Page 122
“If you follow the constellation up to that reddish one right there… do you see it?” I glanced at him long enough to catch him squinting, his head tipping slightly.
“I think so.“
“That’s Betelgeuse, his right shoulder.”
“Beetlejuice?”
“Betelgeuse,” I corrected with a low laugh. “It’s a red supergiant star, which is why you can see it. It’s roughly six hundred light-years away from Earth.”
“Is that the same as lightspeed in Star Wars?” he asked.
“No, it’s not. It means that the light you’re looking at right here, right now actually started traveling toward Earth about six hundred years ago,” I explained. “Light doesn’t travel instantaneously. It’s fast, but space is… space is unimaginably huge. It could be infinite, but that’s a different conversation. The thing about light… the farther away something is, the longer it takes for its light to reach us.”
He watched me intently, not saying anything as the words flowed faster out of me.
“And when you look at the sun, you’re seeing it about eight minutes in the past. The closest star after is called Proxima Centauri, and it’s four-point-two-five light-years away. Betelgeuse is centuries away. Some of the stars you see up there are thousands of light-years away,” I told him. “What that means is every time you look at the stars, you’re getting a glimpse of the past.
“The crazy thing about it is that what you’re looking at right now, for all we know, Betelgeuse could be gone. We don’t know because that light hasn’t reached us yet. Stars change and die all the time, which means we could very well be staring up at a sky full of ghosts, and we won’t live long enough to find out.” I knew I was rambling, but I couldn’t seem to stop. I could talk about the stars all night. “And the stars aren’t twinkling, either. Their light gets distorted when it passes through the Earth’s atmosphere. If you went to space, they’d look like steady points of light.
“And did you know that everything in us comes from the stars? Not everything literally. Hydrogen is older than the stars, but the heavier elements did. The carbon in your body… oxygen, calcium, iron… all of it was made inside stars or during stellar explosions and mergers billions of years ago. Those stars died, scattered that material throughout space, and eventually, some of it became Earth. So, when people say that we’re made of stardust, that’s not just some poetic bullshit. We actually are,” I said. My gaze dropped back to his face, and there was something indescribable there. I became painfully aware of just how long I’d been talking. Fuck.
Heat crawled up the back of my neck as every word I’d just thrown at him replayed in rapid succession in my mind. I’d done it again—gotten excited, lost myself in my thoughts, and forgotten that most people didn’t want an unsolicited lecture on the stars. The calm I’d felt fractured beneath the familiar impulse to pull everything back in before Theo decided I was too much for him.
“I’m sorry. You don’t want to hear about this,” I muttered.
He didn’t answer right away, but his expression softened as he studied me. His gaze moved slowly over my face like he was seeing something I couldn’t. The intensity of his gaze made it difficult to look away, and I waited with bated breath for what he’d say.
“Did you know you have four smiles?” Theo asked. My brows furrowed slightly, and I shook my head, not having a clue what he was talking about. “The first one is your professional smile. It’s the one you get when you have to deal with people. Very practiced and composed. Also a little fuck you at times. It’s hot.”
“Jesus Christ,” I grumbled.
“The second one is when you’re happy, but it’s your everyday kind of happy. It makes your eyes crinkle at the corners. And sometimes you laugh with that one too, which only makes your smile bigger. I like that smile. I like knowing that you’re genuinely happy,” Theo continued, and my chest tightened at the observation. “Your third smile is the one you get when you talk about space and stars. That one’s different—your whole face changes, Rhodes. You light up, and you start talking faster. You get this look in your eyes… and I can just see how much you love it. I can see how happy it makes you… happier than anything else.”
I swallowed hard as he leaned in, his mouth pressing against mine briefly. His lips lingered, warm and unhurried. The tenderness of it threatened to undo me as I kissed him back. When he pulled away, his forehead rested against mine. I kept my eyes shut for a moment longer and held onto the strange feeling building in my chest.
It ached, but not in a way that hurt. There was a fullness to it—a warmth that spread through my entire chest. It was terrifying and wonderful all at the same time. I didn’t quite have the words to describe it, or maybe I did. Maybe deep down I knew what this was, and I just wasn’t ready to say it out loud.
“So, for the record, I want to hear about the stars,” Theo said in earnest.
The words stole the breath from my lungs, and that feeling in my chest grew. He couldn’t possibly know what he was offering me with such a simple sentence. I’d spent a lifetime burying this part of me—the part that grew too excited and too vocal about what interested me. I kept myself in check because no one wanted to hear about how deeply my interest ran.
And yet, Theo did. He took all my rambling and wanted more of me.
“And the fourth one?” I whispered. He pulled back slightly to better stare at me, those blue eyes holding mine.
“That’s the smile you have just for me,” he told me. “It’s different than the others. It’s just a little turn at the corners of your mouth, but the way you look at me… you look at me like no one else in the world exists. Like it’s just you and me and that’s all you need.”
My heart lodged in my throat.
“And that’s why it’s my favorite smile,” Theo finished.
Silence settled between us. For the life of me, I didn’t know how to reply. There simply weren’t words for what it was like to be seen like that. Four smiles. He’d noticed four smiles—cataloged them and understood them in ways I couldn’t even imagine.
That thing inside my chest tightened as I stared at him, its intensity an unnerving feeling I welcomed. I smiled at him, and from the way Theo’s expression softened, I knew exactly which one it was.
CHAPTER 55
Theo
