#5-10

July meant hot night air, so you leave your house and start up the truck, taking your time to wind through the streets. You don’t stop when you reach the edge of town, starting down the country road. There are no streetlights, just the great expanse of dirt and rock that rises into towering formations on either side. There’s no one else on the road. You’re too far away from anywhere anyone would want to be. 

The clear night sky out in the country has always been your favorite sight. The shades of deep purple and blue dotted with millions of stars have always fascinated you. When you were a kid you would climb up to your roof, spend hours lying up there questioning how far away every star was. You would wonder how big the universe was. Sometimes, you would imagine your house hanging off the bottom of Earth, an upwards gravitational pull the only thing keeping you from falling forever down into the dark.

You’re much older now. You had drifted in and out of your home, off to college for some time. Coming back.

You tried not to think about space like that anymore. 

In the distance, you can see the white light of a gas station approaching slowly. By the time the sign saying it’s a mile out arrives you’re already slowing down. You pull into the harsh glow, parking the truck and jumping down onto the asphalt. The hot dry air hits you hard. It’s not the invasive, sticky, painful heat. It’s soft and a light breeze caresses your bare arms to remind you that it could be much worse.

You enter the convenience store, struck by the realization of exactly where you are. 

It’s like you’re on autopilot as you walk to the back of the store, straight to the refrigerators, pulling out a six-pack of the off-brand soda you used to drink as a teen. It has been longer than you can even remember since you last tasted the sweet liquid, and you wondered if it would still taste the same. 

You grabbed a bag of jerky and a pack of M&Ms on your way to the register. 

The guy working wears the same teal vest the guys did all those years ago. The same acne riddled face of a teenager asks if you want a bag, the same careless voice. Almost like nothing has changed in twenty years except the music playing over the speakers. Who the hell would sign up to work all the way out here?

You suppose you’d have applied had you been ten years younger and unemployed.

You’re back on the road, driving away from the light, further into the emptiness of the desert. It’s easy to let your mind wander. Why couldn’t you fall asleep? Why did you leave the safety of your home? What was calling you to drive in this direction? 

It’s not a conscious decision that causes you to pull off the road, begin driving on a dirt path that hardly exists anymore, more like muscle memory. No longer does the familiar route have the worn-out path, free of shrubs, and you wince every time you have to run over another plant. 

The headlights cast long shadows across the prickly bushes. Sticks and small rocks are illuminated like devilish hands grabbing at the tires. Plumes of dust rising behind you restrict any view out your review mirror. A small animal, possibly a fox but you’re not entirely sure, darts across the trail along the point where the light fades into the black again, the motion causing you to slam the brakes. 

You start up once more, your truck bumping across the desert, out towards the hill that rises up in front of you. 

What’s drawing you back here, you’re not sure. A sick sense of nostalgia? Or a state of mind you haven’t allowed yourself to acknowledge since you were a teen?

Even though it’s been years since you returned from college, you haven’t come back here since one August night after senior year.

You stop the vehicle at the base of the hill. A few deep breaths center you. You stuff the food into your pockets, grab your purse off the passenger seat, along with the cans of soda. They’ve grown slick with condensation and while you can do nothing to stop the goosebumps that crop up on your skin, as soon as you exit the truck and reenter the summer heat, the cold feels good. You lower the cans to touch your thigh, allowing yourself to close your eyes and take in the sensation of cold aluminum brushing up against you. 

Slamming the door closed and locking the truck, you begin to hike up the hill, stopping only when you reach a large flat outcropping of rock. 

You walk out onto the boulder, sinking into a sitting position on the smooth stone. 

When you were a teen, you and Javier would come out here

Every time Javi’s mom would come back down from her near-permanent high, once a month or so to show up for some baseball game or to take him out for dinner, she and Chucho would start screaming at each other the whole night. Javi would throw a stone up at your window and you’d slip out onto the roof, jumping down to the ground and you’d drive out, pocketing handfuls of pebbles on the hike up to your rock. You’d take turns throwing them as far as you could. Each time screaming out the name of someone or something that had hurt you. 

The one day where Javi beat up Niles Breckinridge ‘cause he kept asking you out and you kept saying no and he decided to corner you in the girl’s locker room. How Javi found out what he was doing you had no idea, but Niles was on the floor, nose bleeding, and Javi’s knuckles were bruised when he grabbed your hand and you ran out to your car, the two of you laughing and crying as you hit the highway, skipping class to drive out to the middle of nowhere. 

