The Milky Way is above me, each star a perfect point against the black night sky. I had gotten so used to San Diego’s light pollution that I’d forgotten just what, exactly, the stars were supposed to look like.

But even as I drink them in, let them fill me while the desert night air tickles my skin, I can’t help but notice something is off. They don’t anchor me like they used to. They’re still mine, my soul still sings to see them, but . . . I don’t know. That invisible something, that heartstring that used to stretch between me and my guiding stars is different. It’s shifted, and I don’t know where or why. Maybe it’s because Orion—the stars Orion—isn’t out?

I wiggle my legs, trying to ease my spine off a raised groove in the metal of Ry’s truck bed.

“I should have brought pads or something,” he says from where he’s lying flat on his back next to me.

“No, this is perfect.”

We drove straight east, where the sprawling tangle of the city suddenly ended in nothing. Through and over a mountain with wind turbines so big it looked as though the gods from one of Ry’s myths set them there. Then back down the mountain and past kilometers and kilometers of horizon-meltingly flat farmland to the waves and crests of sand dunes in the middle of nowhere.

Though the air still tastes different, the sand and the stars surround me like a blanket of home, a snatch of comfort and familiarity in the middle of a strange new land. And Ry found it for me when I needed it the very most.

I turn my head and look at his dark profile as he studies the sky—his long, straight nose, angled jaw, full lips. He could be a Greek statue come to life. I smile at the thought, and a small line in my chest, the line that anchors me and connects me to my Orion, suddenly gives me a tug.

Toward this Orion.

I close my eyes and hold perfectly still. The impulse to scoot over and close the gap between our bodies, to rest my head in that spot between his shoulder and chest where I know—I know—it will fit perfectly, to twine my fingers through his—

I don’t want that. I won’t. I can accept that he is important to me. He’s a friend. I’d had no idea how much I needed friends until Tyler and Ry. And I’m vulnerable right now, still trying to find me in this new place, still trying to fill the holes inside. I can’t seem to keep my heart from leaking out of the cracks, like sand clutched in a fist.

But I won’t fill those holes with him. I can’t. To do that would invite other holes to be punched in right next to the ones my parents made.

I will fill myself with the desert and the sky. I will be stone and stars, unchanging and strong and safe. The desert is complete; it is spare and alone, but perfect in its solitude. I will be the desert.

I open my eyes to see Ry staring at me, and my desert soul erupts with turquoise water, floods and cascades and waterfalls rushing in around my stone, swirling and eddying around my rocky parts, pushing and reshaping and filling every hidden dark spot.

“Stop it!” I gasp.

“What?”

“That thing you’re doing! With your eyes!”

“Um, opening them? Or blinking? Should I not blink?”

“Just—make them less blue or something.”

He laughs, oblivious to my drowning desert. “It’s pitch-black out here. You can’t see what color they are.”

“But I still know, and they know I know. So just—point them somewhere else.”

He blinks, slowly, the line of dark lashes standing out against his skin in a semicircle smile, mocking me before he opens them again. “But it’s okay to look at friends, remember?”

“Shut up.” I smack my hand against his chest and then it stays there and I need to pull it back I can’t leave it there why isn’t my arm pulling it back and

oh idiot gods I can feel his heart beating and nothing has ever felt so simple and pure and honest and right in my entire life.

GET OUT OF HERE, my brain screams. Move your hand, Isadora. Move it. Move it. But that line, that traitorous anchor that misaligned, that picked the wrong Orion, it’s singing out to stay.

Ry reaches up, ever so slowly, and puts his hand over mine and now his heartbeat is underneath it and his skin is on top of it and I can’t breathe, I’m holding my breath because if I let it go I have to make a choice to drown or to flee, and I cannot make this choice

I like the person I am with him

and no one’s skin has ever felt this way before

and every part of me—every part—is in those few square inches of palm and finger connected to him

and I am going under

and I don’t care

“Isadora?”

My name in his voice sends a jolt through me, creates me in the way he sees me and feels about me and the way I would be with my name in his mouth forever. Finally I understand the power in names, the power that we give people when we tell them our names.

“Orion,” I whisper, and he is. Orion. Forever now, he has replaced my Orion stars in name.

He lifts his free hand toward my face, turning on his side to close the distance between us and—

I panic. I have never been so terrified in my entire life. This is a beginning and that means there will be an end and I can’t, I can’t have something that feels this way end.

“I can’t.” I sit up, pulling my hand from his. It’s cold, so cold, colder than the rest of me and I want to hold it myself to try and get back that sensation but I cross my arms over my chest instead, cut off the errant line connecting me to him. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to do this. I can’t. Please take me back now.”