Page 56 of The Good Guy on My Porch

She looked down at her feet, but quickly back up again, her smile fierce. “The best kind of date, a friends’ date.”

A date was a date in my book, but I pushed the hope back down where it belonged and focused on the moment, on her happiness. “You want to star watch for a bit?”

“Sure. You can teach me all the constellations.”

“I tell you I’ve been to the observatory a few times and you figure I’m an expert on constellations?”

She grinned. “I’m pretty sure you’re an expert on everything outdoorsy and, if you aren’t, you could just make shit up and I’d be impressed.”

“It just so happens,” I said. “Making shit up is my specialty.”

I led her away from the observatory and up a narrow trail. Under the trees, the trail was pitch dark, so I pulled out a flashlight to light our way. She grabbed my free hand and laced her fingers through mine. It felt beyond good to have her small hand in mine, but I reminded myself we were just friends. It was my new mantra.

When we reached the look-out point, a flat, open field, we walked to the middle of it and I set the flashlight down to light our spot.

“I figured our star-gazing spot would be on the side of the mountain,” she said.

“We’d get too much light from Catalpa Creek on the side of the mountain. Here, there’s less ambient light to interfere with the view.”

I laid out a blanket and Dilly got out her own blanket. She didn’t spread it out next to mine, but got comfy on my blanket, right next to me, her own blanket in her lap. Dilly shivered and wrapped the blanket around herself. She tilted her head back and looked up at the sky. “Oh, my god,” she said. “That is amazing. I’ve never…” She drifted off, just looking at the stars.

“It’s better if you lay back.” I lay down to demonstrate. She followed suit, but she laid her head on my shoulder and pulled her blanket over her.

“Okay if I steal some of your body heat? It’s chillier out here than I expected.”

I wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close. “Take as much as you need.” I was on fire, the touch of her body along mine lighting me up and making me want. My heart was beating so hard, I was sure she could feel it against her cheek.

I lay there in the dark for a few moments, just breathing in her warm scent and enjoying the feel of her in my arms. I should have moved away, should have reminded myself she was dating someone else and would never be in my arms like this again. It would be too easy to get used to it, to miss her when she was gone, to want to kiss her again in a half-drunken moment. But I couldn’t move away, couldn’t give up this simple pleasure.

“Tell me about the constellations,” she said.

I searched the sky, trying to come up with a good one. Finally, I pointed out the big dipper. “See that one? The one that looks like a square with a handle?”

“The big dipper?”

“No, that’s the upside-down ball cap. Long before there was the sideways cap or the backwards cap, there was the upside-down cap. It was all the rage in the mid-1200s. But people had—”

She laughed. “Did they even have ball caps in the twelve hundreds?”

“They might not have looked like what we wear today, but they definitely had hats. They had to—”

“And when you say they wore them upside down, you mean literally? Like the part that was supposed to cover the top of their head flipped over? Why would they do that? Could they even keep it from just rolling off their head?”

I cleared my throat, pretending annoyance. “I’m the expert here, don’t question me. They had to walk perfectly erect to keep the hat balanced on top of their heads and one day, a wolf-lion attacked a village of people trying to keep their caps on their heads and, because they couldn’t look down, no one was able to see the approaching blood-thirsty predator and they were all slaughtered. The fashion was declared obsolete and the people threw their ball caps into the sky, where one of them formed that constellation.”

“A wolf-lion?”

“Really? I tell you a heartbreaking tale of an entire village brutally slaughtered and that’s what you come away with?”

“It’s just so ridiculous,” she said. “What would a wolf-lion even look like? How was it created?”

“It’s the most ferocious predator ever known to man. With the stealth and cunning of a…Well, of both the wolf and the lion, the ferocious teeth and strength of the lion, and the speed of the…It’s just really cool, okay? And that’s how the story goes.”

“Okay,” she said. “That’s pretty good, but I bet you’ve never heard the story of that one.” I could just make out her hand, pointing east to a big cluster of bright stars.

“Oh, you mean the cockroach reunion? I know all about it.”

She laughed. “That’s not the cockroach reunion constellation, that’s the princess dress constellation. See how it’s shaped like a dress covered with sparkles?”

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