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Just like that, he lit her on fire.
He put his hands against the amp on either side of her head, crowding in, while hers were pressing into the muscles of his lower back. They felt as tight as they’d looked when she saw them earlier. A little moan of appreciation escaped her throat. Wanting more and unable to stop herself, she flipped her hand beneath his shirt and laid her palm against his skin. He was feverish beneath her fingers, and the smooth, delicious heat of him sent her senses into overdrive. At the same time, he slid a hand from her shoulder to her hip, blazing a trail, to cup under her bare thigh and hitch her knee around his waist.
She gasped into his mouth, completely drunk on him and ready to fully surrender, when the door they’d passed through suddenly shut. A loudclunkfollowed the sound and echoed into the dark loudly enough to startle them both.
Their lips parted, and they froze. Gemma’s heart hammered in her chest, pumping blood to parts of her body that made her dizzy. They stood perfectly still, wound around each other like vines, and waited.
No lights flipped on. No one shouted at them. No one appeared to tell them to leave.
Jack stepped back, and Gemma set her foot back on the ground. Every place where he’d been touching her screamed for him to return. “Did we just get locked in here?” he asked.
A sudden sense of panic hit Gemma like they were trapped in a closet. But then she remembered they were standing in the dark corner of an enormous open space.
She slipped away from him and carefully walked in the direction of the stage. “You mean,outhere?” Her voice carried like a small bird flapping into the endless night.
She stepped into the moonlight on the empty stage and looked out at the dark hillside. Row after curved row of abandoned seats sat silent under a dusting of stars. With the stage lights hanging from the domed ceiling turned off, they were far enough into the hills for the night sky to twinkle above them. Gemma gazed up at it and had a sudden vision of herself as the tiny speck she was. Not more than a grain of sand in a boundless expanse.
Jack came to stand beside her. She felt his eyes on her face, outlining her profile, before he too looked up at the sky. “What are you thinking about?”
“The universe.”
Her mind tended to telescope when she thought of the unknown. It zoomed from the infinite space on all sides of everything down through the solar system, the atmosphere, the sky, the clouds, all the way to her own two feet on the ground in her shoes. The rapid in-and-out gymnastics that she let her mind do sometimes made her dizzy. Not in a way that physically challenged her balance, but one that left her mind tumbling down corridors ofwhyandhow. Shestruggled to comprehend how it all existed, what was beyond it, and her purpose in it.
But then people like Jack turned up, and she realized that maybe connections in life were all that really mattered.
She slipped her hand into his and looked back up at the sky. “Do you think we’re spinning again?”
Jack released a heavy breath, knowing she was referring to the globe demonstration in Dr. Woods’s lab. If Jack’s theory was right, all the axes should be back in motion. “I certainly hope so.”
She couldn’t feel anything different. Gravity hadn’t felt like it shifted in any direction other than pulling her more toward Jack.
She nervously squeezed his hand and turned to face him. “Jack, what if—”
He shook his head before she could finish asking the thing that she was sure neither of them wanted to consider. The silent question hung between them with the weight of a thousand unsaid words. She looked up into his eyes and was struck with sudden, paralyzing fear that she might not recognize them the next time she saw him. Her tongue grew thick, and she couldn’t voice the question that had been on it moments before.
Jack sensed her worry, perhaps feeling it himself, and reached for her other hand. The certainty she’d seen on his face every time he’d tried to explain what was going on throughout the day settled into place. His jaw muscle twitched and his eyes focused. “I have another theory.”
“Oh?” she said, intrigued.
“Yes. I think we should stay awake all night, just in case.”
A laugh popped from her lips.
“I’m serious! It’ll be a precaution. We’ve made it this far. Do you really want to risk having to start all over?”
“Of course not. Though I have to admit, your eleventh-hour worry has got me a little concerned. You don’t think it’s a midnight thing—which we arewellpast by now?”
He shook his head. “It can’t be. I regularly stay up past midnight, and it never made a difference.”
Even the thought of such a late bedtime made her tired.
“I go to bed before eleven every night.”
He unthreaded their fingers and held out his hands. “Well, there you go. That’s why it never worked.”
“Because I was asleep?” she asked with an arched brow.
He laughed. “When are you going to start believing me about all this?”
