A Second Chance at Paris

by Cole McCade

  “I think so. The colors are subtle, but…some look yellow or reddish, even blue.”

  “Right. Some of that is light filtering through our ionosphere, but some has to do with the type of star, or if it’s even a star at all. Venus looks like a red star from Earth, although it’s a planet.” She looked up, tracing the constellations by memory. “The color and intensity of the light tells us which stars are larger or smaller, and which ones are farther away, sometimes even their age and composition. It all looks clustered together on a flat plane from here, but knowing size and distance lets us project the universe in three dimensions. We can understand how vast it really is, and how small we really are.”

  “So if you understand all that just from a star’s light…when the light changes, you know something nearby is affecting it.”

  “Score one for the A student.” She laughed softly. “That’s how we can find planets trillions of miles away, and figure out if they’re anything like Earth. What we observe about their orbits and behavior helps us understand our own solar system, and how to navigate it.”

  “Sometimes it’s easier to understand the forest and not just one tree.”

  “Something like that.”

  He straightened, one hand resting almost protectively on the telescope. “It’s amazing. All of this—it’s amazing that something so distant can change so much.”

  “That’s what always captivated me. We’ll never touch those stars in our lifetime, but they still change how we see our world.” She glanced at him; he looked up at the sky as if he’d never seen it before. “Some of them aren’t even there. They died thousands or millions of years ago—but they’re so far away the light they gave off before dying is just now reaching us. So to us, they look like they’re still there. Still burning bright.” She returned her gaze to the deep and endless blue. “Sometimes I think I shouldn’t look away. If this is all that’s left, I want to hold on so they won’t be forgotten. So someone will see and remember, even when it’s all gone.”

  “Cel.” He exhaled her name reverently. The way she’d always wished he would, even if in her childish daydreams it had been a different name. The bitterness of her lie soured his warmth and sincerity as he said, “I don’t know if I can begin to capture this in words—the wonder in your voice, the emotion radiating from you right now. It’s beautiful.”

  Celeste wrapped her arms around herself and looked down, picking at her sleeve. “I thought you only needed scientific data for your book.”

  “I need both. The intellectualism and the passion, to make the reader really feel why this matters to Violet.” He touched her shoulder, brushing bare skin, subtly roughened enough to shoot a sweet jolt of electricity straight to her heart. “I want them to read this and come back to this night, right here with us.”

  “Only your heroine’s here, not us.” She moved a bit farther away and looked up at the sky, begging the stars to get her through this. To let her survive the quiet intimacy of this without breaking. “So that’s her motivation? Loving the stars the way I do?”

  “Yes,” Ion said softly. “It’s the perfect story. But a better one would be why. Why does it fascinate you so?”

  Dozens had asked her that, a good half-dozen of them men frustrated that she paid more attention to the sky than to them. They wanted to know what was so interesting, why they didn’t measure up. She’d never been able to explain. She could say it was hero-worship toward her father, but that wasn’t it; her father had only recognized that kinship, a wordless understanding of something inexplicable. It was just emotion without bounds, tight and sweet behind her ribs, like fear and exhilaration and awe all tied up in a tangled ball, every time she looked up at the sky. Knowing the science behind the stars hadn’t dispelled the magic.

  It had only taught her magic was real, if you knew where to look.

  “It’s…”

  She struggled for words. Struggled for Ion’s sake, when she’d never tried this hard for anyone else who’d asked. With a frustrated breath she stared down at the city—and something clicked.

  “All around us are complex people trying to live simple lives,” she said. “Wanting simple things with tangled hearts.” From the stars below to the stars above, one a field of color, the other blue and silvery-white. “But up there, in the sky—it’s the most complicated thing of all, but all we see is beauty. Awe. It’s simple. Quiet. Still.” Holding her breath—afraid of the derision she’d faced so often for being a space case, an egghead, a dreamer—she risked a look at him. “I like that,” she whispered. “I like the stillness of the stars.”

