Page 40 of The Secret Of Us

“That’s nice,” she says quietly, almost to herself. It’s not the reaction I expected at all.

“You probably think I’m weird.” I give her the opening to joke about it. It’s what anyone else would do.

“No, never.” She lifts her hand to my bare arm, her fingers tightening for a second around my bicep before she lets go. My throat goes dry again, and a strange feeling settles in my stomach. It feels like her fingerprints have etched themselves there forever. “I really do think it’s nice.”

I can’t help but smile at that, and she does the same. Hers is much wider than mine though, brighter. I don’t know if it’s even possible for her to give anything less than that.

“Okay, so we don’t have to kiss at all. I think if we hold hands whenever we’re together, it’ll be convincing enough. And if anyone does ask, I’ll say I don’t like PDA.”

It might seem like something small to her, but her offer at the end gives me another reason to trust her.

We start walking again, the glow of the moon the only light shining down on us. I know we should start heading back to the dorms, but it’s nice being out here with her under the stars. It’s like no one else exists in this moment apart from us.

She lays out more rules, clearly putting more thought into this than I have. Izzy reassures me that she won’t cross any of my boundaries, and I do the same for her.

“We should set an end date, too. So that we both know when we can walk away from this.”

All I can do is nod, the strange feeling of missing something before it’s even gone washing over me for a split second.

“Maybe right before exams?” I suggest. “We can say it was an amicable breakup, and we both needed to focus on studying.”

“That sounds good to me,” she says. “I think that’s covered pretty much everything I could think of.”

We’ve finished another lap and without saying a word about it, we both start walking toward the steps. Just before we start climbing up them, Izzy holds on to the railing, tilting her head back to the sky. I copy her, wondering what she’s looking at.

“I love seeing the stars here,” she offers, her voice quiet again. “I live just outside of London, so there’s too much light pollution to see anything.”

I store that information away in my mind. I’m enjoying getting to know these small details about her life away from school.

“It’s pretty,” I say. I’ve never paid much attention to the stars before, but looking at them like this with Izzy by my side, I’m starting to see the appeal.

The sky stretches endlessly above us, dots of white scattered all around. It only adds to my earlier feeling that we were the only two people in the world.

Izzy points her finger above her head and I follow the end of it.

“Do you see that group of stars right there?”

There’s a cluster of brighter dots amongst the others, and I assume that’s what she’s talking about.

“That’s the big dipper,” she continues, moving her finger to trace some sort of shape. “It’s part of Ursa Major but I can’t really see it right now.”

It all looks like a blob of dots to me but I nod anyway, humming to myself. I’ll pretend I’m seeing whatever she wants me to. She drops her hand, looking back down at the ground and starts to walk up the steps. I follow behind her.

“When I was younger,” she starts softly. “I really used to believe in that whole written in the stars thing. Well, I still do, I think. My brother and his girlfriend made me believe in it again.”

“How so?”

She stays a step ahead of me. Any time I catch up to her, she speeds up her pace so I hold back. It’s clear this is something she wants to talk about while she doesn’t have to look at me.

“They were born on the same day, Isaac at sunrise and Violet at sunset. He always tells her that they were fated. It’s sickeningly sweet.”

She lets out a laugh at that, but it’s half-hearted and sounds slightly defeated.

“That must be really nice for them.”

“Yeah.” She keeps walking ahead of me, and I keep watching the way her tied-up blonde hair sways with each step. “I thought it would happen for me too, but here we are.”

I don’t know what to say, so I stay silent. It’s better than tripping over my words and offering empty words of comfort. But hearing her speak like that makes my heart feel heavy, like a weight settling on my chest.

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