Page 156 of Her Ex-Husband's Brother

“It’s already the best thing anyone’s ever done for me, and we haven’t even sat down yet.”

That seems to settle something in him. He reaches down and hauls me up into the truck bed. Then we burrow into the sleeping bag under the blanket side by side, my head finding the exact spot on his shoulder it’s apparently decided is its home now.

“Okay,” he says, pointing up. “See those three stars in a row, right there? Real tight together, real straight?”

I follow his finger, smiling. “You mean Orion’s belt?”

“Exactly. Once you’ve got the belt you can find basically everything else off it.” He traces it out for me—the wide shoulders, the two feet planted apart, one hand raised. “Bright red one up top, that’s Betelgeuse. Guy’s dying, actually. Massive star, could go supernova any day now, cosmically speaking, which really means sometime in the next hundred thousand years, but still.”

“That’s morbid.”

“That’s romantic. I brought you out here to watch a dying star with you.”

He grins over at me, and my stomach does the swooping thing it always does when he looks at me like I’m the whole reason for anything. He continues on with what feels like an encyclopedic knowledge, pointing out one star after another, by name. “And up above that,” he continues, “that little smudge that looks like somebody flicked a paintbrush—that’s the Pleiades. The Seven Sisters.”

“How do you know all this?”

He shrugs, and it’s the same shrug he does when I catch him being unexpectedly good at something. “Owen’s obsessed with space right now. He likes to camp out in his backyard in a little tent I got him. I point things out to him until he falls asleep on me.” A pause. “I’ve just kind of been hoping I’d get to do it with somebody who’d stay awake.”

I have to look away from him for a second, back up at the sky, because if I keep looking at his face I’m going to— I don’t know what. Cry? Gush even more about how much he’s meant to me in the healing process of getting over the mind-fuckery Jake did to me and how August has helped me feel like a real, human person again?

He points out Sirius next, low near the horizon, and it’s doing this incredible thing where it flickers between colors—blue, then red, then a hot electric white—just from twinkling that close to the ground.

“That’s the brightest star in the whole sky,” he says. “Isn’t even close. Everything else is just doing its best.”

“Overachiever.”

“Definitely a show-off,” he agrees.

He walks me through the rest of the sky, unhurried, one hand tracing shapes against the dark while the other stays wrapped around mine under the blanket. The twins of Gemini standing shoulder to shoulder above Orion’s head. Low in the north, the Big Dipper is just starting to climb up out of the trees.

He tells me to watch it—that by the time we leave tonight it’ll be twice as high as it is now, that it spins around the pole star all night like a clock hand.

I think about all the nights I spent not looking up. Sitting in that house with Jake, migraine curtains drawn, the whole sky doing this every single night right outside a window I never opened.

“Hey.” August’s voice goes soft, and I realize I’ve gone somewhere else. “Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere bad. I promise.” I turn into him instead of answering the real question, burying my face against his throat and breathing him in—soap and warmth and something underneath that’s justhim, that I could probably find blind in a crowded room by now.

“I’m just so happy I don’t know what to do with it. It keeps building up and I don’t have anywhere to put it.”

“You don’t have to put it anywhere.”

His arms come around me, and I can feel his heart going fast, faster than it should be for two people just lying still under a blanket. “You can just let it be big. I’ve got you.”

“I’ve spent my whole life being scared of feeling this much.” The words come out fast, my voice cracking a little in the middle. “Like if I let myself feel it all the way, something bad has to come balance it out. The other shoe has to drop, you know?”

“Lennon.” He pulls back just far enough to find my eyes in the lantern light, and there’s something wide open on his face. “I love you. I love you so much I drove you forty minutes out into a cow pasture to look at a dying star. I’ll love you for fuckingever, long after that star is burned out.”

“I love you too,” I say, and it comes out wrecked and certain at the same time. Because it’s just the truth. “I love you. I’ve loved you since you told me about the kiddie coaster and I didn’t even let myself know it yet.”

He makes a sound against my mouth that isn’t quite a laugh, and then he’s kissing me, both of us still smiling too hard to do it properly, cocoa forgotten and going lukewarm three feet away, Orion wheeling patient and enormous overhead like he’s got nowhere else to be tonight either.

The blankets are warm. His hands are careful and then not careful at all.

Look, this night has been romantic.

And also, this man makes me horny as shit.