A More Deserving Blackness (33 page)

             
Are you okay?

             
Yes.
  Then,
No.
  Then, my hands shaking over the phone,
I love you.

             
I wait, but nothing else comes through, and the screen blinks off in my hands.

             
But then the handle slowly twists in the door and Logan is standing there, shirtless and shadowed in the doorway, staring at me with his phone in his hand.

             
“You’re finally talking and I get it in a text,” he says disbelievingly, raking over me with dark eyes.

             
I take a shaky breath and let it out.  “Do you remember what you said before, about Scarlett O’Hara?”

             
He blinks once at the unexpected shift in the conversation, but then, “Yes.”

             
“Well, that’s me.  That’s how I feel.  I’m Black Death in a dress.  And I don’t deserve you.”

             
Logan considers me quietly before slowly coming into the room.  He grabs a shirt from his dresser and pulls it over his head, yanking it down over his bruised chest and then taking my hand and snatching up a tangle of blankets from the bed.  “You’re not wearing a dress.  Come on.”

             
“Where are we going?”

             
He leads me down the hall.  “Outside.”

             
I follow unresistingly.  Logan pauses in the entryway to help me into my coat, easing my hair free of the collar with soft hands that make me shiver.  As he slips on his own he notices the blush on my face as I glance at the wall beside the coat hooks and grins but doesn’t comment.

             
“You going to impress me some more?” I tease, to cover up my embarrassment.

             
Logan shoots me a sober look.  “I’m sure as hell gonna try.”

             
“I love you.”

             
He’s facing away from me, his hand on the door handle, and he stops, turning back to me slowly.  For a second, while my heart pounds, he studies me, his eyes flicking over my face.  And then he leans down and gently covers my mouth with his; a sweet, slow, seductive kiss.  He kisses me reverently, savoring the unhurried touch of only our mouths, and then draws back, holding my gaze.

             
Logan unlocks the door and leads me outside by the hand, pulling it shut behind us, cutting off the light from the house and leaving us in a deep well of black.  I shiver when the air hits me, crisp and cool, already hinting at winter.  Logan draws me down into his lap in one of the chairs with his hands on my hips and covers us with the blankets, enveloping me tightly in his arms.

             
I snuggle into him and look up past the overhang of the porch to the stars overhead.  The black night is clear and cloudless, flaunting its immense assortment of perfect, twinkling stars.

             
Logan presses his lips to my temple before he speaks, staring up at the sky with me. 

             
“Of the millions of meteoroids to impact the atmosphere every day, only a minute fraction of them actually make it to the earth.  Most just burn up into nothing, vaporizing in the heat.  But some survive.”  He pauses, shifting to look at me, waiting until I drop my gaze from the black of the sky to his equally black eyes.  “And if you’re lucky enough to find one that made it, it’s all burnt up and blackened, this broken thing . . .  But hell, how many people get to touch a fallen star, you know?  So it’s still the most beautiful fucking thing you’ve ever seen.”

             
There are tears in my eyes when he kisses me. 

             
And I’m just sitting there thinking how I could spend the rest of my whole damn life just being broken together with him.