  “Celeste,” he breathed, and closed the distance between them. So suddenly there, heated and standing tall over her, hands searing as they cupped her face, igniting each nerve ending in a sweet chain reaction of electrical impulses sizzling her to pieces. “Celeste.”

  And before she could say a thing, he leaned down and kissed her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HIS LIPS WERE FIRM, MOLTEN-HOT. Celeste forgot how to move, life and breath stolen to fuel her heart’s tumbling fall into that trembling place where her deepest emotions bottled up tight, so very carefully protected by the shield she’d spent years crafting. A shield that hid the disaster of a girl who’d been Mary Haverford, Hairy Mary, starlet, anyone but the calm professional she pretended to be.

  The girl who’d loved Ion, and had spent four endless years wanting this moment with an ache that outrivaled the stars’ brightness.

  This isn’t for me, she told herself. This is for the woman he thinks I am. But it was hard to remember when his breath curled warm over her lips and he kissed her with a lightness and sweetness that left her fragile as a spun sugar sculpture, crystalline and on the edge of breaking. She shivered and leaned into him, eyes slipping closed as he teased her lower lip, leaving her mouth pulsing, yearning for more.

  When he stopped, she caught herself swaying after him and pulled back so quickly she stumbled, bumping against the lip of the roof and jolting her telescope. Her stomach rolled into a nauseating somersault; she whirled to grasp the Orion, already picturing it tumbling over the edge and shattering against the pavement. It gave her a reason to turn away. To avoid the question burning in those vivid blue eyes, while she reminded herself to breathe. The night air kissed too crisp and cool against her burning skin; she shook herself as she pulled the slouching neckline of her sweater up over one shoulder.

  “Celeste,” he repeated, dark and deep as midnight. He was a shadow at her back, casting heat instead of gloom. She wrapped her arms around herself, fingers digging into her elbows so hard she pried gaps between the knit of her sweater, nails biting into her skin.

  “We should—” Her throat closed. She tried again. “We should talk about triangulation. And…launch simulators. Violet would probably try one.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Violet.”

  “Oh,” she said faintly. “Astrophysics is sort of all I know. So if you want to talk about something else…”

  “We could talk about the fact that I just kissed you, and you’re trying to act like it didn’t happen.”

  “I’m not.”

  But she was. She was afraid to talk about it, afraid to even acknowledge it. Afraid of this tightness in her chest that said she wasn’t nearly as over him as she’d thought. He was like falling into the sun; he burned her to ash, but she couldn’t break free from his magnetic pull. Ten years. Ten years, and she couldn’t let go. She closed her eyes with a bitter sound.

  Grow up, Cel, she reminded herself.

  Ion leaned against the lip of the roof. “You’re angry.”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know.” She took a shaky breath and fixed her gaze rigidly ahead. He was only a blur at her side, but even that was too much. “It’s complicated.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.” He sighed. “It was just a kiss. One kiss between strangers who happen to be attracted to each other. It doesn’t have to be anything more if you don’t want it.”

>   Sick anxiety clutched in her gut. Had she been that obvious? She had to exhale slowly, and remind herself this wasn’t high school. She no longer lived with the old terror that someone would tell Ion about her crush and humiliate her in front the entire school.

  Pull yourself together.

  “I’m not that attracted to you.” She struggled to keep her tone even.

  “I think you are.”

  “Who gave you that idea?”

  “Not who. What.” He touched her jaw. Just the slightest pressure coaxing her to look at him, but her attempt at neutrality vanished when she looked up into the sharp-chiseled shadows of his face while his voice rolled over her like the hard burn of whiskey after the first molten sip. “It’s in the look in your eyes. The way they dilate, until I want to see them just like that before they close in pleasure. The way your lips part on softly indrawn breaths, until I have to kiss you or I won’t be able to think of anything else.”

