Across the Vanishing Sky (Starlight Grove, #1)(73)

A flash sailed across the sky, making me suck in a breath. Shooting star. I closed my eyes and wished.

Please, let me find Nova. Please, let her be okay.

There were days I was so certain she’d walk through my door. Days where I was sure I’d get a call from law enforcement telling me they’d found her and that everything was okay.

But as the days passed, turning to months and then a year, those days of certainty came less often.

Kol’s words echoed in my head. “Before we go down this road, you need to make sure you want the answers. No matter what.”

Part of me didn’t want to walk the road, but I didn’t have a choice. I needed to. For Nova. And for me.

Grass rustled in the direction of Dex’s house, but I didn’t reach for my pepper spray. Somehow, I knew it was him. And that was seriously messed up. How did I know someone’s energy after knowing them for only a handful of weeks?

“You shouldn’t be sitting out here alone.” Dex’s voice rumbled through the dark like a pissed-off freight train.

“I heard you coming,” I said, not taking my eyes off the sky.

“I wanted you to hear me.”

“Stalker.”

“Hellion.”

My mouth curved. “I like looking up at the stars. Didn’t get this in Oakland. Not even in Rhode Island. It’s clearer here.”

Dex lowered himself onto the step next to me, so close his thigh brushed mine, making the material of my sundress skate across my skin. I had to fight not to lean into the sensation.

“It’s pretty damn gorgeous,” he said, the words almost a sigh. “Missed it when I was in DC.”

“I bet.” Now that I knew what it was like to be surrounded by this kind of beauty all the time, I wasn’t sure I could go back. “But it’s more than the stars’ beauty. It’s Nova. She’s somewhere out there. Under the same sky. Looking up makes me feel…not so far away from her.”

Even in moments when it felt like that comforting sky might vanish before my eyes like she had or when it felt like a chasm separated us, I still held tight. I trusted that I would find her, even across a vanishing sky. And somehow, having Dex next to me, looking up at the same sky helped me believe that all the more.

He was quiet for a moment, and then his hand covered mine. The move was the same as he’d done before, his palm pressing down, steady pressure and heat. But this time, he wove his fingers through mine. He created a tapestry that made me believe we were stronger together.

Panic flared somewhere deep, but I shoved it down and breathed. In and out. Over and over as I counted the stars until the panic ebbed.

“I used to think that about my mom,” Dex said softly. “Even when I thought she’d left us by choice. I’d think how she was out there, looking up at the same moon. How could we be that far apart when we were under the same moon?”

My fingers tightened around his. “That makes it so much harder. Not knowing if she chose to leave.”

Dex swallowed, his throat working before he spoke. “Exactly. Those what-ifs. Did she throw us all away, or was she ripped from us?”

I traced the length of his pinky finger as if all the ridges and lines could tell me the story of his life. “I hate that for you.”

He stared out at the shadowy horizon. “She wouldn’t even know me now. And that kills. Either way, I would be a stranger to her.”

God, did I ever understand that, how the mind twisted stolen time and molded us into something we’d never been before.

“Sometimes, I wonder if Nova would even recognize me walking down the street. It’s like I’m two entirely different people. The one who ended up frozen in time when she disappeared and the one irrevocably changed by her disappearance. And that last one…that one is so night and day from who I used to be.”

Dex squeezed my fingers, his callused skin skating over mine. “She’d know you. There’s no way she wouldn’t. I’d recognize you blindfolded and in the dark. Because you glow, Hellion.”

His words were a brand—pleasure and pain because they were a claiming. One that terrified me to want so badly.

“I want to believe that. That she could see me in the dark.”

“She can,” Dex rasped. “You’re a goddamned miracle. Pain changes us. Grief. Trauma. It’s all a sculptor’s knife. But you let it change you for the better.”

I looked at him through the darkness, the starlight and faint glow of the kitchen lights illuminating his face: the hard angle of his jaw covered in scruff, the way the green in his eyes seemed like endless pools I could get lost in. “You didn’t know me before.”

“Don’t have to. I know that losing your friend—your family—could’ve turned you bitter. Instead, it had you looking for the good, claiming it. Just like you keep looking for those stars you share with her.” Dex’s gaze held mine captive. “You’re not like me. You didn’t stop living.”

“You live,” I argued.

He shrugged. “A half-life. Never putting myself in a position where someone could pull the rug out.”

I could see what he meant. He had friends but no one truly close other than his brothers. He didn’t talk about what he was feeling. This might’ve been the most he’d ever shared in that respect. Which only made it more of a gift.