Free Star Dust by Emma Barry & Genevieve Turner

have been its own sentence.
    She remained unmoving, her stance unaccepting. His heart slowed.  
    Then her chin came up. Her shoulders came back. Her hand left the doorknob.
    “How was your trip?” A neighborly enough question, but her tone was stiff.
    Terrible. He released a deep sigh, his heartbeat accelerating back to where it should be. “All right.”
    Surprising the hell out of him, she picked her way across the dark ground between them. She’d changed out of work clothes into a housedress—no girdle. Her bare feet peeked out from underneath her hem.
    Standing only a few feet from him, she asked, “Everything okay? I guess you can’t go into detail.”
    He remembered his motions as he’d prepared to escape the sinking capsule, all of it done without conscious thought, all of him focused on doing his duty.
    Yet, at the very back of his brain, somewhere just above where his neck met his skull, there had been fear. Fear that the ocean would drag him down as surely as it was dragging the capsule, the both of them coming to rest forever on the bottom of the ocean floor.
    “Just fine.” He flashed his Life smile.
    She turned away. “Good for you.” Her voice was cool. She might have accepted his apology—at least, he thought that was what had happened—but they weren’t anywhere near friendly yet.
    “Thanks for taking care of Bucky. I appreciate it.” Dogs and thank yous—she couldn’t be mad about those.
    “It was the kids. Thank them.”
    “I will,” he said, not letting his annoyance into his tone. “But I wanted to thank you too.”
    She tilted her head toward him, but he couldn’t see her expression. For half a moment he was held by the tilt of her head, the considering stance of her. Would she stay? Would she go?
    His breath released as she crossed his patio and sank into the chair. The same one she’d occupied the other night. “Are you going to point out more star shapes that look nothing like what they’re supposed to?” A little less cold now, but still grudging.  
    He laughed. “Do you want me to?”
    “No. I suppose I just want to look.” She raised a finger to the sky. “See the Milky Way? I’ve never really looked at it properly before. But now that I can see it I feel like I can’t look at anything else.”
    “The stars will do that to you. You see them clearly one day, and then you wonder why you bothered to look at anything else.” Bucky set his head on Kit’s knee, his warm doggy breath washing across his thigh. “Imagine seeing them up close.”
    She turned her face to him, and the fire of her hair caught the silver of the moonlight. “Is that what you want to do?”
    Yes. “They’re a little too far away for me to do that.”
    “That doesn’t mean you don’t want to.”
    “Wanting something you can’t have is a waste of time.” He should have let go of that impossible, childish dream ages ago. And yet, no matter how often he looked up at those stars and thought how far away they were… he still wanted to see them up close.
    And you want to kiss her.
    He wouldn’t. She didn’t like him, and it was clear his offer—stupid and half-assed as it had been—was unwelcome. He knew better than to crash land right next to his own home.
    But he wasn’t going to pretend he didn’t want to seduce her into something other than contempt for him. That he didn’t want to hear her whisper his name, heated, needful.
    As if she knew what he was thinking, she said, “Hmm. You don’t strike me as a man with a lot of unrequited desires. I suppose everything you want falls right in your lap. You being a celebrated hero and all.”
    “That’s right.” The bitterness of those words twisted his tongue. “Everything I want just falls into place. I only have to snap my fingers”—she flinched at the sound—“and a genie appears to grant my every wish. All through school, officer training, a damn war, everything just fell into place.”
    Silence spread between