⚓︎

(Nick x Jalen)

The rotor blades carved the sky into soft, rhythmic pulses as the helicopter lifted from the private airstrip, a low thrum that settled into Jalen’s chest like a second heartbeat.

Golden hour had already begun its quiet alchemy across the California hills—sunlight the color of aged honey spilling over ridgelines, turning every dry grass and distant oak into something luminous and fleeting.

Jalen sat beside Nick, their knees brushing, and watched the way the light caught in the younger man’s lashes when he finally opened his eyes.

Nick had been quiet since the moment they climbed aboard. His fingers had tightened around Jalen’s hand during the pre-flight briefing, knuckles pale against the warm brown of Jalen’s skin.

He had joked earlier—something about how the only heights he trusted were the ones on his camera roll—but the humor had thinned the closer they got to the open doors and the waiting sky. Jalen had only squeezed once, firm and steady, and murmured, “I’ve got you,” against the shell of Nick’s ear. That had been enough to get him into the seat.

Now the ground fell away.

The world tilted and softened. The city became a scatter of tiny lights already beginning to wake, the coastline a silver thread unspooling toward the horizon.

Jalen leaned forward slightly, the headset snug over his dark curls, and felt the familiar, private thrill of elevation. He had flown before—chartered planes for brand trips, drones for content—but never like this.

Never with Nick’s breath audible in the shared channel, never with the late sun painting the glass of the cockpit in molten amber.

Nick’s free hand rested on his own thigh, fingers flexing once, twice. Jalen covered it without looking, thumb stroking slow circles across the back of Nick’s hand. The contact was simple. Necessary. He felt the tension bleed out in increments, the way heat leaves a stone after dusk.

“Look,” Jalen said softly into the mic.

Nick turned his head. The golden light found the freckles across the bridge of his nose, the soft pink of his lower lip. Below them the hills rolled in slow waves of shadow and fire.

And then—there. In the darker folds of the valleys, in the open meadows that had already slipped into twilight while the higher ground still burned—tiny points of light began to rise.

Fireflies.

Hundreds of them. Thousands. They lifted from the grass in soft, pulsing clouds, green-gold and weightless, as if the earth itself had decided to breathe stars upward.

The pilot banked gently, giving them a longer view, and the swarm drifted like living embers beneath the helicopter’s belly. Some rose higher than the rest, almost close enough to touch if the doors had been open, their intermittent glow reflecting faintly against the glass.

Nick made a small sound—half laugh, half something quieter. His fingers tightened around Jalen’s again, but this time it wasn’t fear. It was wonder.

Jalen watched the shift happen in real time: the way Nick’s shoulders loosened, the way his mouth parted, the way his eyes—always so expressive, always so ready to perform—simply received. No camera. No audience. Just the two of them suspended between a dying sun and a field of living light.

Jalen’s chest ached with it.

He had planned this carefully. The private charter. The timing calculated to the minute so they would be aloft exactly when the light turned liquid.

He had wanted to give Nick something that couldn’t be edited or filtered or turned into content—something that existed only in the space between their bodies and the sky. And here it was.

The nervousness had been real. The courage to come anyway had been realer. And now the reward unfurled beneath them like a secret the earth had kept until they were ready.

The pilot circled once more, slower this time. The fireflies thickened in the lower shadows, a river of soft green sparks moving against the darker green of the grass.

Higher up, the last of the sun caught the rotor wash and scattered it into fine gold dust. Jalen felt the warmth of it against the side of his face, felt Nick’s shoulder press closer until there was no space left between them.

“I was scared,” Nick admitted, voice low enough that it almost didn’t register through the headset. “Like… actually scared.”

Jalen turned fully toward him. The light had gone copper now, catching the curve of Nick’s cheekbone, the faint sheen of moisture at the corner of one eye that might have been wind or something else.

Jalen reached up and brushed it away with the pad of his thumb, careful, lingering.

“I know,” he said. “You came anyway.”

Nick’s mouth curved—small, private. “Yeah. I did.”

They stayed like that for a long time, the helicopter drifting in wide, lazy arcs while the fireflies continued their quiet constellation below.

Jalen catalogued every detail the way he sometimes catalogued light for a photoshoot: the way Nick’s dark hair lifted slightly in the filtered air from the vents, the way his skin stood out sharper in the golden wash, the way his breathing had finally synced with Jalen’s own.

The city lights grew brighter as the sun slipped fully behind the western ridge, but the fireflies held their own against the encroaching dark, stubborn and soft and alive.

When the pilot finally radioed that it was time to begin the descent, Nick didn’t flinch. He only leaned his head against Jalen’s shoulder, eyes still on the glowing fields below, and whispered something too quiet for the headset to catch. Jalen felt the shape of the words against his collarbone more than he heard them.

He pressed a kiss to the top of Nick’s head, slow and deliberate, and watched the last of the fireflies wink out one by one as the helicopter lowered them gently back toward the earth—toward the ordinary world that would still be waiting, but would never again feel quite the same.

@thenickgirl