It’s only when I go to the ice chest near the stairs for another beer that I realize Blake has retreated to the Escalade, a good thirty feet away. He’s sitting on the hood, leaning back against the windshield, watching us. The faint hum of country music makes it to my ears over the cacophony of my friends, and I can’t help but smile.
He tips his head at me and I wave back, then head to the campfire and sit on a blanket on the ground.
Ginger is blowing the flames off her torched marshmallow as Jonathan wrestles the stick out of her hand. “You’re doing that totally wrong,” he says. “It’s supposed to be golden brown.”
“Not in my family,” she slurs, grabbing the stick back and nearly falling off the stump she’s sitting on in her inebriated state. “This is how we do it.”
Jonathan drops onto my blanket as Ginger sticks her marshmallow back into the flames. He picks up his guitar and starts plucking out the melody of his pizza topping song, making up new lyrics involving the carcinogens in burnt marshmallows.
We laugh and give each other shit, and after a few more beers, when Jonathan and Ginger start giving the rest of us a lesson in sex ed, we tell them to get a room and send them off to bed.
Izzy’s eyes shift to Blake, who’s still on the hood of his car, then back to me. She wraps her arms around me and props her chin on my shoulder. “So, what’s the real deal with you and Secret Agent Man?”
I shrug. “He says Ben was mixed up in a lot of bad stuff.”
“But none of that really has to do with what’s going on between you,” she says, nudging her shoulder into mine. “He’s been sitting on that car for the past two hours, staring at you.”
“Because that’s his job, Izzy.”
She shakes her head slowly. “There’s nothing ‘business’ about the look he’s giving you, girlfriend.”
As if he knows we’re talking about him, he kicks off the car and saunters over to the fire ring. He stomps at the embers with the heel of his boot. “You going to be up for a while? I’ll put some more wood on.”
Izzy stands and stretches. “Jonathan and Ginger are probably passed out by now. I think I’ll crash too.” She flashes me a secret smile as she heads to the stairs.
Blake settles onto a rock at the edge of the circle and pokes at the embers with a stick. He’s more causal than usual today, in jeans and a black T-shirt with an open flannel shirt over the top. He looks very woodsy. And it’s totally hot.
“What did Jonathan say?” he asks.
I hook my elbows around my knees and draw them closer. “He said he was just getting drunk with Marcus.”
“For four days,” he says, flicking me a skeptical look.
I nod.
He pokes at the fire again, then gets up and tosses another log on. “And you believe him?”
“I don’t know.” I want to. Jonathan’s never given me a reason not to trust him. “He thinks that guy who ran us off the road might have been a jealous boyfriend.”
Blake’s jaw tightens as gives me a doubtful tip of his head, like maybe I’m too naive to live. “He ran you off the road and shot at your after you told Jonathan you were testifying against Arroyo.”
I shake my head. “Think about it. Jonathan’s the one who got shot, not me. Do you really think Ben’s guys would have missed me?” I hear the defensiveness in my tone and stuff it down. I get that Blake is just trying to protect me. I need to cut him some slack.
He kicks at the log with the heel of his boot and it bursts into flames. “It was dark and you were a moving target. It’s an easy miss, even for a decent marksman.”
The golden firelight flickers off his features, softening some lines and making others sharper. He’s breathtakingly, heart-stoppingly gorgeous, and my fingers dig into the blanket automatically, as if I need to tether myself to the ground or I’ll launch right into him. To keep from staring . . . and probably drooling, I lie back on my blanket and look up at the stars.
For the first few years after Mom married Greg, before the boys were born, he used to take us camping in Yosemite Meadows. That’s when I realized the sky is a flickering blanket of stars when you’re away from the city lights. Tonight, it’s as beautiful as I’ve ever seen it. Maybe it’s nearly a month in captivity that makes my freedom feel so much bigger now. Or maybe it’s the vastness of it all that makes me feel so small. As I watch, a shooting star streaks across the night sky, and then another.
“It’s a meteor shower tonight. Possibly a meteor storm.” Blake steps around behind me and sits next to me on my blanket. “It really started to pick up about half an hour ago. They’re predicting a ZHR of at least four hundred per hour.”
I sit up, propping myself on my hands behind me. Between his country music, cowboy boots, and infuriating tendencies, I forget he’s a genius. “Great, Mr. Rocket Scientist. Now can you repeat that in English?”
He stifles a smile and stares up into the sky. “NASA has been predicting this shower since 2009, when they discovered Earth would pass through the debris trail of comet 209P. The ZHR is the zenithal hourly rate, or the rate at which debris from the trail will fall through our atmosphere. They say it could peak around one A.M. at up to a thousand, which would bump it from a meteor shower to a meteor storm.”
“So, that’s a lot?”
His eyes turn from the sky to mine and he nods slowly. “Yeah. It’s a lot. And with the crescent moon, we should get a pretty good show.”
“Do you ever regret it?”
His eyebrows rise as he lowers himself onto an elbow. “There are myriad things I regret. You’ll have to be more specific.”
“Leaving Astronaut Candidate training. Giving up your dream.”
He stiffens momentarily. “Cooper told you that?”
I nod.
He blows out a breath and rolls onto his back, lacing his fingers behind his head and gazing at the stars. “Sometimes.”
“Do you think you would have made it? I mean, aren’t there a lot of people shooting for just a few spots?”
“There are. Whether I would have made it or not is irrelevant now. I chose to do something different with my life.”
“Because of your dad.”
He shoots me a glance and his jaw tenses. “Remind me to put a muzzle on Cooper.”
“Thank you for finding Jonathan.”
“I didn’t. Arroyo’s people just let him go.” There’s suspicion in his eyes as he says it, and I hate that he still doesn’t trust Jonathan.
“Listen, Blake. Jonathan is a good guy. Really. He’s just sometimes . . . a little misguided. He would never do anything that he knows would put me in danger. And he swears Ben isn’t after me.”
His expression hardens. “He’s lucky he didn’t get himself killed.”
“Just cut him a little slack, okay? I mean, even if it was Ben’s guys, he’s the one who got shot because of all this.”
His lips press into a line, but he nods. “I invited him on your field trip, didn’t I?”
“Thanks for that. And, thanks for all this,” I add with a wave of my hand at our surroundings. “This is pretty amazing.”
His gaze travels back up to the stars. “It is. I’ve always loved it up here.”
“Did you come up here with your father?” I don’t even know why I asked, but I have the sudden need to know.