Page 21 of Crying Wolfe
Whether she meant to or not, her hand splayed just behind his shoulder, and his entire being became focused on the place where she touched him. A light touch. Maybe one she was unaware of.
He couldn’t see her to tell. But with the tense and twitching muscles in his back, he could make out the delineations of each individual finger. Could sense some sort of energy arcing over his flesh, expanding from where she touched down his spine and landing in his cock.
From his shoulder blade. His goddamned motherfucking perfectly proper shoulder.
Jesus tap-dancing Christ, what was the matter with him? He’d barely been this randy as a teen. Hell, it’d been at least twenty years since he worried that a stiff wind and a soft touch would make him come in his trousers.
“What do you think?” she pressed, tapping his back like one of her enthusiastic kittens. “Isn’t it extraordinary?”
Oh. Right. Shit. The stars—er—meteors. Focusing his eye into the lens, he looked up into the rare, clear night sky. It didn’t look much different through a scope. Just closer. It wasn’t disagreeable or anything, but he couldn’t see the big deal—
“Holy shit.” He caught his breath as a bright orb with a definitive tail streaked across the scope. Another to the left. Two in tandem. Then a barrage of maybe five falling and glowing and burning out like a brilliant sprinkle of rain. “There are so many.”
“And the Andromedids is one of the lesser events. Just wait until next month when the Geminids are visible… You’ll never be the same.”
He could say that about tonight. Right now. A shift was taking place inside him, nudged along by the soft pressure of her hand.
Eli remembered something. Something he’d buried away for several years as he’d done his level best to wrestle an entire industry from the clutches of greedy men who would see their employees die before their profit margins were lowered.
“I did look for sky when I was a boy,” he murmured. “For the stars. After a long day down in the mine digging deep enough to reach the ninth circle of hell and nearly shitting myself each time I heard a rumble. Wondering if I’d be buried again before the sun had a chance to shine on my face. After breathing in the Sulfur, sweat, dust, and God knows what else. A dozen men would climb into a lift, and we’d turn our faces to the sky. Once we reached the surface, we’d stand there for a long time. Breathing the air. Feeling safe knowing that the sky wouldn’t fall on us. Except here it is, doing just that.”
She didn’t respond immediately, and he didn’t much care as he gazed into the glass, watching the lovely event in brilliant intervals.
“We’re just lucky, I suppose, that the sky falls so far beyond our reach,” she murmured.
“Do they know how far?”
“Actually, yes. Though these showers are sort of optical illusions. You see, the meteors are close enough to enter our atmosphere, but the stars behind them are light-years away.”
“What years, now?” He sent her a quizzical look before reclaiming the lens. He didn’t want to miss one. “That makes no sense.”
Her voice became dreamier, further away as if she’d lifted her head to gaze out the observatory ceiling. “Did you know that when you’re looking into the sky, you’re also looking at the past?”
He shook his head, following a particularly interesting streak in a strange and synchronous cluster.
“Some astronomers believe that the stars we see now, existed as we see them at least five hundred light-years ago. A light-year is the distance they measure in the time it takes for light to move through space in a year. Can you imagine time as distance?”
He furrowed his brow. “Not until today.”
The hand on his shoulder increased pressure and he’d the sense she’d bent closer. “Directly in the middle of your lens, you’ll see a constellation of overlapping stars that looks like a woman standing with chains at her wrists that connect to nothing. Do you see?”
Not really, but he checked again until he found some of the brighter stars that might have been a figure if a toddler had drawn it, with something attached to hands that didn’t exist. “I think I found it.”
“They’ve measured that constellation as something like two hundred million light-years away.” Her lips came closer to his ear. “Two hundred million! Think of how fast light moves. Of how far it must reach in an entire year. Of how vast that distance truly is…” She sighed, and he convulsed in a delicious shudder as her breath feathered over the downy hairs on the back of his neck as her voice lowered to reverential tones. “Have you ever felt so insignificant? So small and yet so miraculous?”
Turning his head toward her voice, Eli found her huddled beside him, patiently waiting her turn.
The answer to her question washell no. So he didn’t speak it.
He felt large and hard and very fucking significant right now. Vital. Alive. Infused with whatever mysterious force hurled those chunks of fire across the sky, and burning just as hot.
Honeysuckle and herbs. Skin smooth as porcelain, even this close. Soft eyes. Warm, sweet breath from plump peach lips. The kind of lips that would look perfect stretched around his—
“Here.” He straightened and backed away from the telescope. “It’s your meteor shower. You can watch it now.”
Her eyes crinkled with a pleased smile as she took his place, bending over the telescope in a position that didn’t help his predicament in the slightest.
“It’s not my meteor shower, it’s Andromeda’s.”
