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The mischief tracing her smile makes my heart skip a beat. “Greek god of wine.”
She sits, and the air becomes infused with the smell of something light and floral. As far as unwanted company goes, she’s not the worst choice.
She drinks again and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Sorry, I didn’t bring glasses. Didn’t know there’d be trespassers here.”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that, right?” She glances at the closed roof-deck door. “Won’t your boss wonder where you went?”
“Nah, my boss is a pushover. He lets me get away with whatever I want.”
She arches an eyebrow. “Even stealing the finest red wine blend on this side of the Atlantic?”
The challenge in her words is met with the distant sound of Kingsette’s only train rumbling out of town.
“Even that.”
A cloud drifts in front of the moon, and the little light between us dims. The familiarity between us blinks out, too, as if it were just a trick of the light. She hands me back the bottle without drinking and starts to stand.
My stomach seizes. I thought I wanted to be alone, but now the idea of sitting on this bench with only my thoughts seems absurd.
“I’m Will, by the way. Thought you should know my name since we’ve shared germs now.”
She sits, melting back onto the bench like she wasn’t ready to leave me yet either. “Nice to meet you, Will. I’m Hope.”
“Will and Hope. Funny, our parents had the same idea when they named us.”
She tilts her head, and I don’t blame her for being confused. Bad wine on an empty stomach is a recipe for unfortunate wordplay.
“We were both named after vague, indefinable concepts,” I explain.
Her eyebrows draw together. “You really are a writer.”
“No. Iwasa writer. Now I’m a bartender. It’s a long story.”
“I get it. I know a thing or two about long stories.”
That low dip in her voice again, the one that sounds like heartbreak, makes my chest tighten. “Is your long story the reason you’re hiding up here?”
“Yep,” she says, popping thep, marking the end of this line of questioning.
“Oh,” I breathe, and she stops me with a look.
“Don’t you dare say, ‘I’m sorry.’” Temper flares to life, as stunning and surprising as a crackle of fire streaking against a midnight sky. “If those words come out of your mouth, I’m stealing your wine and heading to that gazebo.”
I put my hands up. “You’re the boss.”
“Good.”
We pass the wine bottle back and forth to the sound of an owl hooting in the distance. Flickers of a bonfire near Lake Kingsette are justbarely visible to our far right. On our left, the only strip of light belongs to the few bars that make up Kingsette’s nightlife. It’s a far cry from the lights and fast pace of LA, which already feels like a distant memory.
I point to a star. “That bright star? Did you know that it’s fifteen hundred light-years away? A hundred times farther than any other star you can see. When I lived in LA, we could barely see the stars. But in Kingsette, we can see fifteen hundred light-years away.”
The weird thing about Kingsette is that you can see stars that are light-years away, but you can’t see a future until you leave.
“Fifteen hundred light-years, huh?” She leans back to look up. Truly look. Most people don’t take the time to do that. “How do you know that?” she asks.
I shrug. “I met an astronomer once in a small town outside of Dublin. He gave me a lesson one night.”
