Misfits Like Us (Like Us #11)(130)

“But not too long.” Lo gets the last word in.

I find Luna outside her childhood bedroom window. She’s on the roof, lying on a knitted blanket that covers the rough shingles, and I climb out into the night.

As I lie beside her, her head turns to me. She’s searching my features for answers. “What’d my dad say?”

She knew I was gonna ask Lo for permission to date her.

I open a pack of cigarettes. “He said, not yet.”

Luna frowns. “Not yet?”

I reach over and slip a cigarette behind her ear. “I gotta figure this thing out with my family first.” I explain everything, which takes a few minutes, and I finish with, “I can’t let anything happen to you, Luna.”

“I’ll be here,” she whispers, her voice tender and fragile. “I feel really protective over you and me and what we have…but I have the strangest feeling…like I erased us somehow.”

“You didn’t.”

“What are we then?”

I’m unsure how to define us. I just know we aren’t done yet. We aren’t over. “Look up.” I pull out my sketchbook from my back pocket.

Luna lifts her gaze to the star-speckled night.

Knees bent, I rest my sketchbook on my thighs. Edged closer to her, our arms touch but neither of us shifts further away.

“Sagittarius and Leo, their compatibility. You only told me about sex. So I thought you must’ve been leaving out some bad news,” I say. “Something that’d tell us to stay away. But I looked it up, Luna, on twelve different sites.”

“Twelve?” Her eyes glass.

“I was surprised,” I breathe, “that every place said the same thing. That it’s inevitable. Get one Leo and one Sag together and they’d inevitably—”

“Fall in love,” Luna finishes, her head turning to me again. Close enough that her lips practically touch mine. Our gazes sink deeper.

My chest rises. “What are we, space babe? It’s been written in the stars. And this—it can never be unwritten.”

Luna wipes at her watery eyes.

I clutch her cheek, pressing a tender kiss to her lips, not letting her deepen it this time, and I sit up, quickly tearing off a page from my sketchbook. If I loiter any longer, it’s gonna be harder to leave.

“Are you staying for dinner?” Luna asks, hopeful.

It’s her fledgling, baby bird sort of hope that makes me wish I could say yes. A thousand of ‘em. I try to give her a smile. “Not tonight.”

“I can go with you. Back to the penthouse.”

“No, you should have dinner with your family.” I want her to be here. I can’t take her from them. “I’ll see you later.” I hand her the sketch.

With one pen stroke, I drew her and me intertwined and making out. One line that never ends. Stars and planets circle the sketch of us.

While Luna is gingerly clutching the sketch with two hands like she’s been given a treasure, I stand and hop onto a lower part of the roof, then I slide down the drainpipe.

I walk backwards towards the darkened yard, staring up at Luna Hale on the roof.

“Why’d you give this to me?!” she calls down, almost leaning forward.

“‘Cause that’s what I imagine in the end,” I grin, pulling out a cigarette. “You and me and our galaxy. And maybe I don’t want you to forget it.”

“I never will,” she says so mightily—you’d think she was born of superheroes.

My grin reverberates inside me, and as I walk further away from the Hale House, I fit my cigarette between my lips and take one last glance back at Luna.

She stays on the roof, still clung to the image of me. Not the sketch. This me. The one standing on the grass, looking back at her. Her eyes squint, fighting to see me in the dark. Her shoulders arch and neck extends.

Searching for me. Afraid of me disappearing. I almost call back out. I almost tell her that she shouldn’t be scared. Because that’s the thing about Donnellys.

We’re impossible to get rid of.