Between the Stars and Sky by David James Read Free Book Online

remember. What could be worse than a love that has forgotten you?
    But when he said this, when he told her, she smiled.
    She evaded his fear.
    “Close your eyes,” he told her one day as they were watching the stars fall at the end of summer.
    She did but asked, “Why?”
    Even with her eyes closed she could hear the smile in his voice, the way his words tilted up like his lips. “So I can make a wish.”
    “You can’t make a wish on eyes,” she laughed.
    “You can,” he said, “if the eyes are like yours.”
    “Like mine?”
    “Your eyes are like stars. Like lights in the darkest sky falling down and down and down until you can’t help but make a wish and hope they will stay in the sky forever. The brightest kind of dark blue, the darkest kind of hope; one that is so filled with life and love that if the light goes out the sky will fall.”
    “My eyes are all that?”
    “Open them.”
    And he said, “Your eyes are stars.”
    “What did you wish for?” she asked.
    In one beat, they touched.
    In two, their lips came close.
    In three, they kissed.
    “This,” he breathed. “Always this.”
     
    “Stop,” she says, her voice breaking the story with one word. And even though I want to continue, want to give her the happy ending I’ve written in my mind, I don’t yet. “Look there. Above the moon to the right. The second star. Do you see it?”
    I nod. “Yes. It’s beautiful.”
    “It’s our star.”
    “Ours,” I agree. I pull her hand to my chest. “Feel my heart beating? Now we have a star and our hearts are up there too, as alive as in our chests. If you ever lose me, I’ll be there. Don’t worry.”
    “Nerd.” She grins. “People don’t talk like that, Jackson. Like words are more than letters strung together; like they are music and freedom and life. Like words can change the world, break and rebuild in one sentence.”
    “I talk like that.”
    “I know. I like it.”
    “You do?”
    “It’s a little corny, but I like it.” She smiles. “I like that your words take time to settle around me instead of being so instantaneous. They last longer, mean more.”
    “You make it sound like words are alive.”
    “Aren’t they?”
    “Is that why you stopped my story? Because of the way I talk?”
    “No,” she whispers. “I stopped it because I wanted to feel the magic it held for one more second before the ending came. And now, I don’t want an ending. I don’t want this to stop. I just want to be here in your arms with our star and our hearts in the sky forever. Like magic.”
    “Magic,” I say. Then, “Why do you destroy your pictures?”
    “Because nothing that beautiful lasts forever. Nothing can last forever, Jackson, but that’s not the point. Not the whole point. I destroy them because sometimes the most beautiful things in the world are broken and bent and bruised a little at the edges.”
    “The most beautiful are the most broken.” My minds drifts back to Natalie, and I wonder if, maybe, I was never broken. Just bent. And maybe it didn’t even matter.
    Maybe I don’t need to be fixed.
    “I quit,” she tells me. “My job at Jameson’s. I quit the only thing I ever loved, the only thing that gave me any freedom.”
    “Why? Is there anything I can do? Miles wouldn’t just fire you. Why did you quit?”
    She sighs, low and sorrowful. “My dad. Made me. He didn’t even know I had a job until last week. He stormed in and said, ‘Fuck this, Sarah Blake! No daughter of mine will work in a place as low as Huntington! You’re better than these people!’ And he dragged me off and called Miles and that’s that. Nothing more.”
    Her eyes are so wet I’m afraid they’ll storm, and yet underneath there is this: A sense of resolution so fearsome, so absolute it’s as though Sarah has accepted her father’s delusions of her, of her helplessness against freedom from him.
    “Miles will still let you work.”
    “It’s not worth it, Jackson. My father will just follow