Star Dust (9 page)

His breath released as she crossed his patio and sank into the chair. The same one she’d occupied the other night. “Are you going to point out more star shapes that look nothing like what they’re supposed to?” A little less cold now, but still grudging.
 

He laughed. “Do you want me to?”

“No. I suppose I just want to look.” She raised a finger to the sky. “See the Milky Way? I’ve never really looked at it properly before. But now that I can see it I feel like I can’t look at anything else.”

“The stars will do that to you. You see them clearly one day, and then you wonder why you bothered to look at anything else.” Bucky set his head on Kit’s knee, his warm doggy breath washing across his thigh. “Imagine seeing them up close.”

She turned her face to him, and the fire of her hair caught the silver of the moonlight. “Is that what you want to do?”

Yes.
“They’re a little too far away for me to do that.”

“That doesn’t mean you don’t want to.”

“Wanting something you can’t have is a waste of time.” He should have let go of that impossible, childish dream ages ago. And yet, no matter how often he looked up at those stars and thought how far away they were… he still wanted to see them up close.

And you want to kiss her.

He wouldn’t. She didn’t like him, and it was clear his offer—stupid and half-assed as it had been—was unwelcome. He knew better than to crash land right next to his own home.

But he wasn’t going to pretend he didn’t want to seduce her into something other than contempt for him. That he didn’t want to hear her whisper his name, heated, needful.

As if she knew what he was thinking, she said, “Hmm. You don’t strike me as a man with a lot of unrequited desires. I suppose everything you want falls right in your lap. You being a celebrated hero and all.”

“That’s right.” The bitterness of those words twisted his tongue. “Everything I want just falls into place. I only have to snap my fingers”—she flinched at the sound—“and a genie appears to grant my every wish. All through school, officer training, a damn war, everything just fell into place.”

Silence spread between them.

“Sorry,” he said after some moments. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

“I shouldn’t have assumed that your life was perfect.” There was clear respect in her voice now, which was a step in the right, albeit chaste, direction.

“It isn’t perfect at all.”

“I know you can’t talk about specifics, but can you talk about any of it?”

He pondered that. An aviator wasn’t meant to ever admit that anything might be wrong, that he might have doubts or fears. You got in that plane, did your duty, and always counted yourself lucky to do so. You were part of an elite brotherhood. No one dared complain about that.

And the brotherhood of astronauts? Not even a hint of a hairline fracture could appear there. It all had to be smooth as butter. Perfection in every way.

Anything less and he wasn’t getting into orbit. It was that simple.

“This test...” He sighed. “It didn’t go as planned.”

“Ah.” She pulled out another cigarette, and without thought he had the lighter out, the flame held up to the tip. As if he’d been lighting her cigarettes for her his entire life.

Had her husband lit her cigarettes like that? A flick of the wrist and fingers, the simplest of motions really, but he felt as if so much more was contained within. At least when he did it for her.

“I suppose with something like this,” she went on, “things don’t always go according to plan.”

He shivered as if he were floating neck-high in the Atlantic. “No, they don’t. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

“Mm.” She rearranged in the chair, and he found himself staring at the soles of her feet, illuminated by the light she’d left on at her house. They were dirty, perhaps from the walk over, and he found it endearing as hell. “I’m the Queen of Things Not Going to Plan. I certainly never thought I’d end up, well, here.”

He doubted she meant an astronaut’s house. He hesitated before asking, “Are you... are you happy that you left him?” Perhaps she wouldn’t answer. Perhaps it was too intimate a question on their short acquaintance.
 

She took a meditative drag on her cigarette. “Happy? That’s tough. I don’t know about happy. Would I do it again?” She took another puff, the smoke curling from her nostrils to fade into the black of the sky. “Yes.” She ashed the cigarette with a quick, decisive flick. “Now it’s my turn. Why do you want to go to the stars so badly? Is it just for the thrill? The glory? To get on the cover of every magazine in the world?”

He knew the line he should give, the one that ASD wanted him to give.
It’s all for God and country. It’s to win this race to control the heavens in the name of freedom.

“It’s because of a book,” he said instead.

“Pardon?” As if it were shocking that he could even read.

His cheeks warmed. “Well, several books, actually. Books about adventuring among the stars.” She said nothing. “Like
A Princess of Mars
. Stuff like that.”

“You want to go to Mars?”

“Yeah. I want to go see all of it. Suns, moons, planets, comets, novas, nebulae—wouldn’t it be amazing to just spend the rest of your life traveling to places no man’s ever seen?” He thought it would be. Always had.

She tilted her face back toward the sky, and he knew she was looking at the Milky Way again. Him? Well, he was looking at her neck. “I suppose it would.”

“Maybe someday that will be possible. But for now, I’ll be happy simply to orbit Earth.” A lie. He wanted more. He wanted the impossible.

“Will you get the chance?”

He was only the backup for this mission, and given the mishap on this training run, Parsons would probably like nothing more than to send Kit back to Pax River on the next transport. But he couldn’t admit that it was unlikely. Not to her. Not to himself.

He looked up at the Milky Way, the two of them studying the pearly smear of it across the sky. Stars upon stars, all gathered together there, sending their light to this little planet circling an ordinary star.

“Yes,” he answered. “I will.”

Anne-Marie sipped her coffee and played with the heavy, flowered drapes. She’d made them for another house, another window. Heck, it felt like another woman had made them. Twenty-one-year-old Anne-Marie wouldn’t recognize the thirty-year-old version. Maybe she’d ditch the drapes for shades and complete the transformation.

