Page 175 of Boyfriend of the Hour
“Nathan!” called Charlotte Mueller as she noticed him pass. “Come have a drink with us!”
He didn’t say a word.
Instead, he led me out of the hall and up a variety of steps, around corners and down hallways, and then finally down a walkway toward a massive round structure I recognized.
“The planetarium?” I asked. “Can we even get in there?”
Nathan gave me a shy smile. “I might have arranged earlier for it to be open.”
I cocked my head. Heplannedthis? For what?
“So, you were that sure you were going to get laid, huh?” I joked.
Nathan turned, and though it was too dark to read his expression, tension lifted his shoulders. “No. I only thought we might need a place to take some space.” He looked around. “I also thought you might like it.”
“Why’s that?”
He turned. “Because you grew up in the city. I miss the stars sometimes. I thought maybe you would like to see them too.”
He opened the door, then he led me inside the darkened planetarium with reclined seating arranged like a theater in the round circling a platformed stage in the center. Except the reclined seats faced up to a ceiling littered with digitized stars.
I stared up. He was right, of course. The sky was a little darker in Belmont than Manhattan, but the heavens were still mostly hidden by a halo of light that wreathed the city at all hours.
Nathan took a seat at the bottom of the theater.
“Do you mind if I join you?” I asked.
He frowned at the empty seats beside him, but when he realized I was staring at his lap, his expression softened. “Oh. No, of course not.”
He opened his arms, allowing me to lie back in his lap so we could both tip back and look up at the faux night sky spinning slowly, constellations glowing in the domed ceiling.
“When I was in high school, some of us would sneak up to Woodlawn Cemetery at night to glimpse a few of these,” I said. “But this is much clearer.”
“You used to hang out in a cemetery?” Nathan sounded reasonably worried about that.
I chuckled. “Not in a witchy kind of way. We just went because it was quiet. We could smoke weed and look at the stars. Get a little peace from the city.”
“I used to do the same thing at my family’s house. On clear nights, I’d take a horse and ride out to the center of the property.There’s a pond there, and no one around for miles. We’d camp, and I’d pretend I didn’t have to go back.” His arms wrapped around my waist and squeezed. “Sometimes, I could see the Milky Way.”
I sighed, utterly content. The party was forgotten for the moment, as was the constant pressure of needing to perform for so many people, of trying to quiet the chaos in my head, the constant confusion.
Sometimes, it felt like that performance never stopped. I always had to be something more for others. In school, it was torture to stop myself from interrupting, and if I wasn’t doing that, I was struggling to pay attention. With my family, it was trying to fit their expectation of what a good Zola should be: responsible, smart,grown. And with men…well, I didn’t want to think about that right now.
Not when I was inthisman’s arms. I was free to be myself. Free to be only myself.
“There’s Leo,” Nathan said, pointing to a familiar constellation on the right. “You.”
I smiled into his shoulder. “My lion.”
A kiss was pressed to the top of my head. “That’s right.” He gave a long sigh. “I never knew it could be like this.”
“What, watching constellations?”
There was a squeeze at my waist. “No. Being with someone.” Nathan’s nose burrowed into my neck, and he kissed me softly just under the ear. “Being with you.”
I hummed in agreement. “Me neither.”
Carefully, he turned me in his lap so I was sitting with my feet draped over his knees. His nose touched mine, and he kissed me, soft and true.
