Page 80 of Always Been His

“She was five,” he says. “She cried when she saw the craters. Happy tears. Said it looked like God had been eating cookies over it.”

I lean my head against his shoulder. “That is the most Iris thing I have ever heard.”

He rests his head on top of mine, and we sit like that for a moment while the sky watches us, enormous and quiet, making every problem feel temporarily small rather than the size it has been feeling inside my chest.

“I have six days,” I say to the sky.

He is quiet for a moment. “I know.”

“I don’t know what happens after six days,” I admit. “I know what I want. I know what I don’t want. But the mechanics of what happens after six days is still… A lot.”

His arm comes around my shoulders, solid and warm, pulling me into his side. “You don’t have to figure it out tonight.”

“But I’m scared I’m going to hurt you and Iris.”

He pinches my chin, tilting my head up to him. “Are you breaking up with me?”

“No.”

Grayson smirks. “Then you can’t hurt me, and I’ll take care of Iris. You won’t hurt her either. I got you.”

His thumb moves along the line of my jaw before he leans forward and presses his mouth to mine. It is slow and warm and entirely without urgency, and I lean into it and savor every moment.

“Tonight,” he murmurs, “we’re going to act like I’m seventeen years old taking you to my special hookup spot for the first time.” His nose skims the line of my cheek. “And you’re sixteen and you snuck out of Mary’s house to be here. And nothing else exists yet.”

I breathe out against his mouth.

He turns my head gently with his hand on my jaw and redirects my gaze upward, back to the sky, his chin resting against my temple. “Look,” he says, softly.

I follow his gaze.

A streak of light crosses the upper left corner of the sky, fast and clean, gone before I’ve fully registered it. Then another one, lower and slower, lasting a full second before it disappears. Then two more in quick succession, crossing paths and diverging, the whole sky suddenly alive with it.

“Perseids,” Grayson murmurs against my hair.

“I know,” I tell him. “I looked it up when I saw the first one from the porch three nights ago.”

A small sound of amusement moves through his chest. “Of course you did.”

I watch the stars fall and I close my eyes and wish for the simplest thing I know how to want. Not fame. Not the tour. Not the streaming numbers or the headlines or the machine. Just my voice, and a keyboard, and the ability to put something true into the world and have it land in the chests of the people who need it. The way it landed in mine when I was nine years old and Miss Flack handed me my first keyboard and told me to find the sound that matched the feeling.

Just that. Just music. Just Sienna.

I open my eyes. Grayson is looking at me.

His eyes catch the starlight, and I think about sixteen-year-old Sienna in a tree at Iris’s birthday party thinking about this exact face and this exact feeling and not being able to name it. And I think about how long a thing can live in you before you let it out, and how much lighter it is once you do.

“Did you wish for anything?” I ask.

He shakes his head no.

“No?” I gasp, pointing at the sky. “You missed a perfectly good shooting star?”

“I don’t have anything left to wish for,” he says simply. “I used every wish I ever had on you.”

My breath catches in my throat.

His hands find my waist, and he pulls me closer in the truck bed, slow and deliberate, turning me toward him until I am facing him cross-legged with my knees against his thigh. He looks at me for a long moment in the dark, the starlight catching the blue of his eyes, the sharp line of his jaw, the slight curl at the corners of his mouth curved upward, and then he cups my face in both palms the way he did the first time he kissed me in the oak tree ten years ago, his thumbs resting lightly at the corners of my jaw, and kisses me like we have nowhere else to be.