  She stumbled back, pulling away from touches that left her so dizzy she could hardly manage words. “Stop it!” she spluttered. “You stop pulling those writer word-tricks!”

  He tilted his head. “Writer word-tricks? Is that a technical term?”

  “It is now,” she hissed. “It is. That’s what writers do, isn’t it? You say things to get your way. Just make things up until people fall for whatever you want.”

  “I think the word you want is ‘liar,’ not ‘writer.’” He drew closer, as if he knew—he knew—he could shut her brain down by proximity alone, with his heat and scent. “Do you think I’m a liar?”

  “No. Yes. No. I’m babbling, oh God…” She retreated until her back hit the lip of the roof, then buried her face in her hands. She sounded like an idiot. No, she sounded sixteen, even more mortifying. “I don’t even know what I’m saying.”

  “You could say just what’s made you so mistrustful.”

  “Besides the fact that you’re a complete stranger?” she mumbled into her hands.

  Except you’re not. I know you. I know you, and I hate that I’ve never forgotten.

  Ion leaned closer, peering over her fingers. She squeezed her eyes shut mutinously, but he snagged the tip of one finger and tugged.

  “I can still see you, you know.”

  She refused to budge. “But I can’t see you.”

  “Doesn’t mean I’m not still here. Do you always deflect like this?”

  She peeked over her fingers with a glare. “Do you always pry like this?”

  “That’s just more deflection.”

  “Stop prying and I’ll stop deflecting,” she muttered. He laughed, shaking his head.

  “You do realize we’re going in circles?”

  “Not necessarily,” she pointed out. “If you really wanted to apply circular logi—”

  He kissed her again.

  Swift and startling, he drew her hands down and pulled her close. His mouth pressed sweet and hot to hers, the slightest parting of his lips letting her breathe him in. She couldn’t taste the chemicals, in this moment. Only him, heady and dark and utterly mesmerizing, making her forget just why she couldn’t. Why this was a bad idea on so many levels. If she let this happen, she’d spend another four years trying to forget him after she went home and he stayed in Paris, with no idea the woman he’d kissed was someone who’d loved him since he was a wild and beautiful Gypsy boy–and completely out of her reach.

  She made herself pull back, tugging her hands free. Her breath trembled when she touched her lips; they tingled, heated from his touch. “Wh-why do you keep doing that?”

  His gaze dropped to her mouth, and her ears burned with the fire building under her skin. “You seemed to be looking for a reason to stop talking. So I gave you one.”

  “Where was all this ten years ago?” she muttered under her breath.

  “Hm?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  Panic fragmented her heart to pieces. She stiffened her spine and turned away, fiddling with the telescope’s viewfinder. She had to be objective about this. Adult. She was an adult, damn it, even if she was having trouble remembering that.

  “Are you really interested in researching your book?” she asked. Yes. Good. Put him on the spot so he’d stop throwing her for a loop. “Or has this all been some pick-up act?”

  “I’m interested in research. I’m interested in you. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.” He sounded so calm, so sincere; she almost wanted to believe him. “I want to know about astrophysics for the story’s sake. I want to know what makes you so passionate for your sake. I want to know you.”

  “So you kiss me after knowing me less than a day.”

  “I’m not one to waste time. If you wait to pursue what you want, it slips away forever.”

  She snorted. “Smooth.”

  “Cel. Look at me.”

  She couldn’t. But when he asked that way, husky as smoke, she couldn’t deny him. She risked a glance over her shoulder. A flimsy shield, incapable of protecting her from the shattering intensity of his gaze. He’d never looked directly at her, in high school. Never made eye contact. She’d always thought she was invisible, but she hadn’t realized how lucky she was. He had the sort of penetrating, compelling eyes that could bring a woman willingly to her knees, and he would have destroyed her teenaged heart with a single glance.

  As he was on the verge of destroying her now.

  “I’m attracted to you,” he murmured. “Why is that so hard to believe?”

