“Why the hell would you say that?”
“Because I saw her text messages to you. About making her say please and all that. She was tired of pretending. She wanted to get out.”
There was a long silence. Then, “Oh. My. God.”
Then a weird jaggedy inhale that seemed to be coming from his own throat.
“She was talking about Wexler,” said Danny. “The young one—the gross one. They had a meeting and he, like, made her ask him nicely not to block the sale. Apparently he was a complete jerk, and she hated doing it. She was glad that was over.”
It was Jack’s turn to talk, he knew, but he had started shaking, and he didn’t trust his voice.
“But you?” Danny went on. “She hoped you would sneak into her room that night. She was waiting for you. You, who kept telling her you didn’t do relationships. You and your fucking precious rules. She fell in love with you, asshole.”
…
Cassie stood slumped against the cold red brick building, silently cursing Danny for insisting they meet at this random corner at the south end of the university, rather than, say, a bar where she could drink approximately a liter of scotch.
But thinking about bars made her feel worse, and not just for the obvious reason. In the midst of everything that had happened, she missed Edward’s, the clatter and bustle, the steady, predictable anchor it provided. But, no. She straightened her spine, lifted her chin, and gazed at the sparse parade of pedestrians on campus on Christmas Eve afternoon, dark blots bundled up against the snow, which was beginning to fall in earnest. Quitting Edward’s had been the right thing to do. She’d always told herself she wasn’t a lifer as a bartender, so, she’d asked herself before handing in her resignation last week, what was she waiting for? What had been keeping her there? In the midst of all her crying, she’d been ruthlessly interrogating herself about every aspect of her life, and the honest answer was fear.
If she wasn’t a lifer, she had to stop wasting her life, assuming that it would really start at some fictional future date. She had to give Jack some credit for the revelation. If nothing else, her time with him had made clear what she wanted out of life—a quick end to her degree and a career in business. He’d shown her a wider world she hadn’t known existed and had somehow managed to give her the confidence to stand up to her mother. Laura had shown up two nights ago, on schedule, insisting she was ready to go back to rehab. Cassie had been tempted to reenroll her in the pricey program she’d abandoned mere weeks ago, but instead did some research and helped her mother apply for a government-subsidized program. Then she gave her two hundred dollars and told her not to come back until she’d been clean for six months.
But she did feel bad about quitting so abruptly on Edward. She’d decided to go back to school full time for one final semester and finish all her outstanding credits. She’d live on student loans and credit cards. She now had confidence that she’d be able to get a good job after graduation, so she’d be able to pay back her debt quickly. Still, there was no reason she couldn’t have given Edward two weeks’ notice. It was one thing to make major life decisions, another to be a jerk about it. But in her irrational, wild grief, she’d wanted to make a clean break from everything, to leave her old identity behind and catapult herself into a new, better future. After Christmas, she’d seek Edward out and try to explain to him. Maybe they’d even talk about Cassie’s dad a little.
She glanced at her phone. Two o’clock. Danny was pushing it if he was going to get to the farm before dark. She typed a text.
Will you hurry up already so I can pass inspection, and you can leave? I haven’t cried all day.
It was true, mostly. She’d spent the morning culling her closet. She wanted to get rid of everything she didn’t need, like a snake shedding its old skin.
“I’m not sure I believe you.”
She didn’t bother trying to look away as he approached. Even through the snowstorm, Danny would see everything. She lifted her chin. “Well, I haven’t cried since ten this morning. Is that good enough for you? And why are we meeting here?”
He didn’t answer, just wrapped an arm around her shoulder and opened the door they were standing next to, giving her a little shove that discharged her into an unremarkable, institutional hallway. She turned, just in time to hear him shout through the closing door, “Text me if you need me! You know I only need the slightest excuse to abandon the farm!”
What the heck? She looked around, trying to get her bearings. She had probably passed this building a thousand times, but since she’d never had a class in it, she’d never taken note of it.
The door clicked open behind her, and she shrieked a little. But it was just Danny. “Go down the stairs right in front of you! I forgot that part!”
Okaaaay. Well, what the heck else was she going to do? She made her way down the dim stairwell and stopped at the bottom in front of a classroom door not unlike the dozens of doors she’d walked through for her own classes. What was going on?
Oh. She couldn’t prevent a gasp. “Planetarium,” she said, reading aloud the word on the sign outside the door.
Then, again, because she couldn’t quite believe it. How had she not known about this place? “Planetarium.” The word felt simultaneously familiar and strange in her mouth.
Her reflex was to tell herself to fake it till she made it, but for once she thought she might be facing a situation in which faking simply would not work. So she just took a deep breath and pushed open the door, stepping into a giant, dim classroom. Inside was a big puffy black dome made of some kind of inflatable material. It looked like a bouncy castle you’d see kids jumping on at a fair.
It had a door. A door she was obviously meant to walk through.
So she conjured Brave Cassie, the one who’d quit in order to start living her life in the here and now, and walked through it.
She stepped into the night sky.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. It was so beautiful, yet so impossible. Her legs started to shake, like they didn’t know whether to buckle or to bolt.
