A Sky Full of Stars

by Samantha Chase

  “Distraction?” he questioned.

  “Brooke.”

  “Ah.”

  “Personally, I don’t think you’re so bad with the opposite sex,” she said with a wink.

  “Hey!” Riley cried with a bit of outrage. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means,” she said with an exaggerated sigh, “the first time Owen and I met, he did just fine putting me in my place. He was uncomfortable, but I think it had more to do with what was going on between you and me. So I say he doesn’t need to do some sort of crazy social experiment with Brooke. If he wants her with him on this project, it should be because she’ll be an asset to him professionally. Not personally.”

  Riley shook his head and scooted his wife out of the camera frame. “Now who’s offering bad advice?” he teased before looking back at Owen. “If you ask me, I think she sounds perfect all the way around.”

  “But…what if she…you know…doesn’t like me?”

  A look of understanding crossed Riley’s face. “It’s a chance we all have to take at one time or another, Owen. No one likes it, and, let’s be honest, rejection sucks. But…not everyone gets rejected. And for all you know, she might be crushing on you a little bit too.”

  Somehow Owen greatly doubted that, but rather than argue about the subject, he decided to let it go.

  “So, Savannah…talk to me about baby names.”

  * * *

  “I don’t think he’s going to call.”

  “He never said he would.”

  Brooke sat and watched as her uncle contemplated his next chess move. They were out in his yard, a small piece of land with a tiny garden and an all-season game table where he loved to play chess. It wasn’t a particular favorite of hers, but he enjoyed it, so she indulged him. Chess had been her brother’s game. He and Howard would play for hours. Even now she could still picture the two of them sitting out here playing.

  “But…how am I supposed to know if he’s going to hire me?”

  Sighing, Howard reached across the table and patted his niece’s hand. “Patience. Owen Shaughnessy doesn’t make decisions lightly. Or quickly. We’ve planted the seed, and now…we wait.”

  Her eyes went a little wide, and she shivered in the cool afternoon breeze. There was an outdoor heater beside them, but for the life of her, she wished they could just go inside. “For how long?”

  Howard shrugged. “As long as he needs.”

  This was not the news she had been hoping for. Brooke felt as if she was on the cusp of doing something great, and the thought of having to sit around and wait until she knew if she was finally going to get to paint in the desert—safely and with her family’s blessing—was making her crazy.

  “Can’t you…you know…call him? Prompt him? Make sure he’s even considering it? Because if he’s not, then I’d like to start looking at other options.”

  “Brooke, sometimes you need to be a little less impulsive. Waiting another day or two isn’t a big deal.” He looked at her, saw her shiver again. “You want a heavier sweater?”

  Ignoring his question, she went back to the topic they were already on. “But it’s already been a week, and you just said it could take a while,” she reminded.

  “No, what I said is Owen doesn’t make decisions quickly.”

  “Same difference.”

  “Hardly.”

  Now it was her turn to sigh. “Okay. Fine. What do you suggest I do? Do I go to see him tomorrow? Maybe just pop in and remind him of our conversation?”

  Howard thoughtfully considered her for a moment and then started to smile. “Actually, I think that is a marvelous idea.”

  Relief washed over her. “You do? Seriously? Because I was thinking of bringing him my résumé and telling him about all of the work I did on committees back in college and how that experience would come in handy for this trip. And—”

  Howard stood, shook his head, and reached down to move his bishop. “That won’t do. What you need is to stop in and say hello. No pressure. No sales pitch. Maybe sit in on the entire lecture this time.”

  She blushed at the reminder of her showing up late. “What good will that do?”

  “Like I said, Owen doesn’t make decisions lightly. And he certainly doesn’t do well under pressure, so if you go in there at full throttle, trying to convince him to hire you, you’ll more than likely scare him off. Trust me on this one. I’ve known him for a very long time.”

  Brooke watched as her uncle turned to walk into the house. “What if he doesn’t want me?” she blurted out and then realized how that sounded. “I mean…what if he doesn’t want to hire me?” She hated the desperation in her voice.

  Her uncle smiled at her—a smile that was part sympathy, part pleasure. “It’s good to see you believe this isn’t going to be handed to you.”

  Sometimes she hated when his comments came out sounding like Yoda’s. “What does that even mean?”

  “It means there was a time when you thought the world owed you everything, that you didn’t have to earn it or work for it. Sort of like a game of chess. It makes you think. It’s not just about skipping around the board, you have to put a lot of effort into every move. Your brother used to love it.”

  She rubbed her temple at her uncle’s lengthy statement. “And this has to do with Dr. Shaughnessy…how?”

  “Go see him tomorrow. For the entire class. Take notes. Learn a little about what he’s doing.”

  “But…”

  But Howard had already gone inside.

  Sighing, Brooke sat and rested her face in her hands. Patience wasn’t her thing. She was more of a get-it-done kind of girl, and that meant always being on the move and in action, not waiting around for the phone to ring. True, it had only been a week, but she had thought she and Howard had presented a great opportunity to Owen Shaughnessy.

  Owen.