When your parents started screaming about your grades you had shown up at Javi’s doorstep, crying, and he led you to the passenger seat of his car. You drove in silence until just past the gas station, and up on this boulder, over canned beer and Starbursts, everything came spilling out: the way Mr. Wallace wouldn’t give you any grade higher than a C unless you wore that low cut top to school once a week, how Mr. Chapman wouldn’t explain why you got an F on every single essay even when you asked him how you could improve your grade, how Mrs. Hayes didn’t like you because you were the only kid in Spanish class who didn’t grow up speaking the language, so your accent was terrible, how Ms. Gordon would let you rewrite any essay you wanted but never offer any advice on how to improve things, how Mr. Phillips didn’t care that you could do more push-ups than at the beginning of the year, only that you still could do the least in the class. And as your tears hit the flat stone overlooking the desert, you stared up at the sky and Javi lay next to you. You laid like that for hours that day, not touching, just side by side, existing in each others’ presence. 

The time you found Javi crying at the park, having been dumped by Morgan Powell, and even though you hadn’t spoken in weeks cause he didn’t want to spend any time with you anymore, he didn’t complain when you held his hand, walked with him to your truck, and found yourselves out in the middle of nowhere. He climbed down the hill to grab a blanket from the car and only for those three minutes he was gone did you let yourself cry. 

The night before Javi left for Texas A&M you spent the entire night out here, watching the sunrise before you climbed back down to the car, and you fell asleep on the drive home. That was your last chance to tell Javi that somewhere along the line you had fallen in love, and you never had the guts to say it. He was gone by the end of the day. 

It wasn’t fair, but you were leaving too, thousands of miles away. One of the only kids to leave the state. You had managed to turn your grades around and were headed up to New York to attend Vassar the next week, and you didn’t come home for summer break that year or the next. The third summer you got a job at the pool. You saw Javi a couple times, as you sat upon your lifeguard’s chair and he brought a different girl every week, hands flying all over their bikini-clad bodies. After the PDA got a little less family-friendly, they’d disappear. Halfway through the summer, he brought along Lorraine Crawford, your middle school best friend who ditched you as soon as you entered high school, and she kept coming back, week after week. 

Javi never noticed you sitting up there watching his every move like a hawk. You had drifted far from his life, and you weren’t sure if you really knew him anymore. 

You came back home after you graduated, got a job in the town center, bought a house, didn’t have to speak to your parents again after they moved away. You became a regular at the diner down the block, and you stopped by the coffee shop on Main Street every morning before work. Some of the people you knew from high school would invite you out to the bar every weekend. You’d go. 

Javi became a police officer. Some nights you’d see him on the other side of the bar. You weren’t friends anymore and you weren’t really sure when you stopped. Probably long before that last night on the rock. 

One day a fancy letter showed up in your mail. Nice paper, frilly letters. A wedding invitation. It came with a handwritten note, not from Javier, but Lorraine. You almost RSVP’d with a no. 

The church was beautiful and happy, and more than a few people there from high school surprised you with friendly words. You were contemplating going to the reception as you waited for the procession. You weren’t close to Lorraine or Javier. Not anymore. Free food didn’t seem worth inserting yourself somewhere you didn’t belong. 

A half-hour after the ceremony was set to begin someone announced that Javier hadn’t shown up. The wedding wouldn’t be happening. As you walked out of the building you could hear Lorraine crying. A month later the word around town was that Javier had moved to Colombia. 

You look out into the dark desert. The smell of sage is potent in the heat, and a lone pair of headlights appear in the distance. You watch the car as it speeds along before the red taillights of the other side of the vehicle disappear into the opposite horizon. 

You pop open a can of soda. 

It’s a mechanical sound that contrasts the soft whisper of the wind and the snakes, a few birds in the distance, and the low hum of insects. 

It’s never quiet out here but this background noise is the only thing that has ever truly calmed you. 

The taste of soda brings back more memories you thought had been lost. The early days on the playground with Javi, two six-year-olds climbing to the top of the structure as your parents both call out for you to get down. When you were eleven the two of you ran a lemonade stand for the whole summer, saving up to buy yourselves bikes. 

It wasn’t until Javi turned sixteen and instead of wandering the streets to avoid your families, he could drive you out of town, floating between convenience stores and rest stops for hours. It wasn’t long before you discovered this spot up here.

This rock became your spot. A sanctuary.

What drew you here after all those years, you weren’t sure. You rip open the pack of jerky, letting the tangy scent fill the air. 

