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When Marcus woke up, he was completely disoriented. His room was still drenched in utter darkness, no glimmer of morning light filtering through the curtains, so he knew that it wasn’t even close to his normal wake-up time and since he usually didn’t have any difficulties sleeping through the night, it took him a moment to figure out what had woken him up at this hour. That was, until his eyes finally got used to the darkness and he noticed the figure standing at the edge of his bed.
“What the fuck – ” Marcus yelped and definitely did not flinch backwards in alarm. “Callum?”
“Yeah, it’s just me,” Callum whispered even though there was clearly no more need for it considering there was no one aside from the two of them living in this apartment and they were both wide awake. At two in the morning apparently, Marcus discovered with a glance across the room to the blinking LED lights of his clock. “I need you to get up.”
“Whatever the fuck for?” Marcus groaned, trying to pull his blanket back over his head, but Callum was having none of it and started pulling the blanket away from him, managing to tug Marcus into an upright position in the process. “This better be some kind of emergency, I swear.”
“It’s, well. Not quite,” Callum admitted after a second of hesitation, looking a bit sheepish, but before Marcus could say anything, Callum pressed a cup of steaming hot coffee into his hands, shutting him up quite effectively. He took a sniff of it and frowned – this was the good stuff from the corner cafe they visited whenever they had the chance to, not the brew from their own barely-functioning coffee machine, and he had no idea how Callum gotten his hands on that in the middle of the fucking night. Marcus raised his head to ask him just that only to realise that Callum had already left the room and disappeared down the stairs, clearly expecting Marcus to follow him.
For a short moment, Marcus considered to just say fuck it, roll around and go back to sleep, but he couldn’t deny that he was slightly curious now to find out what was going on. Plus, Callum had bought him his favourite kind of coffee after all, and Marcus was nothing if not open to bribery via caffeinated beverages. So he simply sighed in resignation and cast a last wistful glance towards his warm covers before tugging a hoodie over his head and following Callum downstairs, finding himself in the passenger seat of his car only moments later.
They had spent a lot of time like this over the years – one of them behind the wheel of the car, the other one curled up in the passenger seat. Driving to race tracks, training camps, PR duties, sightseeing trips on their rare weekends off. Driving everywhere, always together. Marcus liked to fiddle with the radio while Callum was driving, Callum had developed the habit of commenting on everything they passed while staring out of the window, attempting his best David Attenborough impression that never failed to make Marcus laugh or groan, depending on how sleep-deprived he was.
Tonight, the radio was nothing but a steady hum in the background, playing some song Marcus neither recognised nor found particularly pleasant to listen to, but he was far too sleepy to make an effort in changing the station. His hands were wrapped tightly around the cup Callum had pressed into them, letting the heat gently burn his palms and fingertips, and he turned his head towards Callum, watching the movements of his hands that were almost as familiar to him as his own. Maybe even more so.
“Where are we going?” He asked.
“To the stars,” Callum replied cryptically with an artificially dramatic tinge to his voice.
Marcus' brain wasn’t working well enough yet for him to come up with a good retort to that, so he settled for scoffing and rolling his eyes, but it only made Callum laugh.
“Drink your coffee,” he said without taking his eyes off the road, but the tone of his voice let Marcus know that if he could see them, he’d find a familiar soft expression there, so he obeyed and started sipping his coffee slowly. The hot drink was a stark contrast to the cold glass of the car window he was resting his head against as he let himself be transfixed by the steady movement of the car and the soft lights of the city glowing around them, and how they blurred the sharp features of Callum’s face until it became almost a bit fuzzy around the edges. The lights became fewer and fewer and when Callum finally stopped the car, it was in complete darkness, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
Marcus was wide awake now, partially thanks to the coffee and partially due to pure curiosity.
“If you didn’t have so many chances to poison me with your cooking over the years, I’d be scared that I’m about to get murdered,” he said, drawing a low chuckle from Callum.
“At least I try to cook. Wait here.” Callum shut the engine off and exited the car, leaving Marcus alone in the darkness.
Marcus groaned and let his head drop back against the headrest of the car seat, thinking of his warm and comfortable bed that he left behind, but even to his own ears it sounded disgustingly fond. He knew that there was no one else he would let himself get dragged out of bed and bundled into a car in the middle of the night by, especially not without any kind of explanation. But he’d known Callum too long at this point and learnt to trust that it was sometimes better to just go along with it all instead of asking too many questions.
