With This Heart(66)

“ Me too,” I smiled wistfully. “But that was a pretty lame first fight. I think we should break plates and stuff next time. Maybe one of us slams the door and leaves for the night to ‘get a pack of cigs’.”

Beck shook his head so that his nose ran across mine. “How about we skip all of that and just have really great makeup sex,” he offered, bending low to kiss my neck. My eyes fluttered closed and I desperately wished we weren’t in the hallway of a bar.

“ Oh…” I sighed. “Okay.”

Please take me in the bathroom. Please take me in the bathroom.

“ We have to go. Izzie and Tom are waiting to go see the Marfa Lights with us,” Beck said, stepping back and reaching for my hand.

“ Now?” I asked, surprised at how fast the plan had formed without me.

“ Yep. There’s a guy that offered to be our tour guide,” Beck answered.





[page]CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR





There was a viewing platform in Marfa built so that tourists could have a good vantage point to view The Lights. It was made up of a small stone building with a large wrap-around porch. Our group made our way up the stairs that lead to the porch after we’d reconvened in the parking lot.

I’d briefly met everyone at the bar before we left. Tom and Izzie were from England and they were backpacking across the United States before heading off “to university”. Izzie wore a black dress with her pin-straight blonde hair. Tom was dressed really well in a pair of ankle jeans, boots, and an army fatigue jacket. Drew, our tour guide, seemed incredibly odd, but I was happy to have a guide so I didn’t complain.

“ So do you guys know much about these lights?” Tom asked with a thick British accent as he started to roll his third cigarette of the night. He was chain-smoking. He’d pull out a bag of tobacco, roll it into a thin piece of paper, and lick it closed, repeating the process as soon as the previous cigarette was finished. I wondered when he had time to eat or drink.

“ Beck told me a little bit about them. That they’re supposed to be aliens?” I answered with a shrug. I tried to force my head to stop spinning by taking deep breaths, but nothing seemed to help.

Izzie smiled, “Yeah. That’s all we’ve heard as well.”

Drew, who’d been inspecting the perimeter of the rock wall for God knows what, stray javelinas maybe, turned when he heard us talking about the lights.

“ They ARE aliens,” he clarified with a sharp tone. Izzie and I shot each other a silly glance and I tried my hardest to stifle a laugh. Okay then.

“ The Lights were first sighted in 1957 and there have been many studies that claim to explain what the lights are, but I believe they’re examples of paranormal phenomena.” Drew’s facts were interesting, but his tone was going in one ear and out the other.

I turned my chin toward the sky and inspected the billions of stars floating over head. Beck and I had seen stars when we went camping our first night, but the stars in Marfa were on steroids. They were brilliant flickers of white against stark blackness. As I stared up trying to connect them all into made-up constellations, I felt closer to Caroline than I had since the last time I’d spoken to her on the phone.

“ The lights are going to look like small flickers of white light way out in the distance.”

I cast my gaze to where he was pointing, but still wasn’t convinced.

“ I only see that blinking radio tower,” I muttered, confused how that played a role in alien activity.

Drew shot me an annoyed glance, as if to say ‘dumb tourist’. “Everything to the left of the radio tower is Marfa lights. Everything to the right is just headlights.”

I tried to comprehend what he was talking about. I could see the radio tower, but I didn’t see lights on either side of it. Why were the lights on one side aliens, but not on the other side?

I didn’t want to ruin the moment for Beck, so I shrugged and kept my mouth closed.

“ I feel like you’re pulling our leg,” Tom laughed toward Drew, rolling another cigarette. Meanwhile, Izzie pulled out a bottle of cheap champagne from her backpack, apparently uninterested in finding the lights at all. Drew stared daggers at them.

“ Will we know when we see them?” Beck asked.

“ Yes,” Drew groaned.

“ Alriiighty then,” Beck answered. He kept his arm wrapped around me and propelled us toward the ledge and away from the group.

We turned to look back out onto the desert landscape. To be honest, I didn’t really think we’d see anything. It seemed impossible to find something when I had no clue what I was looking for. The stars were distracting and I had to concentrate hard to block out their appeal. Beck and I didn’t budge. We stared off into the distance, trying to stay as still as possible. My eyes scoped every inch of the blackness, and then finally a glow of bright white light came into view.

“ Beck!” I hissed, pointing toward the light, fearing it was about to flicker out.

“ I see it, too,” he spoke into my ear, and we stood there completely mesmerized. It looked like a soft glow of a lantern in the distance, except it was a sphere shape. It bounced and moved around the horizon line until it faded away after a few moments. My eyes were huge when I turned to Beck. “Holy crap! That’s so cool!”