Why didn’t you ever come back? The hot desert air is like a healing bath, seeping into your body as you gaze at the stars. After Javi left you had dated guys, spent evenings with friends, and lived your life. But you sit here now wondering what has happened with all the time. Had you been really living? Or just wandering through a haze? 

The truth was, you knew why you never came back. 

These memories were too painful to have sorted through any earlier. A whole life, wasted, as you fell away from the one person you loved as a teenager and never truly climbed back up from. 

Another pair of headlights appear in the distance, cutting a line across the brush. The car slows straight ahead of you and pulls off the road, heading towards where you sit. You glance down at your truck below. There isn’t enough time to get down there and into your car before whoever it is reaches you. Your hand slips into your purse, grasping around the canister of pepper spray. 

If you’re lucky, they aren’t headed up to your rock. 

The car pulls up and stops alongside your truck. You jump at the sound of the door slamming and peer down. 

You’d recognize that leather jacket anywhere, even in the penumbra of the headlights of his car before they flick off. You didn’t know he was back.

Another sip of soda. Waiting. The sound of rocks sliding down the hill. A couple crunches of dirt under shoes. Plastic against stone as you pick up the bag of jerky. Metal against stone when you set down your can. Deep, slow breaths. Dark leather boots next to your leg, tapping against the rock. A low groan. Javi sitting next to you. 

You keep staring off at the horizon, your chest rising and falling. The last time you were actually really with Javi you were 18. His car parked in front of your house. 8:30am. He jostled your shoulder, pulling you up from your slumped position against the window as you slept. You got out, the blanket still wrapped around you and he hugged you on your front lawn. He whispered goodbye to you, and you were too tired to say anything back. 

All the other times your paths had crossed it had been in silence and at a distance. Years and years of nothing. You had everything to say to him but you weren’t sure if any of it was worth saying. The man sitting beside you used to be an extension of yourself. Now he’s a stranger.

You pull a cold can out of the plastic rings, extending it towards Javi.

“Soda?”

“Thanks.” He grabs the can, his fingers brushing against yours. Enough to feel how rough they were.

You had imagined his voice would be the same as the lanky teen he was back then. It hadn’t even crossed your mind that it would be this much lower, deeper, hoarser. Hesitant. 

A hiss then the pop comes. Your gaze shifts over to watch his hands. They’re so big around the small can and he lifts it up to his lips to take a sip. Finally, after all this time, you get to give Javi a good look. The years have treated him well. The Colombian sun leaving a deep bronze tone, his face a far cry from the clean-shaven boy he once was. You had seen him after college, after he grew out the mustache and his hair darkened, face filling out into an even more handsome one. But in the time since then, a few lines have been left in his forehead and around his eyes. Still doesn’t make him any less beautiful.

“Haven’t had one these in ages,” he says. 

You look away, not responding. What could you say? What was there to talk about? Could one night up here possibly cover even a portion of what had happened?

Then in a terrifying moment, your brain puts something forward that shakes you to your core. 

Did he even want to talk to you anymore? Or had you grown so far apart that there was nothing left?

Javi sets down his can and shrugs off his jacket, throwing it to the side. You can feel him staring at you, but can’t bring yourself to break your gaze at the sky. You lean back, lying on the cool stone. All you can think of is how the distance between you and Javier feels further than you and those stars.

“You know, sometimes during stakeouts, looking over Bogotá? I would pretend we were up here. Staring out over the desert like we did when we were kids. I’d wonder if you were lookin’ up at the same stars I was.” His voice cracks momentarily and he lets out a shaky breath. “I’d always think about how you’d talk about falling off the bottom of the earth.”

You press your eyes closed, blocking out the deep expanse of the universe. The speed at which you were zooming back to Javi was too goddamn fast. How can he say that? How can he think about you when he hardly gave you the time of day after you both left home for the first time. When he wasn’t even the one to invite you to his own wedding.

“Do you come up here often?” he says.

You still haven’t said more than a word since he got up here. You’re not sure if the honest answer is the one he wants. You say it anyway.

“No. Last time was with you.” You try to hide the fact that tears are streaming down your face but he wasn’t fooled by that when you were kids, he wasn’t going to be fooled now. It’s easier to let the tears show through in your voice than hide them as you say, “Did you bring Lorraine up here?”

He’s quiet and you hear the burbling hunting call of a quail. Then a soft rustling as he lays back onto the stone too. 