“Cassie.”
Without even taking her eyes from the stars, she knew it was him. Of course she did. She’d known from the moment she saw the sign on the door that he was behind this, hadn’t she? It was what she wanted and what she dreaded, at the same time.
She dragged her eyes from the pinpricks of light on the ceiling. There wasn’t enough light to really see his face, but he held up a palm, his hand a pale presence in the dark. And the smell of him—the lemon tree in the bog—was an assault in the enclosed space. How had she ever thought she could get over this man?
“I have two things to say.” His gravelly voice unsettled her, scraping over exposed nerves. “Let me say them, and then you can leave if you want.” He didn’t wait for her acquiescence, just started talking, both of them standing under the strange little black dome. “One. I read your text messages to Danny about Brian Wexler. I thought they were about me.”
Her hand flew to her mouth as she struggled to remember what exactly she’d said about Brian. He made her feel like a whore; she couldn’t wait to stop pretending. Oh, my God, she’d referenced him making her say his name. The enormity of the misunderstanding hit her, a knockout punch of regret. And something else—hope. She bit the insides of her cheeks and looked up at the stars, which had grown fuzzy. “And the second thing?” she whispered.
He didn’t hesitate. “The second thing is, I love you. I don’t know how to be without you.”
She wailed then, and she could only hope he recognized it as a wail of joy. She started to crumple, but he caught her and hugged her so tight she thought her ribs might snap.
“I love you, too,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, pulling back enough to frame her face with his hands.
They were close enough that she could see he hadn’t shaved in days. His eyes were filmed with liquid, but he was smiling a small, lopsided smile.
&nb
sp; “I didn’t think Toronto had a planetarium,” she croaked, which was a ridiculous thing to say, but there it was. She remembered the big McLaughlin Planetarium from her childhood. It had closed to make way for condos, and even as a girl, she had lamented its loss.
“Just this little one, right here under your nose all this time.” He tapped her nose, as if to illustrate his point. “They use this for educational purposes, which is why it’s a weird inflatable thing inside a classroom—it’s portable. They only do public shows once a month.”
She cleared her throat, trying for levity. “And why do I suspect tonight is not one of the public shows?”
He answered with a question of his own. “Do you have Christmas Eve plans?”
“No. Do you?”
He grinned. “I do now.”
She looked up at the projected sky, the impossibly gorgeous sky she always knew was just above the clouds and the city lights. The sky she had not seen like this until she’d visited the island with him. “What about the rules?” she asked.
Nothing about his stance changed. He kept standing there a foot away from her in the dark. She felt his face change more than she saw it, felt his eyes slide down her body, just like they had that first night at the bar. “Fuck the rules.”
All right then. She closed her eyes. It was almost too much. To go from dejection and heartbreak to wild, almost-painful joy in the space of a few minutes…well, she needed a moment.
He didn’t give her one. “This is the night sky as it would be tonight. After this, there’s a show we can play. It’s about the formation of stars.”
She tried to talk, to express incredulity, but he kept talking over her.
“I want to kiss you. Hell, I want to…do things to you. But there’s some stuff I have to tell you first.” He gestured to the other side of a small projector set up in the center of the space, which was the source of the stars on the ceiling. She followed him around to a blanket that was set up on the floor. A picnic basket sat next to a bottle of scotch.
“Oh my God,” she said.
Tugging her to the floor to sit beside him, he opened the basket and handed her a Chinese takeout container. “First, about the Wexler deal.”
Yes! Even amidst her grief this past week, she’d been dying to know for sure that Wexler had sold. Jack handed her a fork. She stabbed a bit of the food—he seemed to want her to eat, though dinner was the last thing on her mind. She brought the fork to her mouth. It looked like shredded chicken breast in some kind of sauce. She ventured a taste. “Oh! This is…awful!” He handed her a thick napkin, almost as if he knew her reflex would be to spit out the food, which she did not waste any time doing. “What is that?”
“Pork with preserved lemons.”
She laughed then. A real, unbridled, full belly laugh. It felt so good after her week of tears. Strange, but good. “So?” she asked when she’d composed herself. “Did he sell?”
Jack lay on his back, hands clasped at the back of his head as if he were reclined in a meadow somewhere in the country, taking in the night sky. “He did, but had one condition. Insisted it be written into the documentation.”
“What was it?”
“I get Wexler Construction and the island, but two weeks a year the resort is reserved for math camp.”
“What?” she shrieked, throwing herself down next to him and swatting his shoulder. “Shut up!”
“I told him fine, but I had no idea who was going to run the thing.” He shot her a wry smile. “It sure as hell isn’t going to be me.”
“Shut up!” She didn’t seem to be capable of saying anything else.
“I did promise you a bonus if the deal went through. What do you say? Camp Cassie? It has a certain ring to it, no?”
Her throat felt like it was closing, so she took a moment to arrange herself next to him, lying on her back the same way he was. Looking up, she could easily spot the Big and Little Dipper, Orion, Draco—all the constellations she knew from books. When she’d gotten control of her voice, she said, “What happened with Carl?”
