Between the Stars and Sky Read online

  My heart stops-

  for a short second.

  I wonder if maybe I’m doing it wrong, life.

  Or if maybe I’m right-

  and life is the problem.

  I don’t tell Sarah this: Her words undo me, make me think of my mother and how she’s not alive to live right or wrong or at all.

  Instead, I say, “Sometimes, living like that can kill you, Sarah. Aren’t you afraid of that?”

  “Should I be?”

  “I don’t know,” I answer because I don’t. I know I’m afraid of losing people, but I’m not sure if I’m afraid to die. Afraid to live enough that I might.

  And I wonder.

  Are life and death the same?

  Almost.

  “My point is,” Sarah tells me, her fingers moving over mine and between and under, “that I don’t want to be afraid to live so that I experience everything under the sun. I want to jump off cliffs and see fireworks and drive fast and kiss until I can’t breathe and fall in love until it hurts. And I want to run down the beach with burning branches instead of lighting a fire with a match.”

  I know but I ask, “Why?”

  “Because that’s living.”

  In this moment I know. Sarah is dangerous. Sarah is alive. More than I am, maybe more than I want to be. But I don’t want to stop, not now. Not like this. I want to run with her, see life with her. I want to be the one she kisses to take her breath away and loves until it hurts her.

  I won’t hurt her.

  I say, “I’ll be yours.”

  “My what?” she asks.

  I want to say your love.

  Your only one.

  But I don’t. Not yet.

  Instead, I pull her closer and ask her what she’s thinking about.

  “My house looks like it could fall into the lake,” she tells me. “Everything about it looks heavy.”

  “It’s huge,” I admit. I run my hand down her arm.

  She says, “The truth is, Jackson, everything about my life felt heavy until you came along. That one summer. Do you remember? You told me you hated me and threw sand in my hair and ran away.”

  “I remember.” She rests her head against my chest and I smile. “I ran because you kissed me.”

  “It was that bad?”

  “That good.”

  “Oh.” I feel her smile. Feel her arms tighten around my waist, her fingers digging gently into my back. “Do you... Do you want to head back to my house? Maybe spend the night?”

  “No,” she says easily. “I may be reckless, Jackson Grant, but I do not spend nights with boys who I do not know.”

  “You know me.”

  “Not well enough for that.”

  I grin. “For what?”

  She rolls her eyes. “For whatever that smirk on your face is thinking about! Now, go home and go to sleep and call me in the morning. And remember, we are having dinner with Miles and Sean tomorrow.”

  “We are?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Surprise.”

  As she walks away not looking back, I silently say good night and good morning to her. And I can’t help but look back on everything she just said. Beginning with we.

  That little word resting between Me and Her will follow, I know. Us is waiting.

  We is my wings.

  Us is my sky.

  I will-

  I am flying.

  * * *

  “So you love her,” Miles tells me in the bathroom the next evening, just as the sun is beginning to set against the lake outside the restaurant.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s only been a few days since we’ve started over. Not yet,” I respond, not wanting to have this conversation right now. In the bathroom. While I am doing things only done in bathrooms and forests and swimming pools. With Miles. Standing next to me.

  “Yet!” he shouts. He is victorious.

  “Fine.”

  “Doesn’t Sean look great today?”

  “Miles, I am peeing.”

  “Sorry, just nervous.”

  “About peeing?”

  “I’m going to ask him to marry me. Someday. At the end of summer, maybe sooner, maybe later. I don’t know. I just know he’s the only one for me.”

  I am speechless.

  Miles is-

  one thousand miles ahead of me.

  And I couldn’t be happier.

  “Say something!” he says as I follow him to the sink and start washing my hands. His face riddled with nerves and lines and hopes and questions. And, without asking, I realize I am truly his best friend. And he is mine.

  When my hands are dry, I reach over and put my hand on his shoulder. I say, “I can’t wait to tell the story about how you told me you were going to propose to Sean while you and I were peeing. It’ll be an epic Best Man speech.”

  “Shut up,” he laughs, pushing my hand away. But he is smiling and his eyes are lit from somewhere I can’t see.

  Someday, I want to be as happy as him.

  I learned a long time ago that family is not found in blood but in the people who care about us most. And in Miles I found something between a brother and a friend.

  “You have piss on your pants.”

  “What!” I look down. “I do not. You do.”

  Miles smirks and says, “You know, I never thanked you.”

  “For what, Mr. Piss Pants?” I ask, drying my hands.

  He rolls his eyes. “For Sean. I owe you.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “I do,” Miles insists. “I wouldn’t have said anything to him if you hadn’t told me to get over myself. I wouldn’t have fallen in love. I wouldn’t have been this happy without you. If you hadn’t told me.”

  “If I hadn’t left, you mean.”

  He whispers, “That too.”

  “But not all that?”

  “Not all.”

  “What else is there?” I ask because I don’t know and I want to.

  “Are you happy, Jackson?”