She tugged them all the way open and considered. Was she a drapes woman? Had she ever been?

Before she could decide, someone else came into the picture. To be precise, he ran across it. Kit Campbell: astronaut, all-American man, and stone-cold fox.

She’d discovered Kit’s jogging schedule earlier in the week. She’d noted the time he went out and his route so she could avoid him.

He made, as far as she could tell, two laps. And for the second, he sometimes wasn’t wearing a shirt. Or he’d pull it up and use it blot his face. It was… glorious. In a very silly, very coarse way that she was going to get around to chastising herself for one of these days.

And she hadn’t positioned herself in front of this window at 6:44 in the hopes of catching him. No. Absolutely not.

Then he did it. He pulled his shirt up to wipe his face, and the muscles of his back rippled like water on the pond down the street. Just golden and splendid. It was even better when he did it running toward his house and she could see his stomach.

She sighed, then slammed her hand over her mouth as if he could hear her. Of course he couldn’t, but she flattened herself against the wall just in case. It wouldn’t do for him to catch her watching.

In fact, this was it: the last time. If she happened to be looking out the window and he came past… no, definitely not. If he came past, she was going to close the drapes—or the shades—and go into the other room. Because he was just like the rest of them.

Wasn’t he?

When they’d met and he’d patched her up, and again during their first conversation under the stars, she’d thought she’d had him pegged: cad, playboy, jerk. During her first week in the house, he’d done nothing to convince her this view of him was wrong.

But after last night, she wasn’t sure. She hated not being sure.

She levered herself up and watched his figure retreating down the street. The intentional pump of his shoulders. His hips, slim and insistent. He ran fast, it seemed to her, as if he was excising something from his body.

“What are you running from?” she whispered.

Or maybe he was running toward it—the stars, maybe. Fame. A room filled with blondes.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t her and that was fine.

The phone rang then, which saved her from having to think about him anymore.

“Smith residence,” she answered.

“Good, I caught you before work.”

She set down her coffee and raked her hand through her hair. “Good morning, Doug.” She managed to say the words evenly. “How are you?”

“Busy. Which is why I’m calling. I’m not going to get down there this month.”

She took a deep breath. And then another. She shouldn’t be surprised. Even before she’d left Dallas he’d been finding excuses not to see the children.

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s this case. It’s just… it’ll be better in a few weeks.”

He believed it and he didn’t. He knew it was a lie, but he hoped someday he’d stop telling it. Doug wouldn’t ever change.

“I didn’t tell them you were coming.” She wasn’t mad, simply weary.

“Oh, well that’s good. They won’t be disappointed then.”

“That’s what you have to say about this? It’s good that I’ve lowered their expectations—and mine—so that no one is disappointed?”

“What do you want me to say?”

That had been his big question during the divorce. After a muttered
sorry
—which was an apology that Anne-Marie had found out, not that he’d been involved with his secretary—it had immediately turned into
what do you want me to say
.

The sad part was that she didn’t know. The divorce hadn’t left her devastated or feeling betrayed. It had made her feel foolish that she’d gambled the most important choice of her life on a man who, in the end, she could let go of without much pain.

No, the hurt and anger had come less from Doug than from everyone else. When woman after woman told her to stay with Doug, that this was, if not okay, then expected—that was when she got angry. When men told her that she would fail without a husband—that was when she was more convinced than ever that she had to leave.

“I don’t want you to say anything.” She slid down into the chair by the phone, too tired at this point to stay upright. There was no point in scolding him—he wasn’t going to change, and it wasn’t her problem anymore.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you need anything?”

She knew that the offer was genuine. He didn’t seem to have any hard feelings about the divorce, either—which was how she knew it had been the right choice for him as well as for her.

“No, we’re…” They weren’t fine, but they were going to be. “Everything’s getting settled.”

“You don’t need any money?”

“No!”

Why was every man in her life always offering her the wrong things? Why were they offering her anything at all, and when would they stop?

“Okay, okay,” he said with a laugh. “You always were prickly.”

She guessed she had been. It was that independent streak of hers that no one would let her flash. Until now, at least.

“Please come see them soon,” she said. “They miss you.”

He grunted.

She continued. “There’s this astronaut next door, and Freddie and Lisa worship him.”

Maybe it was wrong to try to make Doug jealous, but she didn’t much care. The kids had spent more time with Kit lately than Doug, and that was sad.

“I know what those astronauts are like—all the wild parties and jet-setting. They’ll get over it soon.”

“I’ll have you know—” She stopped herself. She’d have him know what? That Kit wasn’t like that? Of course Kit was like that. She’d known it from the second she’d seen the inside of his house, long before the blonde had appeared in the white lace shimmy—who wore something like that? No, there was no reason why she should ever think about defending Kit.

“You’re right,” she said. “But you should still come. You’re their father.”

“And I will. When the case is over.”

“All right, then. You do that.”

“Have a good day.” Doug sounded brighter—because he really believed he would. He truly believed that when this case was over he’d change. But he never had before.

“You too.”

For a long time after she hung up, she looked at the phone as if it could explain to her the secret of Doug. Of the failure of their marriage, which didn’t feel like failure at all. But nothing came to her. It was only a phone and not a crystal ball. And she didn’t even believe in crystal balls or fairy tales.

After a bit she looked at the clock and realized she needed to get ready for work and the kids out the door for school.