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Late summer at Skywalker Ranch, and the stars are out in full force tonight. The campfire reduced to embers, the campers sent to bed hours ago, and the lake still under the thin crescent moon: the makings of a perfect night for stargazing. Rey lays sprawled out on the dock and stares at the sky. The rough wood under her palms, the hint of pine in the thick, muggy air, her standard issue counselor polo rolled up under her neck as a pillow—she forgets the chaos of this week at camp and loses herself in the constellations.
The dock creaks as someone approaches, and Rey’s startled from her reverie. Looking up, she finds Ben Solo, his black hair pulled back into a ponytail, striding towards her. “I thought I’d find you out here,” he says stiffly. His Adam’s apple bobs as he waits for a reply.
“The sky is beautiful tonight,” Rey says by way of invitation, scooting over to make room for him to join her on the dock. He stretches out alongside her until their shoulders brush and their fingertips meet. They settle into a comfortable silence, one Rey wouldn’t have thought possible at the beginning of summer, surrounded by the hum of crickets and the lap of the lake against the shore.
“The kids love you,” Rey says, “all of them clamoring to join Ben Solo’s cabin.” She slides her gaze from the heavens to the boy at her side.
“They only want the best,” he shrugs, and smiles when Rey scoffs in reply. “What can I say? The Solos are a legend here.”
She elbows him. “Just because your uncle runs this camp.”
When he turns to face her, she can’t read his expression in the dim light from above. “Tell me about the stars,” he says abruptly.
“Should’ve attended one of my lectures when you had the chance, Solo. Too busy showing the kids how fast you can row a canoe?”
“Maybe next summer.” He reaches for her hand—she can feel him trembling as he weaves his fingers into hers—and points towards the sky. “That bright group of stars over there—tell me about them.
“The Big Dipper.” The facts are routine after a summer teaching children at camp, but next to Ben on their last night here, they fall new from her mouth. “And you see the Little Dipper over there.”
Ben nods in confirmation. “Right.”
“Easy to recognize, but boring.” Tonight, she doesn’t want the familiar. She wants something unexpected, something that lurks behind their banter and the occasional touches that pass furtively between them. “Those bright dipper stars form another set of constellations, Ursa Major and Minor. A pair of bears.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Here’s the tail” —she points using their joined hands, marking up the map of the stars stretching before them— “the head and legs, three of them. Ursa Major.”
“And the other one?”
“Its tail starts here, and then joins with its body.”
“It doesn’t look much like a bear,” he frowns.
“To you, maybe,” she says, “but to me, I see a mama and her cub. A little family.”
“Lovely,” he says, but he’s not looking at the constellations. “Thank you for the lesson. What do I owe you for your services?”
“A canoe ride back to my cabin?”
He grins, and there’s something hungry in his eyes that Rey recognizes from the burn in her stomach. “I had something else in mind.”
His kiss is light and dark, hard and soft all wrapped into one. Rey leans into him, forgets the stars and the crickets—everything but the taste of Ben Solo, the weight of his chest pressing into hers.
Tomorrow she’s headed home, back to Jakku City and the sand and the heat that she came here to escape. But tonight, Rey’s on the dock at Skywalker Ranch under an oil spill of stars with Ben Solo by her side. So she stays out with him until the mama bear and her cub waddle across the sky and into the burgeoning dawn.