“Why would I do that?” he asks. 

You have the guts now to tilt your head over and give him that questioning look. 

“Why wouldn’t you? You seemed to love her. Back before, you know...”

Once again he’s quiet. The sky seems to have lost any of the reddish tinges, leaving only the deepest ocean blue. You wish it was the ocean. Maybe if it was it wouldn’t make you think so much. You could just stare and stare and empty your mind. 

A breeze blows by and you shiver, cold for the first time this whole night.

“Yeah, well. Didn’t seem right, you know? This is our spot,” he says. 

You push yourself back up, staring back down at him.

“Our spot?” you ask. “Javi, is there even an ‘us’ anymore?” 

You place your elbows on top of your crossed legs and rest your forehead on your hands. You were always too quick to get worked up. Too fast to think through the things you said. Javi had extended an olive branch and you may have snapped it in half.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” you whisper. 

“No, I’m sorry. We drifted, I don’t know.” He sits back up beside you. “You never sent a letter and I didn’t either. That first summer back you weren’t there. After the second I thought you didn’t want to see me. Stopped looking, I guess. That’s on me.”

“I was back the third summer, you know?” you say, “I was a lifeguard at the pool. Watched you come in with Lorraine week after week.”

“You were?”

“Yeah.” You don’t say how you watched him with all the other girls too. 

“After I graduated, thought I might come back. Say hello. I heard Vassar already graduated, so if you were back, you’d be there. Your parents’ place was empty.”

“They moved out. I bought a house closer to town.” You picked up your soda again and took a sip.

“I saw you at the bars a couple times.”

“So did I. You never said hi.”

“You didn’t either,” he says. 

You pull out the bag of M&Ms from your pocket. Javi laughs. It sounds clear in the middle of the night. The only competition for airwaves is the quails. You fiddle with the edge of the plastic before it glides open, and you dump a few of the chocolates into your palm.

“Of course you were hiding those.” You can hear the smile in Javi’s voice.

You hold out the bag to him and he extends a palm, allowing you to pour some into his hand. 

Looking down at your own collection, you push the candies into colored categories as best you can in the desaturated night light. 

“You know, I was at your wedding. Lorraine sent me the invitation. Said you didn’t add me to the guest list but she thought you’d want me there anyway. I was sitting there in the pews as the time ticked and nothing happened. And you know what? I wasn’t getting worried about you not showing up. That never crossed my mind.” You take a breath. “I was sitting there debating whether or not I should go to the reception. Make the two of you speak to someone you both had fallen out of touch with. It didn’t seem fair.” 

“You were there?” he sounds distant, voice shaking a bit and you glance over to see his gaze glazed over, fixated on some spot in the desert.

“Yeah. Lorraine was really torn apart after that. We went out for drinks a week later. She asked me what the hell was wrong with you. I didn’t have an answer,” you say. “We made up. She was an asshole in high school, but so were so many others. I forgave her. When she got married to Randy, I was one of her bridesmaids.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t invite you,” he says. You think he’s going to say more. Give an explanation. Nothing comes.

“Why’d you do it?”

“Not invite you? Or leave Lorraine?” he asks. 

“I don’t know. Both, I guess?”

He exhales. You’re putting him on the spot, you know that. But that’s what this hill is for. It’s where you say the tough stuff. You let each other cry. It’s the place where you let yourselves feel without voicing half of it because the other knows exactly what you’re going through. 

It still wasn’t comfortable enough to let you say the toughest thing of all.  

And worse, right now, you have no idea what’s running through Javi’s mind. 

“I couldn’t bring her into all of it,” he starts. “I had been in the DEA for a year by then. Knew the tough shit I’d have to do. If I was going to go up any higher, I was scared I’d be putting her in danger. And part of it was that I was just an asshole. Guess I still am.”

You pour out a few more M&Ms into your palm. The red ones go near your fingers, next yellow, then green, blue, and brown. All the way down to the heel of your hand. You eat the red ones first. One by one. 

“You’re not. You might have been to Lorraine, but you’re not. You care, Javi.” You look over and he’s still focusing on some little spot in the distance. 

“I am though. You don’t know what I’ve done. Down in Colombia. I—I did things you wouldn’t have liked.” He stopped to put an M&M in his mouth. A few minutes passed as he chewed the remaining candy in his palm, one by one. Then washed them down with the soda. “I killed people. And my decisions left even more dead. I did so many bad things.”

“Why?” You swallow.

