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He pulls his hand away and leans back on the palms of his hands, looking up at the sky. I watch him, the way the moon highlights his cheek bones and the scruff that’s forming along his jaw.
“You’re staring,” he murmurs with a smile.
I look back up at the sky and shrug. “Not anymore.”
His laugh is low and sends chills up my spine. I sigh and lean my head to the side, my forehead brushing his shoulder. He shifts until my head is resting perfectly in the crook between his neck and shoulder.
“Lucy?”
“Yes?”
“Wanna hear a secret?”
“Yes, please.” I smile.
“I think . . . I think I’d like to go back to school.”
I lift my head to look at him, at the shy way he glances at me and smiles a little. He was so young when his mom died, and was forced to carry so much. His dad completely shut down, and Wyatt had to pick up the slack. He had a fifteen year old sister to take care of. But before all of that, he was also a kid fresh out of high school with dreams and plans. And he never got the chance to chase those.
“Yeah? What do you think you’d like to study?” I ask.
He looks out over the farm and rubs the back of his neck. “Remember when I said I’d thought about being a veterinarian?”
I smile, remembering the milkshakes and the first time I rode shotgun in his truck.
“I do. I think you would be really good at it.”
“I’d be in school for, like, eight years. By the time I got out I’d be almost thirty-four.”
I whistle dramatically. “Gee, that old? Might as well put you in a nursing home.”
Wyatt smirks and shoves me with his shoulder playfully.
“That’s not old, Wyatt. You’re twenty-five, you’re allowed to change your life if you want. If you wanted to pack up and move to Switzerland to start an alpaca farm, you could.”
He raises his eyebrows at me quizzically. “That’s a very specific career path.”
I shrug and tuck my hands under my thighs. “I had lofty goals as a ten-year-old.”
“Interesting, we’re going to circle back to that at some point, because I havelotsof questions.”
“Seriously though, Wyatt. If you want to go back to school, you should. Just because we’ve experienced this awful loss doesn’t mean we have to stop living. At some point, we have to pick up the pieces and start to put them back together, right?”
Wyatt sighs heavily and turns to look at me, his face a mix of emotions.
“You wanna know another secret?” he asks softly. I nod, because suddenly I can’t remember any words. “For so long, I didn’t feel anything. I was numb. And I didn’t even realize that until I heard you talking to your dead dad a few feet from my mother’s grave. I didn’t realize it untilyou. You have reminded me what it’s like to feel everything, all at once and all the time, when I had gotten so used to feeling nothing at all. I’ve gone from nothing to everything just like that.”
There are moments in our lives that I think we will remember forever. First dances, first kisses, first time a song explains exactly what we’re feeling. And this . . . this is one of the moments I think I’m always going to remember. The soft yet intense way Wyatt’s looking at me, how close he’s gotten without me even noticing. I want to get his words tattooed on my heart. I never want to go a day without remembering them.
His hand has moved to my cheek and it’s sliding around to cup the back of my head. His eyes have never left mine.
“I’m going to kiss you now, if that’s okay?” he whispers softly.
I can’t help but smile as I whisper back, “That’d be good.”
His laugh is soft as he brushes his lips against mine in a barely-there kiss. And it is this exact moment—this beautiful, perfect moment that I want to imprint into my brain—that I hear a very loud, very obnoxiousmoo.
My eyes fly open and I let out a very embarrassing squeal as Wyatt calmly looks over his shoulder at the giant brown cow that’s ambled its way over. And behind it, when I squint my eyes through the dark, I realize there are a lot more. They are slowly surrounding us and, crap, turns out Iamafraid of cows. And Wyatt, the absolute jerk, is trying not to laugh.
