The late setting spring sun had long dipped below the horizon, and its saffron halo snuffed out by the rapidly descending darkness. Along with it, however, was not the expected bitterness of cold, but rather a languidly lingering warmth that signaled the coming of summer.
It was the kind of night that Pam loved.
She hadn’t always, though. Or rather, she hadn’t always paid attention or thought about it enough to love it.
It had been a long time since the approach of summer had made her feel this way. When she was young it had promised hour less days of excitement, weekend family vacations, and the simplistic contented happiness of no obligations.
Then life had begun. Responsibility, stress, and emotions that had never even been considered before as a young girl sitting in a branch of a tree with her colored pencils, had left her cold to the warmth of the summer sun.
The season no longer promised or meant anything. The hazy shades of winter stretched past their natural boundaries, and engulfed her world in a grayness of inescapability that blocked the blue skies. Weeks did not just fall by the wayside, but so did entire years. They were so indistinguishable that she couldn’t remember exactly when things happened anymore, because it was a morass of sameness.
But now it was love, again. She wasn’t the young girl that she had been, who came into dinner with grass stains and sparkling eyes, which betrayed her thoughts of what adventures tomorrow would bring. Instead, she was a woman, but one whose childish optimism had been re-ignited by the epiphany that not all responsibility was bad, and not all obligations unwanted. That summer could be dinner dates, fairs, art shows, and much more pleasurable weekend vacations.
Pam sighed a breath into the warming breeze that lazily moved over her, and shifted a little in her chaise lounge. She had bought it two summers ago, when the apartment she’d moved into had a balcony on it. One just large enough to hold the lounge and her nighttime confessions of love, hate, hope, and dread, which had silently moved across her lips.
Now she stared up at the stars, which pinpricked the blackness above her, and remembered what they had meant to her back then. Nights when the darkness seemed unnatural in its length, and when its reluctant retreat only marshaled forward another day of regret and tortured daydreams at her desk.
“You ever look at the stars?” She asked softly to them, her voice heavy with the end of the day and part of the bottle of wine that sat next to her.
The worlds above her stoically kept their silence. The eternal vigil unbroken. But she didn’t look there for her answers anymore.
“Sometimes, why?” Jim answered back. The creak of the lounge that sat a couple feet away from hers, complaining under the shift of his body.
“I dunno, I just….” her words dissipated back into stillness, the emotion behind them not finding the right way to express itself.
“What?” He encouraged lightly, just as he always did.
Still she continued to look at the stars. At the seemingly insignificant tiny dots of light that were millions of trillions of miles away, but were in truth enormous infernos.
“I know its cliché to look at the stars. You know? To, um, wish on them or gaze up at them, but…” she paused a moment, feeling his stare on her. Not seeing, but already knowing, what the paleness of the moon looked like in them and the concern they held.
“It used to make me so sad to look at them. To think about how huge the universe is, and how small I was. It made me feel hopeless, I guess. Like all my problems didn’t matter, really, at least not to anyone else.” She confessed, the words long ago held in thought, but now loosened by the serenity and wine.
“Was I one of those problems, back then?” He asked tentatively, as if the quietude of the night could be shattered.
She smiled in spite of herself a little at his words. At the cautiousness of his voice even now. “Kind of, I guess. But, I think I was the problem, and that you were a part of that. You were in Stamford and I was here, and there was all of this…”she gestured with her hand to the sky, and the stars. “…to look at, reminding me just how alone I was. How big the distance was between us, but also, how small it was.” She sighed again, her eyes closing for a moment as if they could shut out the memories.
The sting of that time had lessened in its acuteness, she knew, but to say that it still didn’t exist would be a lie. Even now, even with him, and lying on lounges in the backyard of the house they rented and lived in together, it persisted.
As the memories washed over her tightly drawn face, she again heard the creak of his lounge. A second later, she heard his voice, low, throaty, and utterly masculine.
“Hey, move over.”
She opened her eyes to the starlight and his silhouetted frame looming over her. A lethargic warmness stole over her at the husky vibrations of his request.
“Wha-” But before she could even murmur the first word of her question, he was already bending down his lanky frame to the lounge, resting himself half on its edge.
“Jim…” She laughed his name to him as she had done so many times when taken by surprise at an act of romanticism. “We can’t both fit on this.”
Already, as he wordlessly maneuvered himself closer to her, she felt herself pushed closer and closer to the edge. Reflexively, she turned on her side, and away from the stars, to face him. He did the same, and they lay facing each other with only inches between them. Their exhales sweeping over the other’s lips.
They lay there silently for a while. Jim carefully ran his long fingers through her hair, their gentle touch gracefully capturing a couple of curls between them.
She watched him closely as he did. How his eyes became dreamily glazed over as he seemed to look beyond her, maybe into the future itself, and his tongue unconsciously licked his lower lip.
“Hey…” she reached for him, and cradled his full cheek in her small palm. The cold of her hand instantly warmed at its touch. “I wasn’t trying to bring up how it was, okay?”
He blinked back the thoughts inside of him, and focused again on the present, on her. “I know.” He said simply.
“What I was trying to say…” she swept her hand down his face, the roughness of his five o’clock shadow rubbing harshly against the tips of her fingers, which eventually came to rest on his chin. “…is that I’m not sad when I look at them anymore. Because I don’t care. I mean, I don’t care how big the world is, how big the universe is, because it doesn’t matter. You’re here, and we’re together and I don’t know, but I know I’m not scared anymore. That it doesn’t matter if it’s, like, seven million trillion miles away to the Big Dipper, as long as I’m this close to you.” She finished with an exhale that moved his eyelashes slightly. The honesty of her words and how exposed she felt before him made her heart bang harder against her chest.
At first he said nothing, he just stared at her, the intensity in his eyes his answer. But then, after a moment, his cheeks stretched into a smile, and his teeth brilliantly flashed in the starlight.
He moved toward her slightly, and she dropped her fingers from his chin to his chest.
“I….” He kissed her lightly on the tip of her nose, which despite the near-summer night, still was cold.
“…love…” He almost growled to her, as he moved a little higher, and tenderly kissed the ridge of her forehead between her eyebrows.
“…you.” His lips came to hers now, and they moved against them ever so gently. It was not a kiss of passion, or of frenzied emotion. Rather, it was one of contentment, and comfort. It was of an unspoken familiarity that promised that there would be time for many more in the future.
She sighed into his touch, her body arching the short distance to his, and her hand rubbing up his chest. Her fingers nimbly grazing the hair that curled over the top of his T-shirt.
“I love you too,” she whispered into him, as her lips still held the sweet connection to his.
She stayed like that with him for a while, slowly exchanging long kisses which left both of their lips swollen, but smiling widely. Hands endlessly roaming along the other’s sides and chests, and murmured promises that made her completely forget how it had been. How the stars had once taunted her with their distance, and the enormity of the universe they spanned. In fact, she didn’t even need to look at them anymore and wonder, or hope, because she knew. She knew what was in front of her, and what mattered.
“Hey…” He broke away from her kiss and looked at her seriously, his eyes dark even in the starlight. “Do you want to go inside? It’s getting late.”
She thought about it for a moment, but the bubble of bliss that surrounded them right now was one she never wanted to burst.
“Do you mind if we just stay like this? Out here?” She asked tentatively.
He snuggled a little closer to her, so that their bodies were completely flush, and wrapped his arm around her.
“I don’t mind at all.” He whispered softly into her ear, and then slowly kissed down her jaw.
She sighed contently into his hair, and into the star-lit serenity that surrounded them.
“Good.”
