OOC: Date indicated at the start is relative its preceding chapter.

5 years earlier…

"C'mon!" She wanted no part of crossing the creek, but the grip I had on her wrist was persuasive enough to send her stumbling into the ankle-deep babble at my heels. "You need to loosen up a little if you want to enjoy it out here!"

"I didn't know we'd—" she said in an irritated tone, obviously unhappy with the way her feet were getting soaked since I had told her to carry her shoes. But it was muddy enough back here that you would just lose whatever you wore on your feet, so it was for her own good.

"Quit your whining and hurry up, or we'll miss it!" I pulled her with greater haste away from the fading noise of the county fair. She still had a stick of cotton candy in her other hand, small bits along the top of the pillowy cloud of sugar puff crimped and sticky from where she had bitten off a few mouthfuls. She put me in charge of making sure none of it stuck to her face, and I had done my duty, letting her know when stray strands of the sweet had floated onto her chin and cheeks. Each time, without fail, she had blushed and turned away from me, giving me time to chuckle and marvel at how unbelievably adorable she was. She came back each time without so much as a hint of cotton candy on her face, and scolded me for laughing at her. It was a simple formula, but an effective one. It let me look at her as long as I wanted.

"Whatever it is, it can't be important enough to ruin my leggings for it!"

I shook my head. "Oh, hush; you don't even know what it is we're going to see!" I pushed my way through some cattails and felt my bare feet land on a plank of wood. Looking down, I saw what it was we had came for; the railroad tracks. "Right? C'mon! You haven't seen nothing yet!" I brought her to a stop between the two rails and and pointed back the way we had came. "Look!"

She turned her head to where I was gesturing, but I kept watching her eyes. I couldn't help but smile as they lit up with wonder. I knew exactly what she saw; the ferris wheel, standing tall over the reeds in all its multicolored glory. As the colors cycled through, from red to blue to green, the wheel turned slowly but surely. We had just been up there, at the top of the wheel's arc, soaring like we were flying in our own private plane, but we never would have seen the spot we were in from there. We did see the town, all the streets lit dimly with the old-fashioned lamp posts and the businesses clicking off their lights one-by-one as they closed up for the night. We saw the horizon where the sun was finishing its setting, lighting the sky ablaze in an arc over the solitary asphalt road that connected our slice of the country with the rest of the world. It really put into perspective how small we all are, seeing how far away you can go and still not find anything new. Where she came from, there were buildings galore, and streets criss-crossing one another like plaid on a shirt. She'd never thought about what it was like to be truly in the world, and I saw that on her face as she ooh'ed and ahh'ed as we reached the top of the ferris wheel's slow rotation.

"So?" I let my arm fall to my side. "Worth it?"

She shrugged. "That is really pretty," she said, "but it's not $70 at Macy's pretty."

I rolled my eyes. "I'll get you new leggings, if it bothers you that much," I said, exasperated, "but I'm not done yet." I spun her around and motioned towards the small pond that was just on the other side of the tracks. This pond was what I was in a hurry to get to. If we weren't in time, we'd miss out on my favorite part of the fair. "Look," I said, nudging her softly towards the water. She looked up at me hesitantly, stepping cautiously towards the pond with her arms folded across her chest. I took a step towards the water too, peering around her to make sure it was actually going to happen. When I saw the muddy mass at the bottom of the pool, I knew we had made it just in time.

The pond was alight with little critters glowing like the torch bugs that zipped around our heads. They were clustered together in bunches all along the silt at the bottom of the water, mirroring the stars in the sky above. I herd her gasp in surprise when she saw the little buggers glowing away, and the way she bent over to look at them closer was proof that she wasn't thinking about Macy's any more.

"Are those…?" she trailed off, squatting down and sitting on the train track.

I sat down next to her. "Those glowing things are alive in there," I said, pointing at them. "Momma says they're bio…lumen…something-or-others."

