Page 50 of With Stars in Her Eyes

Thea

My hair was still damp because I hadn’t had time to dry it after showering.

I blew a few wild pieces out of my face while I gently lowered the last part of the aura camera into its box.

Something itched at the back of my neck, and I reached back to find that my sweater was inside out with the tag flipped up the wrong way.

I had thrown on the first book fair–appropriate outfit I found in my closet and sped back over to the studio.

I scanned the room to see if I had missed anything, but I kept getting distracted. The photos from the road trip to the Flint Hills were still hanging everywhere.

This meant that the woman I was trying not to think about was literally staring at me from every direction. The woman who was secretly Kestrel . This would not work.

I had never heard Kestrel speak, but now I knew that Courtney was Kestrel the voices fit.

Courtney’s low speaking voice was raspy and velvety just like Kestrel’s singing voice.

But I had always imagined that Kestrel was British like Demetrius.

All the bios on the website said she had joined Demetrius on the UK leg of his first tour and had been playing with him for ten years.

It didn’t even mention her YouTube covers, which were how most of her early fan base found her.

Her hair was so long back then it covered her face.

It was amazing how the makeup and sunglasses made her face completely unrecognizable from the woman I met in the bookstore.

I pulled down the last of the prints and stared at it.

It wasn’t one of the photos of Courtney with star trails.

It was one of the golden-hour photos. The one with Courtney pretending to play her cello.

She was almost a silhouette, her face haloed with the last beams of sun before the light became dusky purple.

Her eyes were closed, and her mouth slightly downturned.

It was the natural set to her mouth, but it wasn’t a frown.

It was like she could hear the music she was pretending to play.

It was like when she was playing, it wouldn’t truly have mattered whether we were alone in Flint Hills or if she was on a stadium stage in front of thousands.

It wasn’t the lovely lighting or the background that made the photo more than just a pretty scene, it was Courtney’s intensity as she pretended to hold bow and instrument.

How could Courtney really be considering giving it up?

Even as I processed how devastating her quitting would be, my old fears emerged from the shadows, shaped into new doubts about the alternative…

When I held on to people too tightly, they always left me. Even with my family, I always became the odd one out. I watched all my oldest friends find partners and grow out of being my friends. My siblings did the same.

I had thought Courtney and I were building something real. She had people here. It all seemed like it was working. We had taken it slowly, and I hadn’t moved too quickly in a relationship.

But now… what I offered Courtney seemed pitiful in comparison to the world open to someone with her talent.

It was ironic really. I had always loved taking snapshots of the universe.

Those glimpses of galaxies captured in light through a lens were magical.

Seeing the grand vastness had never made me feel small.

The more I saw of the mysterious expanse, the more connected I felt.

Like distance wasn’t just relative. Like both miles and light-years were all illusions hiding the epic enmeshment connecting everything to everything else.

It was truly strange to find myself in proximity to a person like Courtney without even realizing what she was.

I’d slept bare body to bare body with a person so clearly destined for a life of bright lights and epic acceleration, and I hadn’t even noticed.

No matter how well I could map the constellations from memory, I could never, ever fit beside a star.

But…

The idea of losing Courtney dueled with the pain of realizing Courtney was considering throwing away a piece of herself. I had only known Courtney a few months, but I would be damned if I didn’t tell the woman to try again.

I dropped the photo onto the stack with the others.

These photos definitely couldn’t stay here if I was going to try to make a rational decision about what to do next.

I searched the space until I found an empty photo box.

I dropped the stack of photos into it and closed the lid.

The film strips hanging behind me caught in a sudden draft.

The movement caught my eye, and as I turned, I saw one photo I’d missed on the counter.

Courtney beneath the star trails.

I had planned on framing that one eventually. Maybe I still would.

I traced the outline of her face.

Yep, these photos needed to be somewhere else.

I set the star trails photo on top of the box. After a five-minute hunt for where I had set my keys, I grabbed the box to take it down to my car.

In my state of total distraction today, I’d left the dumb door to my studio completely unlatched.

I muttered curses at myself. As I pulled it open, I found a tall man wearing a baseball cap behind it.

He had one hand raised like he had been about to knock, but his face angled down toward his phone in the other.

The sudden appearance of a person when I hadn’t expected to find one there had me stumbling backward.

I caught myself on the arm of the futon, but the box of photos slipped out of my hand.

It hit the ground at the wrong angle and bounced slightly, which sent the photos flying and floating to the ground in every direction.

“Oh shite ,” the man said in an ominously familiar, hypnotic British accent.

He tipped up his hat, and before I could stop him, Demetrius Adeyemi bent to help me clean up the mess I had just made.

“So sorry I startled you. The door was open, and I was knocking. I didn’t think you could hear because of the music—good song by the way.

One of your colleagues at the tattoo shop sent me up here because…

” His dark eyes widened as he took a closer look at one of the closer-up shots of Courtney.

“These are… they’re quite remarkable. There are also—er—rather a lot of them.

Remarkable though.” The way his mouth quirked up into a smirk snapped me out of shock.

I snatched the photo out of his hand. “This is not some One Hour Photo psychopath situation. I’m not a stalker.”

“I didn’t think that you wer—”

“I’m a photographer.”

“Clearly. And a very talented one.” The twinkle in his eye as he looked from the photos to me several times was infuriating.

“The tattoo studio is also closed. Why did they send you up here?”

“Because I’m very handsome and charming.”

“And humble.”

“And looking for Courtney Starling.” He plucked a photo from where one had lodged itself between the cushions on the small futon. “It seems I’ve found her but not exactly the way I wanted to.”

“She’s probably setting up for the book fair.”

“I went to the brewery where they’re holding it, and they said she hadn’t arrived yet. They thought she might be here helping you. I couldn’t find the door but knocked on the tattoo shop, and they showed me how to find it.”

“Oh.”

“But she’s not here.”

“Clearly,” I said, in a slightly rude but passable mimic of the tone he’d used about my photography.

“You’re angry at her.”

“I’m just an angry person in general.”

“No.” His eyes narrowed. “No, I don’t think you are actually.”

I could not think of a single response to that presumptuous pronouncement.

He still held the photo of Courtney with the star trails in one hand and he held out his other to me. “I’m Demetrius Adeyemi.”

“Thea Quinn,” I said, proud of myself for not hyperventilating.

His gaze scanned my small studio before settling back onto the photo. It was as if he were reading it, with the keen way his eyes moved over every detail.

I was supposed to be at the book fair in forty-five minutes, but I had a rock star standing a foot away from me.

What in the holy Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” was I supposed to do about this?

“So, as it happens, I’ve recently lost a photographer.” This sentence was more inscrutable than it should have been.

“ Lost , like misplaced?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Have you checked the last spot where you remember seeing them?”

“The last place I remember seeing them was in my bed in my London flat with someone I did not invite into it.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Indeed, they were doing just that.” He handed the photo back. “Is that typical of your work?”

“Is it typical that photographers are cheating dingleberries? I mean, damn, people suck in general, but I can’t say that photographers particularly are—”

“The ‘that’ I was referring to was the photo of Courtney.” Demetrius’s mouth quivered at the corner. “Do you have a portfolio? Of your photographs. Not of stories of cheating photographers.”