  Maybe. Almost. I’m not. But I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to say why I’m miserable and why I can’t be completely happy and why I want to start over and over and over again.

  But.

  I do.

  “She died, Miles. She died and I died too.”

  He says, “I know.”

  A surge of anger. “You don’t know!”

  “I know that too.”

  I smile, and I hate that I smile. But I’m glad Miles can still make me. “I just don’t know how to be the kind of happy I used to be.”

  “You’re happy around Sarah,” he tells me. “I can see it. And I know you can feel it.”

  “Yeah, but is that enough to forget what happened?”

  “You can’t forget.”

  “I know.”

  “Is it enough, Jackson? Because if you aren’t sure, if you are hesitating, you better figure it out. She deserves better than almost being enough and so do you. You both do. So is it? Is she enough to make you happy?”

  She is.

  * * *

  Waves grab the sand, pulling away words Miles had written for Sean. Still, I can see a glimmer of always and meant and want in what the lake refuses to touch.

  It is cold.

  “I’m glad you came tonight,” I tell Sarah. I don’t know what to say to her, not really. Not when I want to do nothing but kiss her.

  She mumbles, “It was nice.”

  “You had fun?”

  “Yes.”

  We walk to the sounds of summer’s night. The deep bass of the lake growling against the strings of the breeze through the trees. The drumming of our feet against sand.

  The world is music.

  And it is so, so cold.

  I shiver. “Do you want my jacket?”

  I think she’ll say yes. I think she’ll want something of mine to wear around her shoulders like people do in movies when they’re in love and happy.

/>   Instead, she shakes her head. “No. But look. Miles and Sean have a fire going by the Point. Let’s go.”

  I nod and we begin to walk-

  to run-

  and then we are flying.

  We are birds in the night, against the coolness of the lake air and the chill of darkness swiftly falling.

  Suddenly. “Let’s do something crazy.”

  “Like what?” I ask, my chest pounding.

  “Let’s run and jump in the water and swim until we reach the other side. Or take off our clothes and run down the beach,” Sarah says.

  “What?”

  “Kiss me.” She turns to me, her eyes burning wild, and says, “Kiss me like you love me.”

  Sarah is the lake.

  My heart is the tide pulling me under.

  I don’t speak.

  My hands find her face and I hold her.

  She wanted to run

  She wanted to jump.

  But I am already falling.

  I am already out of breath.

  And when I kiss her-

  I drown.

  Chapter Eleven

  “LET’S TELL STORIES,” Sean says.

  “A scary one?” Miles asks.

  Sean’s head moves back and forth and back. His short brown hair never moves, but his pale skin flickers by the light of the soft fire. “No, a story that means something. Just like tonight.”

  “Jackson is good at those,” Miles tells him.

  Sarah nods. “He is.”

  It thrills me that she remembers a time meant for just her and me, but I can’t tell a story like that tonight. A private one. I’m enjoying this too much, and when I tell stories my words are traced with memories or wants or desires.

  For a moment, just one tiny moment, I wonder what my story would be about. This one. Right now. The one I am living and breathing through.

  A boy trying to be a man.

  A teenager trying to fall in love.

  A boy already in love.

  A son lost.

  I am so many things it feels as though I am between everything. Nothing. I am nowhere and everywhere at once. And tonight, those little pieces of my great story are not safe to say.

  I am healing-

  slowly.

  So, I tell a different story. One I remember from my mother, from my life here in Huntington before. Words as true as the characters who lived them. A story that will be remembered in vivid detail days from now, one about a man named Jameson and a woman named Emily.

  Jameson lived and breathed the water. But his world was not filled with fishing or hunting, instead Jameson lived a quiet life in a small village near a small lake overlooking small mountains. Every morning he would leave his cabin and walk the mile to the place where the water met sand, where his boat waited for him. Even in the winter, Jameson would do this, even if it was just him and the lake, his boat left behind.

  But the one thing Jameson refused to leave behind was his heart.

  Day after day on the water, Jameson would make his way to the tallest rock that overlooked the lake and have lunch there. He would break, throwing pebbles in the placid water. Wishing, hoping, dreaming.

  For what?

  For love.

  Jameson thought love was like water, that it was something no one could control but everyone needed. Something that moved and changed like waves or raindrops.

  But Jameson had no one.

  He loved the village, the lake, too much to leave. And there was no one there for him. No one at all. He was very much alone.

  Until he wasn’t.

  One day, as the brightest sky was just beginning to changed to night, Jameson saw a woman standing on the tallest rock where he normally lunched. At first, he didn’t know what to do. She looked like an angel, her dark hair nearly blending with the fading day and her white dress moving in the air like waves on the lake. He was struck so swiftly, so instantly by her beauty he didn’t think to scream as she jumped.

  But she did.

  With no warning, the woman jumped from the cliff to the lake, her arms stretched in front of her like wings. Flying and flying and flying until she landed without a sound in the cool waters.

