Page 22 of Crossed By the Stars
She laughed as if I’d told a joke, and when she realized I was serious, she couldn’t hide her smile. “I’ll be fine, but thanks for asking.”
Outside, the night was unusually warm for a London spring. Clear skies and a full moon shone down upon us as we crossed the street and entered the depths of Hyde Park.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Somewhere quieter.”
“I didn’t take you as a nature boy,” she said as we walked toward my favorite spot in the park.
I shrugged. “In the middle of the ocean on my father’s sailboat is probably my favorite place to be. I like the quiet of the sea. There are no people to deal with. Just the sky and the water.”
“And the fish,” she teased.
I chuckled. “But they don’t talk behind your back.”
She rolled her eyes.
I led her down the path to where the Serpentine Waterfall flowed into a little pond. At night, the quiet rush of the falls muffled the noise from the streets of London. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine being at my parents’ villa on St. Micah.
Jada took in the entire scene and then looked upward to where we could see a few stars shining through the ambient lights of the city. They seemed to capture her attention far more than the water and flowers captured me.
“Wow. This is…” she said.
“Amazing,” I said, but I was looking at her, and it drew her eyes from the heavens back to me. As her gaze met mine, she shivered, and I realized that the night air wasn’t as warm for her in a strapless dress and bare legs as it was to me in a tuxedo. I unbuttoned my jacket and draped it around her shoulders.
At first, she stilled, surprise registering on her face. Then, she said quietly, “Arigatogozaimashita.”
My brow furrowed at the word, and she smiled. “It means thank you.”
“I think I’d like to learn Japanese. Maybe you should teach me.”
It was a poorly done flirtation that my friends would have laughed at had they heard it. Jada just stared at me, as if trying to assess my level of honesty. The moonlight cast her in an ethereal glow. After our first slow dance, I’d been haunted for weeks by the silkiness of her skin under my fingertips.
“It’s only because you’ve been forbidden to talk to me that makes that idea tantalizing. It’s the illicitness of it that you want, not me,” she said with an edge to her tone before she looked away again.
I raised a hand to her chin, tilting her face toward me.
“It’s not that, Jada,” I told her, my voice deepening in a way it never had before. “It’s you.”
She shut her eyes against my look and my words as if they were unbearable, and her dark lashes made a thick line against the shining porcelain.
I fought the desire to kiss her. I’d spent a lot of time kissing a lot of girls over the last couple of years. Experimenting. Learning the way to caress a tongue so that my partner softened against me. Learning how to lead without demanding, to taste and sip and touch until we were both on the edge of breaking. I wondered if Jada had ever been kissed.
The thought caused me to back away, dropping my hand.
Her eyes opened, and she stared again with her chest heaving under my jacket. She’d wanted me to kiss her, but it seemed…too soon. Too dangerous. Risky, like she’d said, in a way that might hurt us both.
After what felt like a thousand heartbeats, she turned her gaze back to the heavens. Mine dropped to the water and the plants bordering the pond. Amongst them was a group of stargazer lilies with closed blooms. They reminded me of Jada, not only because she was looking at the stars right now but because the pink and white flowers were strong and yet silky. They seemed like the Jada I was coming to know.
I picked one of the stems, pushing it into her hands. Our fingers collided, and electricity shot through me. She looked down, as surprised as I was by the feeling but also by the flower I’d given her.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“A stargazer. It’s closed right now, but when the sun rises, it’s going to bloom.”
For a year after that moment in London, whenever I knew I’d see Jada, I’d left stargazers for her. I’d leave them at the plate with her name on it at the tables, or I’d send them to her hotel room. It was like a hidden message that I’d see her there. It was a promise to steal precious moments with her where she could teach me Japanese, and I could make her feel heard. Where we talked about nothing in our lives and yet everything at the same time.
And then, I’d kissed her.
