Page 28

CHAPTER 28

THE DARKNESS

EMORY

"Are you serious?" I stare up at Kayden. The only reason I know it's him is because I recognize his sneakers. The rest of him is hidden by the blankets clutched in his arms.

"Absolutely. It's freezing up here, and you don't want to go inside. Stand up just a second so I can spread one of these out for you."

"How about you just leave me alone instead?" It's so cold, I've moved past simple shivering and into the kind of teeth chattering that would have a dentist dreaming of buying a new vacation home. But the cold is still less than I deserve.

Kayden kneels and spreads the black comforter from his bed beside me on the grass.

"Kayden, I don't want it. Please." But he scoops his hands under me anyway, and my heart thuds to a stop as he lifts me onto the blanket like I barely weigh more than a pillow. "What the fuck!" I shriek so loud that all of downtown Salt Lake City can probably hear me. "You can't just do that!"

"Pretty sure I did. You're going to get hypothermia." He lies next to me on the comforter and pulls two more blankets over us. "'Nothing's gonna hurt you tonight. Not on my watch.'"

I turn to look at him, weighing whether I want to finish the quote from the movie or lie here in silence. "'Don't worry about the doctor,'" I say. "'This trial starts Monday.'"

"Really? You've seen A Few Good Men enough times to quote that?"

I shrug and do my best to fight back the grin that's threatening to form. "I wanted to grow up to be Demi Moore."

"Makes sense for a girl. But I was a teenage boy, so I had… different thoughts about her."

"Gross. Thanks for oversharing. You should leave me alone before you feel compelled to tell me something else I don't want to know."

He edges a little closer to me, and I feel the heat coming from him. How is he still so warm after being outside for so long? He finds my hand and threads his fingers through mine. "Not going to happen. You need me, so I'm not leaving your side."

Every little hair along my body stands on end. My body might have forgotten what this is, but I haven't. I'm a tool he's using to get a new contract. Hockey is the only thing he truly loves. Definitely not me.

And I shouldn't want him to. I've never let myself have feelings for any man after Seth. But I've been living with Kayden for four days, so of course, I'm going to feel something for him. That's probably why my heart feels like it's flipping over right now. Why I look forward to him coming home. Why he was the first person I wanted to talk to after having the worst day of my career.

Not just the first person. The only person.

But none of that means anything. I let my head fall back against the soft comforter, and I gaze up at the sky.

"What are you looking at?" he asks after a few minutes of silence.

I shrug, realizing that I'm not shivering anymore. "The sky. Stars."

"But which one?"

I turn to find him staring at me. "What difference does it make?"

"Because I want to look at the same star you're looking at. I want to see the same thing you see."

Why does he have to be like this? When I agreed to our deal, I thought I was pretending to be the fiancée of a man who doesn't care about anyone except himself. That would have been easy. I wouldn't want to scoot closer to that man. But Kayden isn't who I thought he was.

"I don't think you see the same thing I see." The cold wind whips away the steam of my breath as I speak.

For just a second, his face twists before he looks toward our feet. "You're probably right, but what if I want to try anyway?"

The words hang heavy in the little space between us until his attention moves back to the sky. After a couple of seconds, he raises his free hand to point upward. "I'll tell you what I'm looking at then. That one. See the Pleiades? Look to their left. Down a little. The red star that's super bright."

I follow the path of his finger even though I already know which star he's pointing toward.

"That's your star. Red and bright, and I'll always be able to find it."

My throat is so tight I feel like I'm on the verge of suffocating. The fact that he chose that one doesn't mean anything . Just random chance. Not even random. It's one of the brightest stars in the sky. And it's natural that it would make him think of me since it's red. That's all this is.

"That's Aldebaran," I tell him.

"Seriously? So I can just point to any random star, and you'll know its name? Am I living with an astronomy savant?"

"Only the stars I grew up watching with my dad." A new wave of cold rolls through me. "Do you know my birthday?" I'm hesitant to ask, but I need to know.

He pulls in a sudden breath. "No. Did I miss it? I'm going to make it up to you. We'll do… something. What do you normally do?"

"You didn't miss it. I'm a Taurus, and Aldebaran is the brightest star in the constellation Taurus. Dad always told me that was my star." I try to force a laugh, to signal that I don't believe this is anything more than a meaningless coincidence, but it sticks in the back of my throat and sounds more like a bark. "You really didn't know?"

Kayden doesn't say anything. Maybe he didn't hear me. Maybe he fell asleep. He has to be tired after his game this afternoon, and it's surprisingly cozy under these blankets. After a few seconds, I hear him swallow. I can picture the way his Adam's apple bobs under his rough stubble, and I wish I could press my lips against it. "I really didn't know," he whispers.

We both fall into a quiet that stretches for several minutes. I stare at Aldebaran, wondering if Kayden is doing the same. Wondering what it means if he is.

Nothing. It means nothing.

"Did you do it a lot?" Kayden breaks the silence. "Go stargazing with your dad?"

"When I was young. We used to drive up into the mountains every week, unless it was cloudy or snowy. Dad had a telescope—it seemed enormous to me back then—that he would set up in an empty field. I loved looking through it, but my favorite was when we would just spread a blanket, lie on our backs, and look up. Sometimes we spent hours like that. Then he expanded his practice. He started working late every night. Weekends. And even when he was home, he was still working. So stargazing turned into something we only did on special occasions. The Perseid meteor showers, maybe a lunar eclipse. Then he stopped even doing that. When I got my license, I started going out by myself. Or with Seth, but that—" I cut myself off before I can say anything more. Kayden doesn't need to know that story. "But I quit, and I haven't done it since high school."

"Why?"

I blink away the threat of tears, but I don't say anything. It doesn't matter, and he doesn't really want to know anyway.

"Then tell me what you see when you look up there."

I roll my eyes. "Stars."

"Emory, I'm serious. I want to know what you see."

I let my eyes roam the sky. We've been out here so long that Taurus has moved down to the horizon. With the glow from the city lights, it's becoming difficult to make out Aldebaran. "I don't know. It's just beautiful."

"So beautiful." His warm breath tickles my cheek.

"If you did that cheesy romance thing where you looked at me instead of the stars when you said that, I'm going to steal these blankets and leave you to freeze."

There's a sudden movement in the corner of my eye. "Nope. I wasn't doing that at all. I don't even know what you're talking about." He pulls the blankets a little tighter, as if he's scared I'm going to yank them away, and I laugh.

"But I think you see more than just beauty," he says. "Tell me. I want to know."

I hesitate for a moment. Then I give in, inching closer until I feel his body against mine. The heat doesn't take long to spread through me and melt the cold I feel inside. "I see forever. Each one of those stars is so far away that it took their light years to get here. The photons hitting our retinas might have traveled for a thousand years just to get to us right now. The universe is so large we literally can't comprehend it, but those stars find a way. They cross forever to get to us."

But once I stopped believing in forever, I stopped looking up. All I could see was the black emptiness between the stars. Billions of miles of darkness reminding me how alone we really are. But I can't tell Kayden that.

His hand tightens around mine, and I close my eyes, blocking out the darkness. Until there's just him. The warmth of his body. The beating pulse in his palm. The soft rhythmic sound of his breaths. Even those fade as I fall asleep.