Page 17 of The Time It Takes
He rolled his eyes, but he was smiling when he responded, “I know how stargazing works.”
With that, he proceeded to belly-flop onto the blanket, face down. A deep laugh erupted through me when he stayed like that. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked at me with an odd expression. It caught me so off guard that the sounds coming out of me came to an abrupt stop.
“Jesus, what?” I blurted like he offended me. It was a defense mechanism, I realized, and completely unnecessary.
He only shook his head and chuckled to himself as he fell beside me onto his back. He rested his hands behind his head. I crossed my ankles and placed my hands on my stomach.
“So, what do you see?” I asked.
He let out a harsh breath. “I see…” His words fell off to nothing as he tried to make something up. After a minute had passed, I looked over at him and that stupid dimple was showing again. I found myself needing to look away, but I didn’t. “A blob,” he finished.
I laughed at that because at least he was being honest. “What do you feel from them?”
He looked at me this time and asked, “Is this the part when you finally enlighten me?” His eyes widened in pure, almost giddy amusement.
I narrowed my eyes at him before turning them back to the star-coated sky above us. I focused on a cluster of them.
“My father used to say that when we look at the stars, they look back. He said they hold no room for the past—that there’s nothing to be said about where we’ve been.” I let myself form a weak smile at the memory of us on the Ferris wheel when I was eight years old. A few months after that he was gone. His body wasn’t found until two weeks later, having washed up on the beach and found by a man walking his dog at sunrise. “He always used to nag at me and tell me that if I’m going to look up, it should only be toward the stars and what could be. To never look up if I seek answers from what already was. So, when I look at them, I see so much future that it burns my eyes.” I finally turned my head to look at him. “I see too many versions of myself up there,” I breathed. “And I don’t know which one I want to be. It’s terrifying to have to choose.”
Sometimes I caught myself looking up at the stars with the hope of catching a glimpse of my father. I just wish he were here so I could ask him things and grasp his advice in a way eight-year-old me couldn’t.
“On the other side of fear is freedom.” His words were almost lost in the wind, but I grabbed them and held them close. “But you never have to pick one version of yourself or the other.” He smiled so softly as he added, “Just be. Whatever feels right, just be that.”
Vulnerability threatened to burst through somewhere inside of me and I tried to push it away. My eyes fell to his chest where he had a tattoo of a blue butterfly with a broken wing over his heart. He never told me what it meant. It somehow felt too personal to ask.
He watched me thoughtfully. “For as long as I’ve known you, you never struck me as the type of person who was afraid of anything.” His tone was light against the denseness of my mood.
“Everyone’s afraid of something,” I said quietly. “I think I might be afraid of everything.” The honesty rolled off my tongue and it was moments like this that I realized how comfortable I truly was with him. How my soul was undeniably entwined with his.
His eyebrows nearly touched his hairline. “I don’t believe that for a second. You’re reckless and undeniably impulsive.” He smirked. “You’re Willow. You’re not afraid of anything. You’re a fighter, Damsel.”
A scratchy laugh escaped my throat. “Right, that’s what makes my nickname so endearing to you, huh?” I responded dryly.
He tugged at another strand of my hair and his eyes followed the movement. “Do you want to know something I’m afraid of?” He twirled my dark hair in his fingertips shamelessly.
Every hard ironed thread of tension in my body softened, and every bone went to mush.
I nodded and it took him so long to speak that I thought he might not say anything at all. Yet saying nothing would have been saying plenty to me. A thought occurs to me. Maybe he’s afraid of everything too.
“Being forgotten,” he whispered. My hand instinctively lifted to hold him somewhere between his cheek and his neck. “Remember when we were younger, and we could choose a superpower and just pretend for a while?”
I nodded slowly.
I remembered it all very well. Life was so much simpler back then. Just a bunch of kids who didn’t know how dark the world could get because they became each other’s night light.
“You said you wanted to control the weather so that you could make it rain every day,” he reminded me, laughing under his breath as his fingertips traced over my arm, causing every hair on my body to rise. “You always did love the rain.”
I did because I understood life to be a lot like it. Depending on your mood, you either ran from it or you felt the need to dance in it. I let out a breath at the fact that he remembered such a silly detail. Then I realized I remembered all the silly details too.
“You said you wanted to be invisible,” I said with a grin on my face. He used to make sure I was the only one who could see him, anyone else had to pretend he wasn’t there.
His gaze was caught on his fingers tracing idle circles along my skin. “Do you know why?”
I stared at him for a moment, an ache forming in my chest at the memory of what he admitted when we turned thirteen. “Because if you were invisible, then at least there would be a reason as to why no one remembered you,” I said quietly.
We stared at each other for a moment and this time it felt like the world was waiting for something. For what? I wasn’t sure, but I liked to think that maybe I was waiting too. Waiting for everything to fall into place like my father always promised it would.
To ease the tension, I quirked an eyebrow at him. “What about reading people’s minds?” I asked him. “Now that would be interesting.”
