Somebody Else's Sky (Something in the Way, #2)

by Jessica Hawkins

“I don’t want to be taken care of. I want to be loved the way you love me.”

“I can’t just sit back and watch. I have to say something.” Her face, open and sweet, pleaded with me. “You know it’s true, Manning, you have to. You’ve always known that my heart doesn’t function right without you, that food doesn’t taste the same and air is too thick, and my mind is always wandering back to that night on the lake, because I’m all wrong without you, because I’m in love with you.”

“You think I don’t know how you feel? You think I don’t carry the burden of our love on my shoulders just to keep it from crashing down onto you?”

“If you ask me to choose you, I will—even if it could ultimately destroy me.”

Manning had once told me you couldn’t move the stars. I’d thought that meant our love was predestined, written in the night sky, sure as death. Behind my lids, I pictured the two stars and realized for the first time the permanent distance between them. And I accepted that there was, and always had been, a third star. You can’t move the stars. I had tried, and I had failed.

My love for him spanned the ocean, the sky over our heads, an infinite universe of stars. I could do this to Tiffany, but I couldn’t do it to him. I sealed my words inside along with a great love that somehow fit inside me. Maybe one day, Manning and I would challenge fate, defy gravity, and move the stars ourselves. But today was not that day.