  Or was she supposed to refer to him as Dr. Shaughnessy? Professor Shaughnessy?

  Her immediate impulse was to call him Owen—it was more personal, and she had a feeling he would probably prefer that to the stuffy title. How she knew, Brooke wasn’t sure, but she just…did.

  Weird.

  Deep down, Brooke felt confident she could be an asset to…Owen. She smiled. They would be assets to one another—she would help him feel more at ease with his students on this trip, and she would get to paint in the one place she was dying to with everyone’s blessings.

  Why was it so important to get her family’s permission to take this trip? Well, she owed them. Her parents had become more and more protective of her over the past several years—and with good reason—and the last thing she wanted to do was cause them any more undue stress. So if that meant not going to the desert without a strong support system around her, then she’d wait.

  Sometimes it was hard to do what was right. The old her—the girl who used to be selfish and frivolous and uncaring of other people’s feelings—wanted to come out and stomp her foot and demand to be heard. And sometimes it was hard to push that girl aside and remember who she was now—who she needed to be and why. Not that she didn’t like the woman she had grown into. She did. On every level, Brooke was proud of who she was now.

  She just hated remembering the person she had been.

  That was one of the reasons this position with Owen Shaughnessy was so damn important. She’d get to paint and…she’d get to help him. Swallowing the painful lump of emotion that instantly clogged her throat, Brooke wandered back to the guest room her uncle had transformed into a temporary studio for her.

  Blank canvases lined the walls, and there were several easels collapsed in the corner and one set up on a tarp in the middle of the room. She’d been here for almost three weeks and hadn’t picked up a paintbrush yet.

  That was about to change.

  With a long stretch to help herself relax
, Brooke started making her way around the room to set up. Within minutes she had her hair pulled back and her favorite smock on to protect her clothes. Her paints were organized on her palette, and Taylor Swift’s 1989 was playing on her iPod.

  Stepping up to the canvas, Brooke dipped her brush into the blue paint and was about to touch it to the canvas when she stopped. As she’d been setting up, in her mind, she knew she was going to paint the desert—the way she’d seen it in pictures—but with her own twist on it. But now that the brush was in her hand and the canvas was in front of her, her subject changed. Turning, she put the palette down, rinsed her brush, and wiped her hands on her smock as her heart began to pound.

  It had been so long since she’d painted anything other than the skies and landscapes that she was almost afraid to get started, afraid that once the first stroke of paint was on the canvas, she’d realize she’d made a mistake. But rather than letting that twinge of fear stop her, Brooke took a deep breath and picked the brush back up again.

  She took in her palette with the primary colors—yellow, blue, red—and began to mix them together. With a hint of white, she continued to blend until she refined the colors to her liking. When she glanced up at her canvas, it wasn’t blank. There, before her eyes, she could see what she was going to paint, what she was going to create, and it made her smile.

  Her hand began to move, color began to cover the surface, and her subject began to take form. In the background, Taylor Swift sang of wildest dreams, while in front of her, Brooke’s was taking shape.

  It was amazing—how fluid it all felt, how confident her strokes were. Her shoulder began to cramp, but she refused to stop—couldn’t have even if she had wanted to. So she worked through the discomfort, refusing to call it pain. Every so often, she would step back and critique what she’d done, but immediately she’d return to the canvas with more color.

  Every time Brooke had picked up her brush in the past, she had been inspired. She loved what she did and received great pleasure from the art she was able to create. But this? This wasn’t simply inspiration that had her painting like a woman possessed.

  This was art on an emotional level she didn’t know existed.

  This was coming from a place within that had yet to be defined.

  And as silence filled the room after Taylor’s last breath, Brooke stepped back and stared in wonder at the painting before her.

  And looked into the eyes of Owen Shaughnessy.

  * * *

  The next day, Brooke made her way to the lecture hall and checked her watch to ensure she was early. It wasn’t enough to be on time; she had to get to the room, get inside, and find a seat so she could observe Owen in a way she hadn’t on her previous visit.

  Of course, he was there already, standing at the front of the room, behind the podium, and reading his notes. At least, she guessed that was what he was doing. There were several students already seated, and as Brooke made her way up the aisle to a higher seat, she stopped and turned to look at him.

  And found him looking right back at her.

  Heat flooded her cheeks, and she was thankful to be standing so far away. Smiling, she gave a small wave and then turned to find a seat—which wasn’t what she wanted to do at all. Nope. Her first instinct was to turn, walk back down the steps, go over, and say hello to him.

  If you go in there at full throttle trying to convince him to hire you, you’ll more than likely scare him off. Trust me on this one. I’ve known him for a very long time.

  Her uncle’s words came back to her, and Brooke knew she was doing the right thing. No matter how wrong it felt. She finally chose a seat right on the center aisle, so she could see Owen clearly, and pulled out her notebook. Looking around, she noticed how all of the other students in the room had laptops or tablets, but—call her crazy—she still liked the feel of putting pen to paper. And besides, it wasn’t as if she were taking the class. The only notes would have to do with topics that might come up on the Nevada trip.

  Meteor showers, right?

