Page 152 of Pick-Up
He tucks my hair behind my ear. “I may have reached out. And, before you ask, no, she doesn’t mind. She seemed pretty supportive, actually.”
I lean my cheek against his palm. “Ethan.”
“Sasha.”
“That’s so nice. And so cocky. What if I hadn’t forgiven you?”
He shrugs, sheepish. “I rolled the dice. I hoped. Optimism.”
I am touched. And excited. A puddle. A ball of bliss.
I step forward and meld to his chest, my eyes welling. I feel so lucky to have landed here in this hopeful place.
“So, is this a yes?” he asks, looking down at me with eyes that dance.
“Hmm. I don’t know if I’m free.” I shrug. “You know me. I’m all tied up.”
“I can work with that,” he says. And he leans down and kisses me again.
EpilogueSASHA (+DEMON DAD 4-EVA)
“The universe is vast and ever-expanding,” booms a deep voice that seems to emanate from all sides at once. “As different as we may feel, the 8.1 billion humans on Earth today all exist within the same cosmos.”
“The stars—they’re just like us!” I stage-whisper through pitch-blackness in Ethan’s general direction.
“Four and half billion years ago, our solar system formed from a combination of interstellar gas and dust…”
I lean over and, this time, I whisper in his ear, “There’s some dust collecting under my fridge. Should we try to make our own galaxy later?”
“We’re not going home tonight,” he says.
“I know. I just meantlaterin our lives.”
It’s too dark to see him, but I can feel his grin.
I am immediately thrown back to the night we stargazed on the beach, the night we first kissed for real—butnotour true first date, in my opinion. I had to sense Ethan beside me then too. Imagine his reactions. The subtle nuances of his face.
Even then, I felt like I knew him like he was mine.
Of course, this memory jog is precisely what Ethan had in mind.
He and I are on our non-first-date date—finally. We are at the planetarium. Which somehow he has managed to secure for us alone.
I could not have loved anything more. This man gifted me the night sky.
“Buthow?” I asked when we first arrived at the empty theater, after museum hours. My mouth agape.
“I play basketball with the assistant director.” He shrugged.
This basketball game is a gold mine. Maybe I need to work on my jump shot?
And yet I knew Ethan was downplaying the favor he called in. There is, no doubt, an expectation of some major quid pro quo.
“There are eighty-eight official constellations in the sky,” says the all-knowing voice now, “from Canis Minor to Boötes to Triangulum Australe, or Southern Triangle.”
Maybe now is a good time to finally tell Ethan my theory about constellations being named like sexual positions.
“Hey, Ethan,” I whisper.
