Page 37 of Sunset Catchers

“I like simple things,” I say, really meaning that I crave them from the very pit of my core.

“So do I.” I hold in my snort.

Levi both wanting to know me and liking simple things is as ironic as it gets. I turn my face toward the water. The sky is tying off itself nicely for the night, with pink and purple ribbons amid the impending dark blue dusk.

“The sky is pink,” I say wistfully.

“Tomorrow will be a good day then.”

My head snaps toward him so fast, my neck hurts.

“What…why would you say that?”

“I don’t know,” he says insouciantly. “I think it’s a thing Kit used to say. That when the sky is pink, it means we’ll have good weather or something. Since I love when it’s sunny outside, I guess my brain blended the two together when I was a kid. So anytime I see the sky turning pink, I think to myself that tomorrow will be a good day.”

I’m shocked out of my mind.

This never happened before.

I don’t know what to say.

“It probably sounds stupid. I know it’s a matter of science.”

His cheeks turn red. He’s misunderstanding my silence.

And it is. A matter of science. And no, I still don’t fully grasp it. But most importantly, it’s not stupid, at all.

The tides have a pull on the moon; pink sunsets have a pull on me.

“It’s not stupid!” I blurt out with my intensity turned on way too high. I turn the dial lower. “At all,” I whisper.

“Okay.” Levi is clearly befuddled by the way I’m acting right now. He tries to find some obvious explanations on my face. I want to tell him more. But I’m not ready to go into the well of what pink sunsets truly mean to me. So, I settle on a version that barely skims the surface.

“I think the same.”

His gaze is penetrating. He’s connecting dots I hadn’t known he even drew. I turn away from the knowledge that he’s decrypting me without my consent. My phone alerts me of a new text. I slide it out of my pocket to see a message from Junie lighting up my screen: a picture of a pink sunset, taken from our apartment balcony. I snap a picture of the sunset in front of me and send it to her. Levi’s looking at me funny when we share eye contact again.

“So,” he begins casually, “Do you have a girlfriend? I laugh. Shake my head.

“No. But I do have a best friend.”

“She must be really important to you,” he notes.

“Yes,” I confirm. “Junie is my favorite person in the world. We’ve been best friends for sixteen years.”

“That’s a long time.”

I smile. It is. “Do you have a best friend?” His smile broadens.

It feels like we’re twelve years old, with our innocence still intact.

“Yup, Benny. Louise is his grandmother, actually. Her and Kit have been best friends for over fifty years, so our families have always blended together. Our parents are also very close, and we were born a month apart from each other. It was pretty much inevitable that we’d end up becoming friends.”

That’s kind of really sweet. I tell him that much.

“So, sixteen years. How does that compare to your…?”

“Sleek.”