“
Yes.” I sniff.
I love him like you might love a star.
“Yes, you did?” He stares over at me.
I nod. “Yes.”
His eyes go funny, sort of blurry—he blinks twice and then he yells
“Fuck!” way too loudly to be anything close to discreet.
My head pulls back and I tense up.
“Shit.” He breathes out, shaking his head. “Fuck—”
I watch on in mild horror. “Are you ok—”
“Say it.”
“What?” I stare over at him.
“Can you, please? Say it?” he asks. “Now. Out loud—” He shakes his
head at himself. “Just so I’ve heard you say it one time.”
I open my mouth to protest for a reason I don’t know why and then I stop
myself, swallow and look him in the eye.
“I loved you.”
He nods a couple of times then closes his eyes for a few seconds, blows
some air out of his mouth.
“I have to ask—” He looks back over at me, eyes all heavy now. “Was I
ever in with a shot?”
He is a star. Not the shooting kind. Not some flash-in-the-pan meteorite
that burns up on entry into the atmosphere. And stars, they’re undeniably
beautiful, kind of magical. Only come out at the nighttime. Easy enough to
ignore. In a sky full of them, a single star can be difficult to tell apart from
the others. They don’t affect our day-to-day lives, really. You might see it
one night and not the next, and it bears no real consequence other than
perhaps the sky is a little less wonderful on that particular evening. A star is
a star.
“In this world,” I give him a delicate look, “with BJ?” I shake my head.
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s—” He trails, letting out this hollow laugh that I kind of hate. It
doesn’t suit him. His regular laugh is so wonderful. “—fine.” He nods.
“That’s good to know, actually—”
“I’m sorry,” I tell him.
He shakes his head again. “No, don’t be.”
But you see, the thing about stars is that in another galaxy, that star is
also a sun.
“If it wasn’t him, it would be you,” I tell him, for better and for worse.
He blows some more air out of his mouth and catches my eye.
“In another life, yeah?”
I nod and offer him a weak smile. “I’ll meet you there.
”
”
Jessa Hastings (Magnolia Parks Universe Series 5 Books Collection Set by Jessa Hastings (Magnolia Parks, Daisy Haites, The Long Way Home, The Great Undoing, and Into the Dark))