"Bioluminescent," she said breathily, shaking her head, "they'd have to be!" She leaned forward a bit. "Wow! They're so beautiful!"

"Tell me about it," I said, "I love coming to see them every year around this time."

She looked at me. "How did you find them?"

"Well, I liked exploring when I was a kid. We'd get bored at the fair and sneak away from our parents and come out here. Then, one night, we just stumbled across this pond and…"

"Who's 'we?'"

My breath stopped in my throat. I wasn't ready for that question. Did I want to tell her? Should she know? Was now the time? She just moved here two months ago, she's practically a stranger. Maybe it'd be best if—

"Did I—" her voice startled me back to reality, and apparently it had startled her too. She was looking at me with concern in her eyes, her head tilted to the side, her long braided hair hanging off her shoulder. "Did I say something wrong? You don't have to—"

"No, no, it's all right," I said, leaning back and laying my head on the other railway track, "I just haven't told this story in a while." I sighed. "I was talking about my friend Tay, we used to do everything together. Playing in the fields, sword fights, football. We found so many caves and ditches and hovels full of junk that we would collect and store in our closets, pretending we owned convenience stores and trading one thing for another. And—" I motioned around to the area we were sitting in "—we found this place." I sighed. "But…that was a long time ago."

It was quiet for a few seconds. "Where is he now?" I couldn't blame her for asking.

I closed my eyes. "Barn fire." The silence that blanketed the pond was heavy. Even the frogs stopped croaking.

There was a slight shuffling beside me, and I peered out the corner of my eye to see her drop back onto the train tracks the same way I was. I looked up at the sky. The stars were really bright tonight, like sugar crystals sprinkled onto the blackness of space. I decided to break the silence.

"Do y'all—"

"I'm sorry." Her voice cut me off. She shook her head. "Sorry; I'm sorry about your friend."

I gnawed on my lower lip. "Thanks," I replied, "it's probably six years ago now. He's back in Heaven now, which is better than anywhere else."

"Yea," she said, "that must have been tough."

I shrugged. "It was, y'know. You only really get one or two people like that in your lifetime, so losing him was unfair. We were still just kids, we had more to do on this earth."

"I know what you mean," she said. I turned my head to look at her. She had her eyes closed too, like I had a moment before. "I lost my parents. That's why I moved here, because my parents died."

I felt like someone had punched me in the chest. "Jesus," I cursed, "I didn't—I-I'm so sorry. I had no—"

"Idea? Yea, nobody has any idea." She smirked, clicking her tongue. "They went down on that yacht that capsized. No bodies meant no real ceremony and no real closure, just me and my sister having to figure out where to go from there."

"You have a sister?"

"Mhmm, Anna. Little redheaded girl at the middle school. Our aunt lives overseas in Germany, but we couldn't travel that far, so we came here to live with our godparents." She shook her head. "I totally know what you mean about having more to do on this earth; there was so much more they needed to help me with…before…"

I sat up on my elbow and looked over at her. She had tears rolling down her cheeks and dropping onto the railroad planks beneath her head. This isn't how I wanted the night to end. I laid a hand on her arm, causing her eyes to snap open and lock on to my face. "It's all right," I said, "I'm not a gossip." I smiled. "If you want to keep that door closed, you can count on me to guard it for you."

She took a few deep, shaky breaths, sitting up and leaning against my shoulder as she brought her attention back to the bio-whatever critters in the pond. I let her sit there for a while, until her sniffles faded away, and the only sound left was the groaning of the frogs and the far-off chirping of crickets. I wanted her to be the one to break the silence this time, and I waited patiently until I felt her body move as she drew breath to say,

"What was it you wanted to ask me? Before I cut you off, I mean."

"Oh," I said, scratching the back of my neck, "I just wanted to ask if y'all got stars like this in the city."

She looked up at the sky, scanning back and forth across the heavens. "I never looked at the stars back home," she said, "I was always inside at night."