  She couldn’t help a soft, broken laugh. “You don’t even want to know.”

  “Would you rather I pretended I wasn’t interested?”

  “Isn’t that how the game works?” She shrugged one shoulder. “You pretend not to want sex, feign interest in the things I like, until I trust you enough to sleep with you?”

  “That’s how the game works.” He brushed a strand of her hair off her shoulder. His fingertips grazed bare skin. She bit back a sound, holding it in her throat. “But I don’t like games. I’d rather you trusted that I’m honestly interested. In you, and what makes you tick. You intrigue me. That I happen to be attracted to you is just a bonus.”

  “Oh. Just a bonus.”

  “You won’t believe me no matter what I say, will you?” Exhaling heavily, he sank down to sit on the roof with his knees bent and his back resting against the lip. He tilted his head back, looking up at her. “Who hurt you, Cel? What made it so hard for you to believe something so simple as honest attraction?”

  You, she thought. Old hurts she’d forgotten dug deep, plunging needles into her heart. And everyone who came after you.

  “Look, I’m…” Damn it. Her eyes were burning again. “I’m bad at this. With men. My mind is always on other things.”

  “Maybe you just haven’t met someone you care about enough to hold your attention.”

  “And you think you’re going to be that?”

  “It’s a little early to think anything except that you intrigue me.”

  “Yeah.” With a sigh she settled next to him, hugging her knees to her chest. More protection, when she wasn’t sure what she was protecting herself from. He’d never done anything to her in high school, other than never really seeing her. “It’s more complicated than that. I can’t tell you why, but it’s just…not simple.”

  “More complicated than your mysterious phone calls?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. But if you’re in trouble, I could help.”

  “I’m not in trouble.” She shook her head and offered as much of a smile as she could muster. “Not the way you might think. It’s not something you can help with. It’s just family.”

  “I see.”

  He said nothing else—but he leaned to rest against her, shoulder to shoulder, warm arm pressing to hers, strength and firmness like a shield between her and the world for just this moment. No prying questions. No demands. Just his presence and companionship, there without smothering, wordless and so very right
. It was the best thing he could have done. So much better than the men who’d tried to “fix” everything, from offering brochures for elderly care homes to trying to convince her that her needs came before her father’s. Their needs came before her father’s.

  Ion didn’t do any of that. He only sat with her, solid and safe. Being everything she wanted.

  And she couldn’t have him.

  “Don’t.” She could hardly breathe; it took everything in her to pull away. Her chest constricted. “Don’t do that.”

  He looked down at her, night casting him into planes of shadow and gold. “Do what?”

  “This. Being warm. Comforting.”

  A flicker of something that might almost be hurt darkened his eyes. “I can’t find you interesting. I can’t be attracted to you. I can’t offer friendly support.” He smiled with a touch of sorrow. “Doesn’t leave me with many options. Is there anything I can do for you, Celeste, or should I just stay behind the professional line?”

  She knew what she should say: stay behind the professional line. Just cut him off cold—but she didn’t want to. God, she didn’t want to. She wanted him, with a deep-seated pull that had never died.

  I want to be over you. I was supposed to be over you! I changed my name, I changed myself, I changed everything, but you still tear me apart. Why can’t I change how I feel about you?

  And why can’t I let myself have you, for as long as I can?

  She searched his eyes, looking for something to ease this sweetly painful need. Something that would make him less, somehow. Less than the man he was. Someone she could stop wanting, needing, craving. But she found only patient warmth in eyes like the midnight sky, dark and full of stars. Warmth, understanding…and a longing that answered her own.

  She wet her lips and whispered, “You can answer this. If we’d just met tonight and would never see each other again, what would you say?”

  “Stay,” he said without hesitation. A breathy rumble, each word wrapping warm around her. “I’d ask you to please, just…stay.”

  She reached up to cradle his face in her hands, rough stubble scraping her palms, and drew his mouth down to hers.