haven’t, it’s just their position right now. The Great Conjunction, they call it. Rare, so we’re lucky. And Mars. You can see that it’s a bit red. And Orion in the north.”
“The Hunter,” Luke said.
“Betelgeuse, the red supergiant, in there, and Rigel, that one’s a bit blue. You can actually see the colors down here, at least I’m pretending you can. The Southern Cross, helping you find your way south and back home again. And the constellation Carina, there. That’s meant to be the keel of a ship, and the bright star is Canopus, the helmsman, steering the ship. Sailing through the night sky.”
“That’s nice,” Luke said. “A nice thought.”
“I’m never sure, though,” Hayden said, “if it’s better to look for the patterns you know are up there, or just to … to look at all of it for yourself.”
“Something to be said for that,” Luke said.
Hayden shivered, and Luke said, “We can scoot back inside and zip the tent up. Warmer, eh.”
“Yeh,” Hayden said, feeling ridiculously shy again, but comforted, too. Luke was possibly the most noticing person he’d ever met, and definitely the most solicitous. Well, other than the other day, but he’d take that, too.
When the stars were zipped away, they fell silent, only their breath audible in the silence around them. Hayden finally said, “I was proud today. Of you. Proud of you.”
“Same,” Luke said. “Of you.”
“Me? What did I do?”
“The wedding. That was nice. Did you write that?”
“Some of it.” Shy again. “The part about the rings—I wrote that.”
“It was nice. And it sounded like you believed it.”
“Well, good,” Hayden said. “That was the idea.”
Luke found his hand under the sleeping bag, and laced his fingers through Hayden’s. And Hayden took a breath.
Get out of your comfort zone. You want your life to be different? Make it different.
“Could we try something new?” he asked.
“Well, yeh,” Luke said. “Probably. But—tent.”
“What, in case I scream?” Hayden tried to laugh. It wasn’t easy. “I want to … I want to touch you. And hold you, and kiss you, and do some other things. Basically, do the things I want, the way I never do. Though—consent, of course. It’s hard to ask, but dancing, today … how I feel … how I feel about you … I want to.”
And held his breath.
Right, Luke thought. Right. He said, “Uh …”
“Or not,” Hayden said, “if you’re not comfortable.”
“Could be hard for me to keep quiet,” Luke said, trying to make a joke. His heart was, suddenly, beating like it was the eightieth minute and you were making that last, desperate defensive stand. Ka-boom. Ka-boom. Ka-boom.