Jack turned over so he was lying on his side. “I showed him the email—the email I suspect you sent—and he admitted everything. I’m not going to press charges in exchange for him going into treatment.”
“Did you fire him?”
“Yeah. I might hire him back, though. We’ll see.”
“So Carl and my mother are both in rehab for Christmas,” Cassie said. “Kind of ironic, huh?”
He reared back a little, almost involuntarily, it seemed. “Your mom showed up again?” His tone had turned cold.
“Don’t worry, I’m not paying for it this time. I finally see that there’s no point in continuing to pay for these gold-plated programs if she’s going to keep skipping out.” She shrugged. “Who knows, maybe the seventh time’s the charm.”
“For her sake, I hope so.”
God. How did he do that? All he’d done was touch her arm and breathe near her ear, and everything inside her came alive. The urge to burrow into his arms was almost overwhelming. But how often did a girl get a private planetarium show? She snuggled into the crook of his arm and whispered, “So let’s see this show of yours.”
“Oh,” Jack mock-groaned. “I knew it. You’re going to want to pay attention, aren’t you?”
“I’m not even going to ask how you did this.”
He grinned as he got up and went to the projector. “I know people.”
“Of course you do.” She smiled as he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and surreptitiously studied it as if he were cheating on an exam.
Once the show got going, he moved back to stretch out next to her. After a minute or so, he began inching closer.
“No way!” said Cassie, scooting away from him. “I want to see the show.”
Jack made a strangled, vaguely frustrated noise, but planted a quick kiss on her neck and rolled over onto his back so that he wasn’t touching her at all.
They spent the next twenty minutes marveling over the universe as it unfolded before them. Well, Cassie did. Jack watched her more than he watched the show. She could feel his attention as surely as if he’d been shining a spotlight on her, but she kept her eyes trained upward, watching gasses condense and explode, throwing out new elements into the heavens, the elements that would, over billions of years, go on to make everything in the universe.
Cassie felt a little like she had a universe inside her heart, like big glowing suns were coming to life in gorgeous violent explosions as everything expanded outward, creating space where there had been none before.
She hadn’t realized she’d been crying until the narrator finished. “And so,” boomed the disembodied voice, “when people say we are made of stardust, it is literally true.”
It was dark then. Just dark. She swiped at her eyes but didn’t have a moment to regain her equilibrium before Jack took her in his arms, his mouth crashing down on hers. It was so familiar. It was so new. It was everything at the same time. But what hadn’t changed was the undercurrent of heat that was always there between them. Snaking her arms around him, she kissed him in the secret planetarium, where, in contradiction to the laws of the possible, the stars shone just for them.
Tearing his mouth from hers, he whispered, “We’re made of the same stuff, Cassie.”
“Yes,” she said, pressing her mouth against his again, imbuing the kiss with everything she had, with all the stardust in the universe.
Epilogue
A Tuesday night in May.
When Jack came into Edward’s that night, he was grinning. He couldn’t help it. He was just so damned proud.
“Jack!”
He wiped the smile off his face as Camille, the hostess, approached. A man did have limits.
“I read about you in that Forbes “Ones to Watch” thing!”
“Mmmm,” he murmured, scanning the bar as he left the Queen of the Ballerina Girls still talking.
There was everyone—Danny, Amy and her boy
friend Mason, Dax and some of the guys from his company, a few of the women from Marcus’s advertising firm. Cassie had grown close with lots of the folks from the forty-ninth floor. Of course she had—everyone loved her. She was fucking irresistible.
There was everyone. But where was the guest of honor?
Just then, a familiar brunette head popped up from behind the bar at the far end, away from the others. Her eyes lit up when she saw him approach.
He ignored the greetings being lobbed at him from everyone else and made his way to her. “What are you doing back there?” Though Cassie had made up with Edward, she had decisively quit and had been working tirelessly all semester to finish school.
“Just getting some props out to help Alana,” she said, plunking down a bunch of shot glasses on the bar and then coming around to sit by the girl. “We’re working on ants again.” She already had a ruler on the bar, and she started measuring out the distance between one shot glass and another.
“Oh no you don’t,” he said, reaching between her and Alana to close the textbook sitting on the bar. “This is your party.”
“Thank you!” said Alana with her signature drama. “I’ve been trying to get her to quit for half an hour!”
He winked at Alana. “I just saw Carl. Britney said to tell you she’s on her way.” Tenderhearted Cassie, in the months that Carl had been in treatment for his gambling addiction, had made friends with Britney, and had, in turn, introduced her to Alana.
“How did it go with Carl?” Cassie whispered as she gathered her things in preparation for moving down the bar.
“I offered him a less senior position, but he said no.”
She raised her eyebrows in surprise.
“He said he thought it was better for him to start over somewhere else. Prove himself.”
“It’s hard to argue with that.”
He nodded. It had been a relief, really. He couldn’t just throw Carl out on the street, but it would have been hard to fully trust him again. This way, they could stay friends and keep the business out of it. “Anyway, enough. We’re celebrating the graduate.”
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