Fragments
"Jack, did ya see it? Shot straight across the sky." Lureen craned her neck, trying to look up at Jack.
"What now? Sorry, honey, I was tryin' a figure if those stars over there really make a bear like that fella on TV said. Still don't see no bear. Think I might a seen an octopus, though, gettin' his funny little legs into everyone else's business."
Lureen smiled a little, resting her head back against Jack's shoulders. "You make wishes on shootin' stars? Or you too busy scopin' out them octopuses?" Her fingers played idly across Jack's knuckles; she felt his hand curl into a fist.
He paused, and the words slipped out of him, soft as sigh, heavy as mourning, "Cain't say that I do."
The statement rattled around Lureen's head for a few moments, coins in a cup of always-unanswered questions. She wanted to toss them down, see if she could divine any meaning from the way they fell, like a mystic reading tea leaves. She absorbed their meaning, sinking into the melancholy he offered up.
"I used a make wishes. But now…" she bit her lip, voice lowering an octave, "Sometimes I wish I could jump on Belle, start riding, and never look back."
He tightened his arm around her. "I think… I think I know how you feel."
Their voices tuned into the same chord, striking a harmonic of echoed sorrow, they saw a choice laid out. It welled up between them, the pregnance of the air right before condensation forms, heralding an irreversible change in direction. Jack took her hands in his, turned to her, their eyes connecting, blue meeting brown, and the first step was taken in the surrendered silence of two people looking for a place to call home, the necessity of youth to make its own mistakes.
"Marry me?"
Her smile transfigured her whole body, like flower opening in the first flush of spring to the brilliance of the sun, and her answer was the first and last true kiss they would share.