"Well, then, you'd better take 'em all in," I said, "because come next month there'll be a whole new set." She muttered something I couldn't hear, but she kept looking up at the stars. She still had her cotton candy in her hand, the pink fluff tantalizingly close to my hand. I reeeally want some of that… As carefully as I could, I reached two fingers out and tried to pinch a strand off of the bottom of the clump, where she hadn't bitten it. As I tugged on the sugar treat, though, her head snapped around to me.

"Are you trying to steal my cotton candy?"

"Well, it's just sitting there getting stale, and you weren't eating it, so I figured I'd just take a little off the side so it—"

"Didn't they teach you country bumpkins not to mess with a lady's food?" An enormous, flirty smile spread across her face as she tore a huge chunk of cotton candy off the stick and stuffed it into her mouth. It puffed up her cheeks and made her lips purse up into a tiny button. Through the mouthful of sticky sugar, she managed to say, "And here I thought at least one man in this town had some culture!"

I smiled back at her. "Says the girl talking with her mouth full!" I reached for her candy again, but she held it away from me at an arms length. I poked her in the side, causing her to squeal and tuck her arms into her sides. I seized my chance and grabbed a sizable chunk of the candy and stuffed it into my mouth before she could react. She gasped, mouth gaping at me in shock as I chewed away at the sticky sugar, taunting her with every bite.

"Oh, you asked for it, buster!" She poked me in the ribs like I had just done to her, causing me to squirm in my seat. I poked her back in response, she returned the favor, and the cycle repeated itself until we were both reduced to puddles of laughter between the rails of the train tracks.

As our laughter died down, she pulled out her phone and clicked the screen on. In the dim light, I saw her eyes widen in shock. "Shoot! I'm late!" She scrambled to her feet. "I said I'd be home at 11 and it's almost midnight!"

I stood up to go, brushing myself off. When I went to lead her back, though, she glided up to me and stood up on her toes and kissed me. Her lips were cool and soft, and they tasted sweet, a mixture of cotton candy and vanilla. It wasn't a long kiss, but it felt like it could have lasted a lifetime, and when she rocked back off her toes and broke our lips apart her face was flushed crimson like I'd never seen it before.

"I just…" she said, finger-combing a few loose bangs out of her face. "Thank you…for tonight. It was the best time I've had in forever. I'd really like to do it again, really soon." I nodded stupidly. She smiled. "And, thank you for feeling comfortable sharing with me…about Tay. It really means a lot."

I was still speechless, in shock from how forward she had just been. "It's…nothing," I managed to say, breathless.

She re-adjusted her braid on her shoulder. "I'll get home on my own," she said, looking at the pond again. "I want you to…to have some time here by yourself. Maybe talk with Tay for a while." She looked back up at me. "I can find my way back."

She dipped into the cattails. "Elsa!" I called after her. Her head re-appeared from amongst the reeds. I shook my head, my jaw slack. "Th-thank you…for…"

She smiled. "I'll see you tomorrow," she said, ducking away again.

"Wait, wait!" She leaned back out. "And I promise we'll do this again…As many times as you want!" She smiled again, slipping away once more. "And!" Her head poked through the reeds a third time. "I'm sorry about your leggings," I said, exasperated, "I really will buy you a new pair if you want."

She giggled daintily, putting a hand over her mouth. "I think I'll keep them," she said, "what's wrong with a little bit of mud?" She disappeared again, but this time I didn't have anything that came to mind to call her back.

I turned back to the glowing critters in the pond. Some time alone with Tay… But I didn't want time with Tay, I wanted time with her. There was so much more to that girl than I could even imagine. And tonight, even if Tay were standing right here, I wouldn't want to stay another minute without her.

Because she made this the place I wanted to be, not the glowing pond or the memories of my childhood.

A sweet little something, a mid-night kiss. On a plane, or a train, or way back in the sticks.

"I'd really like to do it again, really soon.""

"Yep, yep," I hollered, pumping my fist in the air.

That's where it's at.