Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,14

the heavens seemed so big, I almost felt like I was falling into them.

“Let’s just forget what we saw,” I whispered. “I can’t even remember where I found you.”

“Okay.” His arms relaxed.

“Did I hurt you?” I asked, turning to see if his face was marked.

“No,” he said, but I wasn’t so sure.

I pushed up even closer to him—arms, sides, hip to hip, legs, even our feet, his right and my left, pressed together. He lifted his foot and rested it over my ankle, gently pinning me down.

Then he pointed into the heavens. “Want to go there?”

“Where?”

“That star.” He gave his finger an extra stretch toward the dozens of stars in that general direction. “The one by those other two stars.”

“What do you mean?” I lifted my arm so it was touching his, our hands and fingers aligned, and pointed. “That one?”

“No,” he complained. Then he swiped his fingers across our view of the sky, like he was flicking away a speck of dust or a drop of water, and the night surged forward. The stars, staying perfectly aligned, curved across the sky—time had sped into the future an hour.

I gasped at this and grabbed his hand, pulling it back toward our bodies as if he might accidentally throw the earth off its rotation. The stars slowed again, appearing to have stopped.

“How did you do that?” I whispered.

“I took us somewhere we hadn’t been yet,” he said. “Forward in time.”

He said it so matter-of-factly, but the idea made me shiver on the inside.

“Just a little,” he reassured me.

“That’s . . . so cool.” I pointed at one particularly bright star and gave it a push with my fingertip in the air. The map of stars glided forward again, constellations staying aligned as they gracefully passed over us, not a long way, just a bit into the tail of the night, an hour or two closer to morning.

He made a sound of alarm, a fake cry, and then laughed. “Here.” He lifted his arm to mine, our hands together, our index fingers pointing up. As one, without saying aloud what we would do, we moved the stars a few minutes westward, then froze. “Look what we can do together,” he said.

“What did we do?”

“We stopped time,” he whispered.

I didn’t believe him at first. I watched the star at the end of my finger for a long while. He just lay there waiting for me to admit it. “Did we really?” I asked.

“We pooled our superstrength.”

“So you think I couldn’t have done it by myself?” I teased him.

“Okay.” He withdrew his hand and folded him arms over his chest again. “Now you’re just getting power hungry.”

Of course we hadn’t truly stopped planets and suns in the vacuum of space—I supposed we had stopped our perception of time. Which was just as magic.

The warmth of his spirit along the side of mine made me bold. I pointed both my hands toward the east and swept my arms westward. As the night sky appeared to fly by, and the sun raced up the ceiling of purple, brightening it to blue, as clouds sailed over us, scudding along, he slid between my open arms and kissed me.

I’d never been kissed, so I had nothing to compare it with. We had eyes to see and we could hold hands, and I supposed we had lips, because we kissed. But I also knew we were out of our bodies. So how was it that he tasted like rain? It was dizzying how we could press into each other further than humans ever could. He was pulling something out of me, like my sense of balance—he was dropping me off a cliff and I never wanted him to let go.

But it was also disturbing. How would we ever sort ourselves out from each other again?

The heavens were still floating along, faster than they should. I didn’t know how many days had rolled past. I shot my hand up and slowed down the sun halfway up the sky. Maybe time didn’t mean anything to us anymore, but if flinging the stars around shortened the number of minutes I had with him, I needed to put the planets back in rhythm. How many times had the moon crossed over us while we were kissing?

He had made the world of wandering spirits safe for me. But again came that nagging feeling that there was something wrong. We’d never be able to eat in a restaurant together. We’d never have our picture taken