“You used to not ask that.”

He was right. You used to say things. No explanations needed. You both had grown. “I don’t feel like I can read you as well as I used to.”

Javi sets down his can on the rock. The soft clink seems to echo across the sweeping land. You wouldn’t be surprised if the guy at the gas station heard it.

“I had to do a lot of the things,” he whispers. “Did a lot of the other things to forget the things I had to do.”

You look over him as he closes his eyes. You think you see a tear fall down the side facing away from you, but he tilts his head away.

“I’m sorry,” you say. You didn’t use to say that either.

“Wasn’t your fault.”

“You shouldn’t have had to go through that. Alone. You know?”

Javi deserved people in his life. He had gone through so much shit as a kid; to have to go through even more as an adult, it wasn’t fair.

“You mean Lorraine?” Your heart aches when you hear the way Javi says her name. It’s different from the way he says yours. Different emotions. You suppose that’s what his voice sounds like when he says the name of someone he loves.

You don’t fucking mean Lorraine though. You’re tiptoeing around it, but you mean you. 

“No, I just mean anyone. You might not have wanted to bring her into all of it but maybe you needed to have brought someone. So you didn’t feel so alone.”

If it was anyone else sitting next to him, they wouldn’t notice the way his hand shakes, the empty can making no noise, but it’s not anyone else. Maybe Lorraine would have noticed too.

You wish Javi had reached out to you, all those years ago when he thought you didn’t care. Maybe you could have gotten to be part of his life, even if you weren’t in the front row, you could still be in the theater. Not sitting in the parking lot, crying in your car. At least that’s what these past twenty years or so have felt like.

Underneath all the stars he looks so small. You both do. You want to hug him. Or something. You can’t even bring yourself to nudge his foot with yours. 

“Never said I felt alone,” he says.

“You didn’t have to.”

You feel the tears in the corners of your eyes and you try to blink them dry. It doesn’t work. You love Javi so much that if he really wanted to be with Lorraine, you were going to be there and make sure he was happy. But in the end, that wasn’t what he wanted.

It’s weird how having someone suddenly back in your life can make it feel like everything is right again. Like your entire existence has felt so pointless because he wasn’t part of it. You never believed in soulmates, but you thought that maybe someone was right when they decided that you’re bonded to someone in life. That their presence would make you whole again. They were just wrong in believing the other person would always love you back.

“I didn’t invite you because I didn’t know if you cared anymore. I felt we were too far apart that I wouldn’t matter,” he says. “I was scared you didn’t care anymore.”

“We could not speak for 50 years and I’d still want to be at your wedding, Javi. You’ve always mattered.” That was it, wasn’t it? Javi was always what mattered.

When your life felt like everything was falling apart as it always seems to when you’re a teen, he was always there to catch you. And you caught him too. Time and time again. And then your lives parted ways and you started falling with no net. Javi mattered.

“Why’d you come out here?” he asks.

“What?”

“Why’d you come all the way out here when you haven’t been back since we were 18?”

“Did you ever come back? Until today?” Even without Lorraine, you assume he might have. But maybe he’s like you. It hurt too much to come out here. Almost like you couldn’t without Javi. Not until tonight. And well, the universe seems to have had other plans.

“No,” he says. Simple.

“I couldn’t sleep. It was too hot and I was too alone. My house felt too small. Had to get out. I didn’t even realize where I was going until I reached the gas station.” You pull out another can from the pack and flip up the tab.

If you’re being honest with yourself, it tastes terrible. Like a Coke gone wrong. But it also tastes like nights up here with Javi. You don’t think a single time you came up you didn’t at least share a can. You used to each have an emergency case in the trunks of your cars. Even when you came up to drink beer and dance and tell each other about the things going on, there was always a can of soda. 

“Guess I had a feeling. I needed to get out,” you continue.” Tonight was just the night where I finally let myself need this. Didn’t even know you were back.”

“Only got back a few hours ago.”

No. A few hours ago? He woke up yesterday in Colombia and was now sitting here at 3am on a rock hanging over the desert with you?

“What?” you ask. “And this is the first place you went?”

“I dropped off my things with my dad.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Then yeah. First place I guess.”

He comes back and the first place he goes is here? What does that even mean?

He’s facing you now and you grin and raise your eyebrows. “Why?”

“Guess I had a feeling,” he mocks back. 

“Why up here. Why this first?” You’re not voicing the real question. Why is the first thing something that means you?

