Hi there. I'd like to say, this book killed me. It touched me like no book ever has and most of the time I wasn't sure whether to cry or scream. The writing style was absolutely gorgeous and moving and I rate this book 20/10. Favourite of all time.
I hope I do the book justice with this short story from Ari's perspective.
I present to you: Stories in the Stars!
Enjoy
We gaze at the stars; at the constellations that have captured people's souls and fantasies for millennia, and we marvel.
If you take a snapshot of a single section of the sky, there are thousands of stars, and within the blank spaces between each of those stars is another story to tell. How many stories are in the sky, I ponder.
The universe is endless. Ceaseless. Incomprehensible. I'll never have a hope of discovering each and every one of its secrets.
But when I look at Dante, I feel as if I might have a chance.
There is a story in his beautiful face. His eyes are streetlights in a dark ally, his nose the gradient of a graceful desert sand dune, his hair a silken mop for my greedy fingers to weave through, his sensual mouth… a forbidden pleasure like hot chocolate in the middle of the night.
Dante's face is a canvas of life's hedonisms the way the twinkling night sky is a signpost of everything we think we know and don't know at all about the mysterious universe, wise and unknowable and smug.
We lie in the tray of my chrome red pick up truck.
We don't speak.
Where our arms brush, burning heat scalds my skin, raises my hair and sends shivers down my spine.
The desert is deadly, peacefully silent around us and it is in this rare serenity that I gather the courage to lift my shaking hand and touch that face. That smooth, olive toned skin smooth like the hide of a baby seal.
I want to kiss him. I know I could kiss him. I know that society would say that I shouldn't kiss him.
The stars dance against a midnight blue backdrop. They whisper in a language I don't understand.
A cool desert breeze blows that ebony hair across his forehead and I decide to damn the consequences.
I kiss him.
The moment lasts for only a few seconds, but within those seconds is milliseconds and nanoseconds and microseconds and macroseconds and infinity and beyond. Seconds lazily stretch their limits like a coy leopard flexing its tight muscles, and seconds turn into minutes.
Hours.
Days.
Lifetimes…
Seconds.
Dante and I lie in the tray of my chrome red pick up truck.
We don't speak.
When our lips touch, the wind bursts into chorus and the stars applaud and the desert shifts somewhere deep in its bosom, as if it feels the perfection, the absolute… rightness of this ceaseless moment.
The skies sing and the stars whisper of countless stories, and Dante and I are just two people against the world.
I like to think that one day, the stars will sing of us… of the two lost boys who found each other in a torrential river and ended up in the tranquil desert.