“Oh!” she said, face glowing with a bright smile. “I think I saw one!”

From the edge of the cliff, a fiery glow streaked across the sky, lighting up the inky midnight darkness as it rushed for the ocean. She leaned forward, enthralled, as the gleam illuminated the soft shadows of her cheekbones.

“What do you think we’re going to do after this?” Another small meteor flew past, then another, quickly towards its destination. “I mean, it’s the first time we’ll be on our own.”

She laughed, grabbing his hand, glossy chestnut eyes nearly incandescent in thrill. When she spoke, it was full of emotion, and he was surprised to find her almost choked up. “Isn’t that what’s wonderful about it, though?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean!”

She closed her eyes, only smiling for a moment as the sky erupted in brightness. “Tonight, I’m living for the first time. There’s nobody that can tell me what to do any more. If I want to be a doctor, I can, and if I want to be a starving artist in the worst parts of Haight-Ashbury, I can do that, too.”

“Don’t do that.”

She laughed once more. “You know what I mean,” she repeated, leaning back and rolling over into the crook of his arm. After a moment of consideration, he took her hand gently, savoring the fleeting warmth of her flesh.

“I really believe that,” she mumbled, gazing up with heavy lids and the final meteorites cut through the dark, leaving only the night, the shiny black of a beetle’s wing.

He loved her. Of that, he was absolutely certain.

“Do you think we’ll see each other after this?”

“Of course we will. We can do anything now.”

It was something that he would never, could never, verbalize. Her eyes were turned to Parisian sunsets, to the fleeting glow of fireflies, to ravaging hurricanes and meteor showers and to everything wonderful and terrible that he knew he could never be.
He was content just to hold her hand, to feel the soft rise and fall of her chest against his loose t-shirt.

“We’ll be miles apart. States apart. We might lose each other.”

She smiled. “Then I’ll just keep searching ‘til I find you again.”

He leaned over and kissed her, barely touching her lips, and for that brief moment, the silence seemed the most wonderful thing in the world.