Before I Do(47)

They sat down on a patch of grass and Fred showed her how to use his camera, how to change the shutter speed and the aperture size. She picked it up easily.

“It’s basically a telescope, only you can’t see as far,” she teased him.

“Maybe I don’t need to see that far,” he countered, “when there’s so much to look at right here.”

Wandering further into the park, they found Mars, a huge red orb of dappled marble that spun on its axis. They lay down on the ground and took turns spinning it with their feet. Audrey took a photo of their shoes against the red planet, and when she showed Fred the result, they both laughed at the blur of trainers.

“I like this one,” she said.

“I like it too,” he said, taking the camera back from her and snapping a photo of her lying next to him. “But I like the ones with you in better.”

She looked at the screen he was holding out for her to see. It was obvious in her eyes how much she liked the man on the other side of the lens. She turned her gaze to the sky.

“I read somewhere that our universe has two hundred and eighty-five galaxies for every single human on earth, and more stars than there are grains of sand. I can never get my head around that.”

“Tell me more cool space facts, Audrey the Astronomer,” Fred said, turning on his side and propping his head up on his elbow.

“On Pluto, the snow is red; on Mars, the sunset is blue.” She paused, wondering what else to tell him. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of facts about space at her fingertips.

She knew what was interesting to her but not necessarily what would interest other people. “Did you know there are rogue floating planets out there, not in orbit around a star—they’re just alone, drifting through the universe?”

“Could we live on them?” he asked.

“No. All life needs a sun,” she said as Fred started spinning Mars with his feet again. “I read this theory about the multiverse—that there could be an infinite number of universes, all with their own stars and galaxies. Logically, it would mean a planet exactly like Earth would repeat itself over and over. We’d have doppelg?ngers out there, leading variations of our lives. Anything that can possibly happen will happen an infinite number of times.”

“Ideas like that make my brain melt,” said Fred, stopping Mars from spinning and pushing it so that it spun the other way.

“You just made all the Martians very dizzy,” Audrey said, helping spin the planet faster and faster with her feet.

“I often wonder how humans can be so clever, making houses, cars, phones, pasta.” He smiled. “And yet we’ll never know the answers to these big questions. We don’t even know what we’re doing here, on this tiny rock among the stars.”

“Would you want to know, even if it made your brain explode two seconds later?” she asked, turning onto her side and putting her feet back down on the grass next to him.

Fred contemplated this for a moment.

“Now, or later in my life when I’ve lived more?”

“Now,” she said, watching his face move, his expressive eyebrows, his features in perpetual motion.

“I don’t know. I think, before my brain exploded with the vastness of the multiverse, I’d want to kiss you,” he said. Then he rolled away from her and stood up. Audrey felt her blood pump loud around her veins in deafening anticipation. He reached out and took her hand, helping her to her feet.

As they stood facing each other, Fred leaned forward and gently kissed her on the lips, then drew back and smiled that crooked smile of his. She felt something awaken inside her, and she had to reach for his hand to anchor herself to the ground. She had never felt this kind of crackle before, this magnetic draw to another human.

“This is crazy,” he whispered.

“I know,” she said.

They strolled hand in hand through the park and found the sculpture of Earth, but the crowds were busier there and they couldn’t get close. As they meandered back toward the bus stop, he put his arm around her and kissed her shoulder in the most tender way. It was such an intimate gesture, anyone observing them might have imagined they’d known each other far longer than a few hours. On the bus, Audrey desperately wanted to kiss him properly, but it was busy, and it felt too public.

When they pulled into Baker Street, Audrey said, “We’re back where we began, at the photo booth.”

As they got off the bus, his arm was still around her shoulder, and her skin tingled at the prospect of where this was going and how. They got to the booth and climbed in, both giddy with laughter, drawing the curtain behind them. Fred found change in his pocket and she sat on his lap. As the flash went off, she kissed him, a proper full kiss, his lips soft and hot, his tongue meeting hers, the flash of light from the photo booth scorching the feeling onto her lips. The flashes stopped, but the kiss continued, hungry and urgent, and she felt the tinderbox of tension between them explode. She had never been kissed like this, never felt a kiss in every atom of her body. They heard the whirl of the booth, and the photos hit the slot.

“Did you feel that?” he asked, breathless, his pupils wide.

“Yes,” she said.

“I think this booth might be magic.”

Outside, they collected the photos and huddled together to see. In the first three photos, most of her face was obscured by his, but in the final image you could see their lips meet, and Audrey blushed at the rawness of the image.