  Jameson panicked, and hurried over to where she had landed. But he didn’t see her.

  “Help!” he called. “Help!”

  But no one answered, no one came. And the woman seemed to be missing. Was she a ghost? A reflection? A dream come true and gone again?

  “Are you lost, sir?” a voice called in the dark.

  There.

  Jameson almost cried, and with a burst of air he realized he had not breathed since she jumped. But there she was, alive and well and smiling.

  “Are you mad?” Jameson asked her.

  Her smile flipped. “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “I meant to ask if you were okay, but you shocked me.”

  “I have that effect, I’m told.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Are you flirting with me, sir?” Her smile was back. “I couldn’t be,” Jameson said, although his smile was nearly as big as hers. “I don’t even know your name.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “Jameson.”

  “Jameson,” she repeated, tasting the name on her lips, her tongue. “I’m Emily.”

  “Emily,” he said, doing the same. “It’s very nice to meet you. But why did you jump?”

  “To feel alive, Jameson. The greatest things in the world require us to jump. It’s like taking a leap of faith or falling in love. We have to. So I did.”

  “Just like that?” Jameson snapped his fingers.

  Emily shook her head. “It takes time, always time. I’ve been working up to this jump, telling myself that at the end of summer when fall was just beginning, I would jump and find myself in the air as I fell.”

  “Did you?”

  Her eyes locked on his. “I think I might have.”

  Days later, Emily and Jameson were in something like love. When Emily kissed him, his lips tasted of salt and love and danger. Of things that should not make her feel safe but did.

  Like the lake.

  Like the fire.

  “I love you,” Jameson told Emily, his voice raw and rough with the passion of his words. The meaning behind them, he wanted forever.

  A sly smile hit her lips. “I don’t love you.”

  It was then that Jameson knew what death must feel like, must taste like, because his heart was barely beating and his lungs hardly breathing. “You don’t?”

  “No,” Emily told him. “You are my air, my life, my heart. You’re my everything, Jameson. That is not love. That’s something so much more. How can you define something that gives you life, makes your heart beat as though someone else controls it? I don’t love you, but if love is the strongest word we have then that is what we’ll say. I love you I love you I love you.”

  “Let’s jump,” Jameson told her. “Let’s jump again and hold hands and fall together.”

  “Fall together forever,” she said. “Our first jump.”

  “First of many.” He smiled, the air from the lake below them rising around the cliff where they rested. In the light of their small fire, the world looked darker around them as though he and Emily were the only two pieces of light in existence. “Do you think this jump means more than just falling from a cliff into the lake?”

  “Of course it does,” Emily told him. “It means everything, Jameson. Life and love, the two great events of our world. This fall holds them both.”

  “Like everyone who falls will fall in love?” Jameson laughed.

  “Why not? Anything is possible.”

  “With you, I’m sure it is.”

  Emily took his hand and pulled him close to the fire that was kindling next to them.

  “You, fire, and the fall, Jameson. Those are my very favorite things. In you I see my future, in fire I see life, and in the fall I found you. How could I ever need anything more t
han this?”

  Jameson felt her breathe, felt her live. And as his whispered words carried higher in the air around them both, he knew he didn’t need anything more than her. “I want you to be happy, Emily. The happiest you’ve ever been, and I want to be the man who makes you feel like the world is yours to take.”

  “You already do.”

  “You feel like you can do anything?”

  She nodded. “I do.”

  “Then let’s jump.” He grinned.

  On their feet, hands together, they took one breath before they ran past the fire to the edge of the pointed cliff and jumped.

  Arms like birds.

  Hair flying in the night.

  Darker as they fell.

  And when they hit the water, the impact of the cold lake unlocked their hands. But Jameson was smiling. He had felt the world pass him by, felt Emily’s warmth all the way down. Heard her scream and laugh and giggle as the two fell through the air, fell further in love.

  He surfaced. “Emily?”

  Jameson’s hand ran through his hair, the only movement in the night. Otherwise, the lake was flat. No waves, no ripples. Nothing.

  Panic rose in his chest. “Emily! Emily!”

  She was nowhere. Where could she have gone?

  Minute after minute, hour after hour, he searched for her. Questions beat Jameson silly until guilt broke him in a thousand pieces. And finally, he stopped.

  There, at the edge of the lake, was a body.

  Cold and blue in the darkened waters, Emily looked like a ghostly angel. Sleeping soundly. Eyes closed. Lips slightly curved in an innocent smile. She looked peaceful.

  “Emily?” Jameson choked as he ran for her. “No! No, please. Don’t leave me, Emily. Don’t go.” And then, “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry...”

  Jameson whispered into the night, the day. Until he was found next to her, holding her hand, mumbling words into the noon air.

  He was never the same.

  But he never left.

  Because of a woman named Emily, a man named Jameson lived and breathed the water. He never left his love, his Emily, and forever he would visit the pointed rock that looked over the lake and light a fire for her. And through the cool air and heavy mist, he always remembered.