  All of a sudden, she couldn’t remember what, specifically, the purpose of the trip was other than going to watch the meteor shower. Damn it! Maybe she should have brought her laptop with her. Ugh.

  At the front of the hall, Owen cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention, and Brooke instantly sat up straighter.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, his voice loud but not overly confident. “Today we’re going to continue on our topic with the discussion of dust tails and dust trails. As you should know, there are two types of comet tails: dust and gas ion.” He looked up to make sure no one had any questions so far, and then he returned to the notes in front of him.

  “A dust tail contains small, solid particles that are approximately the same size as those found in cigarette smoke. This tail forms because sunlight pushes on these small particles, gently shoving them away from the comet’s nucleus. Because the pressure from sunlight is relatively weak, the dust particles end up forming a diffuse, curved tail.”

  Behind Owen, a screen diagrammed everything he was saying, and Brooke found herself fascinated. She studied the picture and wondered how she could replicate it with acrylics. When he started speaking again, she forced herself to stop looking at the screen and focus on him.

  “Gas ion tails form when ultraviolet sunlight rips one or more electrons from gas atoms in the coma, making them into ions in a process called…” He looked up to see if anyone could fill in the blanks.

  “Ionization?” someone called out.

  “Exactly,” Owen replied with a small smile. And Brooke felt a fluttering in her belly.

  She was in serious trouble here.

  Stuff like this didn’t happen to her. She didn’t get crushes—certainly not at her age—and she was beginning to feel utterly ridiculous at her schoolgirl reaction to Owen Shaughnessy. Brooke was comfortable with the amount of men she’d dated in her twenty-eight years of life, and even though most of them were shallow jocks who were full of flash, she’d never reacted to any of them the way she was right now to this shy and quiet astrophysicist.

  “And at that point, the solar wind will carry those ions straight outward away from the sun. The resulting tail is straight and narrow. However, both types of tails may extend millions of kilometers into space.” Owen lifted his head and scanned the room again, and when his gaze landed on Brooke, she smiled. And when he smiled back, she felt like she had been given a gift.

  Maybe her uncle was right. Maybe being here in the lecture hall and observing Owen teaching a class and listening to what he was saying was the smarter way to go. If she had gone to him when she arrived in the classroom earlier, she may have spooked him—crazy as it sounded—and could have possibly ruined her chances to work with him. Maybe if he saw how she was taking this seriously, it would make him feel a little more at ease with her.

  She could only hope.

  “When that happens, and the comet heads away from the sun, its tail will dissipate, its coma will disappear, and the matter contained in its nucleus will freeze into a rocklike material.”

  Now she had no idea what he was talking about. She’d lost track of the point of the lecture and had to curse herself. Vowing to pay better attention, she put her pen to paper and started to write down as much as she could.

  Thirty minutes later, she had drawn the lecture hall and Owen standing at the podium.

  She was in deep trouble if she didn’t get her head in the game. There was no way someone as brilliant and as esteemed as Owen Shaughnessy was going to let her come on as his assistant for an important project when all she was capable of was doodling in a notebook because she couldn’t focus on what was being said and taught.

  Quickly turning the page, she once again straightened in her seat and listened as one of the students raised his hand to ask a question.

  “Yes, Mr. Kelly,” Owen said, motioning
to the student.

  “Can you explain the difference between a meteoroid and a meteor?”

  Owen looked confused for a moment, as if wondering why this question was being asked at this particular point in time, and Brooke found herself leaning forward in her seat, anxiously waiting to see if he would comment on the timing of the question or simply answer it.

  “A meteoroid is a small fracture of rock that travels around our solar system. Once this meteoroid enters Earth’s atmosphere, it becomes a meteor. And when it becomes visible to us, this meteor can be seen in the sky as a shooting star. And if it manages to land on the ground, it becomes a meteorite.” He paused. “So you can see how they are one and the same.”

  Huh, she thought. Look at that. She’d learned her first real meteor fact. And not wanting to leave anything to chance, she quickly wrote it down in her notebook.

  For the next hour, her notes were more sporadic, and there were times when she found it completely impossible to keep her mind from wandering. The PowerPoint presentation helped, but overall, it was hard to stay focused. At least for her it was. Maybe this was the sort of thing she could help Owen with—putting together a more dynamic presentation so his students would engage more. She was about to get excited when it hit her—maybe this was the way scientists engaged. Maybe she was the odd one out here because she didn’t understand the subject matter.

  She made a quick mental note to talk to her uncle about that.

  As the class came to a close, Brooke stayed in her seat and watched as the hall emptied out. Several students stayed behind to talk to Owen about one thing or another—she couldn’t hear from where she was sitting, but it gave her an opportunity to observe him as he interacted with his students.

  For the most part, he seemed fine—although a little stiff—and he was oh so serious. Maybe whatever it was they were talking about required a serious response, but she had a feeling a little humor or a smile couldn’t hurt. He had patience. The last student to stop to talk to him had been the one who had asked the meteorite-versus-meteor question and a list of others over the course of the class. She had to wonder why he was even taking the class if there was so much he didn’t seem to understand.