Written in the Stars(79)

Darcy set her glass down on the table of hors d’oeuvres behind her. “He’s near the front of the room making the rounds with my mother.”

“Your mom?” Elle shifted uneasily on her heels. “Do I get to meet her?”

Darcy’s brows rose. “You want to?”

Elle reached out, resting a hand on Darcy’s upper arm. “Unless you’d rather I not.”

Darcy stared across the room to where Brendon was currently introducing Mom to a group of coworkers who appeared to hang on her every word. Darcy twisted the ring around her middle finger. “Later? Do you want something else to drink? More champagne?”

Elle stared at her with huge eyes rimmed with dark, smudgy liner. Glitter had fallen from her hair down onto her lids, her cheeks, her jaw. “Okay, that sounds—”

Elle broke off, cocking her head to the side. More glitter scattered around her, falling from her hair.

“This song.” Elle drained her glass and set it aside with one hand, reaching for Darcy’s hand with the other. “I love this song.”

Dancing wasn’t something Darcy usually did unless forced. But the beat was slow, had a hazy dreamy quality to it that she could probably sway to. That and Elle seemed eager, so eager Darcy didn’t want to deny her. She let Elle drag her out onto the dance floor where she wrapped her arms around Darcy’s waist, fingers dragging against the skin left bare by her low-cut dress. Darcy shivered and stepped closer, resting her hands lightly atop Elle’s shoulders.

“Your dress.” She swallowed. There was a lump in her throat that hadn’t been there before, not until she caught a whiff of Elle’s perfume, something sweet but not floral. Vanilla. Elle almost always smelled like cookies or some kind of baked delicacy, mouthwatering. The same scent had clung to Darcy’s pillows, her sheets. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I meant to tell you I like it. You look like—”

“A disco ball?” Elle suggested, laughing. She continued to trace nonsensical patterns against Darcy’s skin.

She gasped softly when Elle’s fingers slipped beneath the satin of her dress. “I was going to say you look like . . . you look like the moon.”

The stars, too, for that matter. Elle looked like she’d been draped in the night sky, dipped in starlight.

Rather than laugh or roll her eyes at Darcy’s fumbling ineloquence, Elle pressed closer, fingers squeezing Darcy’s waist. Her tongue swept against her bottom lip and Darcy couldn’t help but track the movement. “Fun fact—the moon doesn’t actually produce any light of its own. It reflects light from the sun, making it appear bright at night. So, if I look like the moon, I guess that means I’m reflecting the light that’s around me.”

Her eyes lifted, staring up at Darcy from beneath the blackest of black lashes.

“That’s—”

Elle dropped her eyes, breaking their gaze. “Corny? Sorry.”

No. Or, if it was, Darcy still liked it. She liked Elle and all her eccentricities, her quirks. Elle made her smile more in the past month and a half than Darcy could remember smiling over the course of the last two years. “No. I was going to say—” She hadn’t actually known. “Interesting. It’s interesting. I didn’t know that.”

“I taught you something?” Elle trailed a finger down the length of Darcy’s spine and grinned. “Huh. Kudos to me.”

“You’ve taught me plenty of things.” Glitter from Elle’s hair landed on Darcy’s wrist, pink, blue, and silver freckles mingling with the rest of the moles that dotted her skin. Rather than shake it off, Darcy let the glitter linger.

Her cheeks burned when Elle stared, lips quirking curiously. Please don’t let her ask what Darcy had learned.

“Teach me something,” Elle said instead. “Preferably something that doesn’t involve death statistics due to inclement weather.”

Darcy cut her eyes. “It was relevant.”

“It was morbid.”

Darcy harrumphed.

“Tick tock.” Elle arched a brow sprinkled with glitter.

Darcy drew a blank. Not because all her facts were boring or morose, but because staring at Elle did that to her. Zeroed Darcy’s focus to figuring out what color to call the blue of her eyes. Romantic obsessions that scared her more than any death statistic.

“Um.” Darcy shook her head. “I don’t know. I—” Her facts weren’t boring, but they felt inconsequential in the face of Elle’s cosmic knowledge, her ability to expand Darcy’s world by reducing the universe to something as finite as the fact that the moon had no light of its own, but also infinite in its ability to take her breath away. Being with Elle, around Elle, in the mere presence of Elle meant getting comfortable with constantly being out of her comfort zone. Paradoxical.

Elle’s fingers dipped below the back of Darcy’s dress, flirting with hidden skin, almost indecently low. Her lips twitched and Darcy ached. “Come on. Anything.”

“I could tell you a joke.”

What the hell. A joke? Where had that even come from?

Elle’s head bobbed in a frenzied nod, her footsteps faltering, losing the rhythm of the song. “Yes.”

“It’s not funny, not really. Lower your expectations. It’s—” Darcy sighed. Based on Elle’s wide-eyed look of anticipation, Darcy had committed and now she needed to deliver. “On our first . . . our first date, you told me you weren’t sure what an actuary does.”