He reaches over, grabbing the bag of jerky and pulling out a piece. He puts it in his mouth and rips off a chunk. You know what he’s like when he doesn’t want to answer a question he knows the response to.

You stare back out and watch a car cross the desert. Then another. You lie back down, staring up at the stars again. And Javi still says nothing. 

“Maybe there’s a parallel universe out there where everything’s the same but we can both end up here but on different nights and not find each other.”

He doesn’t say anything but you can see him tilting up his head.

“Or maybe this rock is just a universal constant. Like in every version of Earth, one of us can’t spend a night here without the other. It just isn’t allowed.”

Your favorite thing about the night sky is how out here on a clear night, you can see the milky way, a saturated strip of stars belting across the dome. The fact that it’s so damn big has always scared you. You say as much to Javi.

“I’ve always been scared that we’re so small. That we mean nothing. If best friends can go from being everything to being strangers who avoid each other and don’t notice when the other is watching and the only people that care are the two friends themselves, who’s to say anyone cares about us? Maybe we’re all alone. A little rock flying around a bigger burning rock that somehow bubbled up intelligent life, an intergalactic anomaly... A little sphere that doesn’t care that my life feels pointless, and my life feels pointless because of that.”

“Your life isn’t pointless.”

“Then what is it? Because ever since college I don’t know what I’ve been doing. Stuck in my hometown, in love with all the people who don’t love me back.” It’s the first time for the night you know Javi can’t see you crying. Your voice is stable enough to hide it, and he’s sitting up, looking away from you. “And I guess it’s all fine cause I’m going to exist in this little millisecond on a cosmic scale and no one gives two shits if I live or die.”

“I do.”

“Do you, Javi? Because it didn’t seem like you were ever really looking. I could have disappeared and it would have been all the same.”

He’s quiet again and you think that it’s because on some level he knows you’re right.

“There was another reason I left Lorraine at the altar,” he says. You’re not sure if he’s answered more than one of your damn questions the whole night, only saying things that crop up new ones.

“That girl is amazing. She didn’t deserve to be someone’s second choice.”

“Second choice?” you ask. 

“Yeah,” his voice shakes and you sit up again, realizing that he’s crying.

You reach out to touch his shoulder. “Javi—”

He turns away from you. Then he’s leaning on his far arm, pushing himself up. You grasp at his wrist, hoping he’ll stay. Just long enough to finish this. He pulls out of your grip. And he still hasn’t explained himself.

“Javi,” you breathe out. “Stay? Just tonight. You never have to see me again after this. Please?”

That gets him to stop. “What if I want to see you again?”

You turn around looking up at him. The starlight shines against the longitudinal lines on his cheeks. He looks so much like the kid you grew up with.

You stand up, grabbing his jacket off the ground and handing it to him. You can’t make the same mistake you did when you were 18.

“You don’t have to stay, Javi. I’m sorry. You can go. It doesn’t matter what you meant by second choice. I don’t want to push you. I just, that last night? When we were kids? It was my last chance to tell you something and I didn’t have the guts to say it. And by the time I saw you again, it’d been a few years and you were bringing all the other girls to the pool and I was too scared to even say hello.”

He’s holding the jacket limply in his arms. You’re sure you’ve never looked at Javi in the eyes like this ever before. All those nights and you’ve never looked into his eyes and shared the vulnerability that you do now and seen the same expression staring back at you.

“I love you.” It was so much easier than you had ever imagined. The scary thing was actually not saying the words, but staring into Javi as his face shifted.

It began with shock then awe then admiration, all familiar expressions that you had seen a thousand times before. Then it morphed into something you didn’t know as he dropped the jacket and put a hand in yours, spinning you out so you stood side by side instead of face to face, and led you to the edge of the rock. He let go for a moment and when his hand returned there was a stone in it, which he closed your fingers around.

“Having to wait until now to be with the person I love,” he whispers. You’re confused until he’s winding up and throwing something. His own rock.

Oh.

You look down at the rock in your hand.

“Not telling people you love them before you almost lose them,” you say. Your rock flies even farther.

You’re smiling and you look up at Javi. He’s grinning at you and his arms pull you in, wrapping you up and you return the embrace, pulling him close.

“I love you too.”

You nod against his shoulder and pull away, wanting to really look at him.

And in Javi’s eyes, you can see the reflection of thousands of stars, shining bright and big and far away, all contained within the beautiful dark you’ve looked into for what feels like your entire life, and you can now call it home. 

-o-o-o-o-