She raised her brow, not hiding the obvious amusement on her face. “And you can,” she told him. “But we’re not going to have intense make out sessions in front of people.”
“So I do still get to kiss you then?”
Carmen shrugged, suppressing the smile tugging at her lips. “Sure. You know, those quick pecks on the mouth. A chaste brush of the lips. We can totally do that.”
Asa’s jaw dropped open, shooting her an incredulous look as if someone had just told him the Earth was flat. “There’s only one way I know to kiss my girl.” His eyes dropped to her lips for emphasis before he dragged them back up to meet her eyes, “And it’s anything but chaste.”
“And what way is that?” she murmured, drawing lazy patterns on his left cheekbone with her index finger.
“The knee-buckling, make-your-world-spin kind of way.” He grinned wickedly. “The only way I’m going to kiss you is by pretending each time is the last time I’ll ever get to do so.”
Carmen shook her head with a ghost of a smile, feeling her hair swish against her back as she did so, before she sighed in contentment and tucked her head under his chin. She smiled to herself and relished the feeling of melting into his body, the way her small frame fit cosily against his broad one. As if nothing could get to her past him.
They sat there for a while, no words being exchanged. The only sound that filled the air around them was each other’s breathing, which was no longer ragged and heavy, but slowly calming down and regaining its natural rhythm.
Carmen’s eyes flickered upwards, finding a gap between the thick branches and leaves that allowed her to catch a glimpse of the dark sky stretching out endlessly above her and Asa. There weren’t as many stars as she’d have liked to see, but they were enough to make the sky look like someone had strung fairy lights on it.
“Do you know about binary pairs?” she asked softly, listening to the sound of his steady breathing.
She felt his hand shift and start stroking her hair, running his fingers from the roots right down to the tips. “As in, the one to do with computers?” he asked, and she could hear the confusion in his voice. “The ones and zeros?”
Laughter fell past her lips, light and breezy. “No.” She traced her finger along his collarbone, hearing his breath hitch at the contact. “I mean the stars.”
She felt Asa shake his head as his chin moved against her temple due to the gesture. “I haven’t.” He pressed his lips to the top of her head. “But I’d like to hear about them from you.”
Carmen snuggled further into his chest, shifting her gaze back to the tiny bit of sky she could see. “So the stars have a system, and the binary pairing is a pretty common one where only two stars belong in one system.”
“System?”
She nodded against his chest. “Yeah,” she murmured. “They orbit around the same centre. In their own little world, belonging only to their system.”
“That seems nice,” Asa commented. He stopped his kneading of her hair and started massaging the back of her head.
“It is,” she said. “There’s the primary star which shines the brightest. And the secondary star which is the dimmer one. You wouldn’t be able to tell by just looking at the sky from here, though. Any of those stars above could actually be a binary pair, instead of a single star. When we look at them from here, it appears as one star because the primary star’s brightness allows the secondary one to seem just as bright to our eyes. Kind of like it’s lending its light to the dimmer one.” She tore her gaze away from the sky, looking down at the grass, her smile fading.
“You... You sound almost sad about it,” Asa stated, confusion finding its way into his voice again.
Carmen could honestly blame Asa if he found her extremely weird to be getting sad about something as beyond her control as the elements of space.
“I don’t know,” she muttered, her voice sounding deflated to her own ears. “I mean, they’re not equal, are they? One’s brighter while the other one’s light is dimmer as if it’s a given that they can never shine as equals. That one of them will never shine as great as the other because it was created that way.”
There was a stretch of silence as Asa’s hand paused in its soothing movements against her scalp. “Carmen,” he said after a while, his tone gentle now. “I’m not sure we’re speaking of stars anymore.”
Carmen remained quiet for a while, wondering how exactly to put her thoughts into words. “I just… I…” She paused, took a deep breath, and then told herself this was Asa, and that she could say just about anything she wanted. “I wonder sometimes if human souls are like that too.”
“Working in a system?”
“When they find that one soul they connect with on a deep level, yeah. Except the system would instead be a relationship.” Carmen titled her head back, gazing up at Asa as he bored his eyes into hers. “But there’s that one soul that’s born dimmer, incapable of shining as bright as the other because it was fractured the second it came into existence, just like the secondary star.”
At first, Asa seemed perplexed, the crease between his eyebrows increasing until something registered in his eyes and then his expression grew angry.
“Don’t say that,” he told her, voice firm but also pained. “You’re anything but a fractured soul. God, Carmen, every single word that comes out of your mouth is literally gold, okay? You make me question what it even means to be beautiful every time you do something that’s insanely kind, because
