air and hurl them out his window. Couldn’t he come up with anything better to ask the man he loved?
“Fine.”
“You, uh, have a performance soon, yeah?”
Justin’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that?”
“I looked it up. Next week, right? At the planetarium?”
Justin’s jaw shifted left and right. “It’s a space theme,” he finally said. “The performance. The dance.”
“Cool venue.” Can I come? Can I watch? Would you hate me if I came? He opened his mouth—
The front door banged open. One of these days, that door was going to fly off its hinges or, more likely, bust through the drywall when one of the guys flung it open like that. Wes rolled his eyes and thunked his head back, sighing. By the pairs of elephant feet thundering through the downstairs, he guessed at least four of the guys were home.
Justin was like a cat who’d sensed a dog, all stiff and on guard with his hackles up even farther than they already had been. He glanced once at Wes and then headed for the door, calling out a “Bye” over his shoulder. He almost blurred, he moved so fast.
He heard Colton’s surprised, “Whoa, hey” on the stairs and Justin’s cold, “Just dropping something off for Wes” in return.
“Oh, cool. I didn’t know you were Wes’s friend,” Colton said. Like the women at home would say, bless Colton’s heart, he could make friends with a telephone pole.
“We’re not friends,” Justin said. His footsteps pattered down the stairs. “I only know him from class.”
Wes closed his eyes and crumpled the photo in his fist.
Chapter Twelve
Starlight winked by Wes’s head. Jupiter spun inside Saturn’s orbit, the two planets twirling on invisible fishing line through a dazzling array of tiny LEDs strung in lazy arcs beneath the dome of the planetarium. The room was dim, the walls lit with a deep indigo glow, the color of crushed sapphires. A small, round stage was set up in the center, and the audience mingled on the outer rim of the circle of seats before the performance began.
Wes clung to the wall by the emergency exit, keeping his head down. He glanced up every minute or so, scanning the room to see if the performance was about to start before staring down at his phone again. He had his ball cap pulled down, and even though it was still warm, he wore his green canvas jacket with the collar turned up. He’d almost gone out and bought a pair of reading glasses to try to disguise himself, give him one evening of anonymity. One night of peace.
His hands were clammy, and he’d already sweated almost entirely through the program. He rubbed his palms down his jeans, then rolled up the program and shoved it into his back pocket. He knew the important details, anyway. Justin was dancing in the second and fifth performances. A duet and then a solo.
The lights dimmed, finally, and the audience moved toward their seats. Wes snagged the closest one to him, still in the back, as close to the exit as he could get. He caught a group of girls looking his way, and he stared at the floor, his hands laced behind his neck, trying to block his face with his elbows, until the overhead lights turned all the way off and only the LED stars lit the stage.
He couldn’t follow the story that was supposed to accompany the evening, not without Justin to break it down for him. He gave up a few minutes in and just watched.
The music came from a live string quartet, and it started delicate and airy before dropping into a deep, rumbling bass that quaked the floor beneath his boots. He watched the first dancer, a lithe, muscular woman, leap and spin and arch her way across the stage until she folded into herself on a quivering high note to end her routine. The lights dimmed even further, even the LED stars darkening before the next dance. A vibration from the bass and the cello sent tremors through Wes’s bones until every hair on his body was standing on end.
The stars glowed brighter, and there was Justin with another male dancer, wrapped chest to back, necks intertwined, bodies flush. Justin was in a skintight black dance suit, his eyes painted with rectangles of orange that swept up toward his teased and sky-high hair.
Wes’s teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached as Justin and the other guy started to move.