“Not really,” he says, looking down at the few apples left on his chest. He picks them up and sets them to the side, brushing his sweater off before lifting himself so he’s sitting in front of me, our knees touching.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring her up,” I say as he looks down at his hands in his lap. He’s playing with a blade of grass, one of those kinds that flower and blow in the wind, probably to go make more grass somewhere else.
“Don’t be sorry. I don’t regret a single thing, not even convincing Beth to go ahead with the trust,” he says. I stare at his long dark lashes while he looks down. Even those are better than everyone else’s.
“Do you miss her?” I ask. I’ve thought that question often over the last few days, and I’m not really brave enough to ask it now, my heart beating erratically, pounding as it tries to escape my body, ridding itself of the squeezing sensation that is bound to follow when he answers yes.
“Sometimes I ask myself what good missing her would do,” he answers, not really the words I was expecting. His eyes come to mine for short meetings while he explains, gauging my reaction, making sure I don’t think less of him for anything he says. “At first, yeah…I missed her. But I also think I mostly grieved her, and then I was scared to death wondering how I would be able to raise Leah on my own.”
“Your mom is amazing,” I say, acknowledging how much help she gives her son.
“My mom is a saint. I mean literally…a saint. Someone is carving a statue in her honor somewhere, I swear,” he smiles, but it drifts back to a flat line when he continues. “Leah…she looks just like her. I think more than missing her, now I just sort of hate the things she missed—like seeing her daughter grow up to become the woman she was.”
Houston leans back on his hands and tilts his head up to look at the stars. I follow his lead. A few wispy clouds have found the sky. It’s incredible how dark it gets out here. In California, sometimes the sky is so bright, you can’t really tell if there are clouds at night or not. Out here, though, there’s no room for error—everything is clear.
“That’s how I know it was really love, I guess,” he says, his words bringing my head back to level, my eyes right to him. He’s still lost in the stars. “When you want something for someone else more than you want them to be here for you—when you just wish they had more time, rather than more time with you. I’m pretty sure that’s love.”
My chest feels empty. I look back up before he looks to me; I don’t want him to see the tears forming in my eyes. I can feel his eyes on me, but I won’t give in. I’m not strong enough for this. I know his question is coming before he speaks.
“You ever feel that, Paige? Love?”
My eyes zero in on this one tiny star—it’s smaller than most of the others surrounding it, but its light is wavering in and out. My dad once told me that’s how you know when a star is dying.
“What you just described?” I question. “I’m pretty sure no, Houston. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that.”
I breathe in deeply, preparing to say more, but then I change my mind, because anything else I said would just be sad. I’ve never been in love. I’ve never had a boy say he loved me. All I’ve done is chase and be chased. I’ve had lust. I’ve been infatuated. But that feeling he described? This is the closest I’ve come to that.
“The sun will be up soon,” he says, his voice a welcomed interruption to the silence and my connection with the star above—the one that’s dying. I lift my head to look at the horizon, but all I see are his eyes. I wonder how long they’ve been on me; I wonder what they saw.
“We should go,” I say, drawing my legs in to stand. I’ve been covered in the jackets for the last two hours, my legs wrapped in the edges of the blanket we were lying on. When I stand and expose my skin to the air, the coolness makes me shiver.
“Here,” Houston says, shaking the blanket off, losing the speckles of grass from the back side and wrapping me in it, his arm still around me. Maybe this feeling is close enough to the real thing. I slide my arms around his waist, keeping him close as we walk to the car.
Houston keeps our hands linked during the drive home, his fingers never resting, always weaving in and out, stroking the skin of the top of my hand, making the most out of every second we have to touch. I don’t think Carson ever held my hand—not once. Unless he was dragging me somewhere. He doesn’t let go until we pull in the driveway and he gets out of the car.