@goldfanged asked: [ 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐒 ] ― sender and receiver lay under the stars to stargaze 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐅𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐒𝐄𝐍𝐒𝐄𝐒 (accepting)
It is exceedingly rare in the concrete Manhattan wilderness to find so much as a lone twinkle within the nighttime sky, but three hours out where the roads merge into the Keystone State and where white dots pepper and wheel all above, there is a lonely suburb tucked by the lemon trees showered in stars.
Cliff is a city boy born and raised in Dallas, now a citizen of New York. The twinkles he sees are the flashes of radio towers and helicopters crawling by.
Tonight, he watches a falling star, and he feels marvelously small.
“Hey, Theo. I appreciate you coming all this way for me,” Cliff says in that sighing way of his, disappearing like a feather. He cracks open seltzer. “And for filling my car.”
Moments earlier, he’d run on empty and parked on the side of the road. Theo had miraculously been not too far. Now they’re here, Cliff sitting on the hood with the smell of lemons and too-long grass wafting in the air. A breeze blows. He looks over.
10:34 and crickets chirping. Dandelions at their feet. Theo has this way about them where they seem to wear the night, dark and unknowable and starry, and maybe they've eaten constellations. That's why their teeth are gold.
Safe and comforting. Like the glow-in-the-dark stars he had as a boy.
"I can't help but wonder what you wished for?" he asks almost no one, light and soft around bites of burger. He stops eating, then, and he catches himself. "...It won't happen if you tell me."