He buried himself deeper into his hoodie while simultaneously craning his neck to try and catch a glimpse of what Callum was doing outside. It was difficult to make out anything in the darkness, but he didn’t have to endure his curiosity for very long as he heard the sound of the boot being shut and only a few moments later, Callum appeared right next to the passenger side of the car, opening the door for him.
“You can come out now.”
No longer blinded by the bright interior lights of the car, Marcus tried to figure out where Callum had taken him. As far as he could see, they were somewhere in the hills of Modena, a valley dipping down a few metres ahead of him and very far in the distance, he could barely make out the muted lights of Maranello, so they must’ve driven quite a long way. Right next to the car, Callum had spread a blanket on the ground and Marcus blinked, still not quite sure what was going on.
“If you wanted to do a midnight picnic, you should’ve probably remembered to bring some food.”
“No picnic,” Callum snorted. “Look up.”
“Oh,” Marcus breathed.
Above them, the vast darkness of the night sky was stretching out but it couldn’t even be exactly described as dark anymore since it was illuminated by what seemed like a million stars. Up here in the mountains, ‘stars’ apparently didn’t just mean spotting a few specks of light here and there – instead, the entire sky was almost completely covered by them. It was not fully rivalling the brilliance of the canopy of stars Marcus remembered from when his parents had taken him stargazing at home in New Zealand’s outback, but it was certainly the closest to it that he’d seen in a while. The stars were everywhere around them, painting the sky silver, and it left him a little breathless.
“That’s beautiful,” he murmured. He felt Callum’s eyes on him but couldn’t quite bring himself to turn around and meet them just yet. He still wasn’t quite sure why Callum had brought him here but the air around them felt heavy and important in a way he couldn’t quite pinpoint and he didn’t want to ruin that by saying or doing the wrong thing.
“Do you remember when you were upset the other week?” Callum asked and Marcus noticed that he was fidgeting, twisting his hands, a tell-tale sign that he was nervous. He had no idea what reason Callum had to be nervous, but he didn’t want to make it worse so he swallowed the sarcastic remark sitting right at the tip of his tongue, and instead silently shook his head.
“You were talking about how much you missed New Zealand and how it sucked that you haven’t been able to go back to visit for so long now,” Callum said. “And you were saying how shitty it is to live here sometimes, that the city is too loud and too dirty and that you can’t even see the stars at night because of all the light pollution here and I just thought – I know this isn’t the same thing and I know it won’t make the distance between here and New Zealand any smaller, but I just thought, at least I can take you out here to see the stars properly, you know?”
He trailed off and when Marcus turned around to look at him, his heart clenched at the earnest expression on Callum’s face.
Marcus didn’t quite remember, not really. He’d gone on about a million of these rants since he’d moved to Italy all those years ago – it was never about anything serious, never about something that would make him seriously consider going back, it was usually just evoked by a momentary bout of homesickness which he’d developed the habit of working through by cursing Italy, Europe and everything else that provided him the opportunity to let off some steam. And in this case, that had apparently been the city’s tragic lack of visible stars.
Marcus didn’t remember. But Callum did.
Not only had Callum actively listened to him, which was already more than Marcus expected considering the irrelevance of his rants in the grand scheme of things, but he had also remembered and obviously tried to figure out how he could Marcus feel better and suddenly, Marcus found it very difficult to speak. He could only look at Callum, intensely conscious of how lucky he was to have someone in his life who knew him, knew all of him, maybe even better than he knew himself, and who cared – cared enough to get up in the middle of the night and drive an hour through the Italian countryside just to give him the opportunity to see the night sky more clearly.
“Callum, I’m –” Marcus tried, breaking off again because he knew that nothing he could say would be enough to express the way his heart felt almost raw from emotion.
“I know,” Callum said. “It’s okay.”
They sat down next to each other then, tilting their heads back in unison, and Marcus wanted to say so many things. He wanted to tell Callum that he’d never had someone like him in his life before, someone who made his life better just by being a part of it and how immensely grateful he was that he even got to have this, but he didn’t have the words for it, so he stayed silent. Their usual way of communicating mostly consisted of stupid banter and jokingly exchanged insults, so to put his feelings into genuine words seemed like an impossible task to him and he resorted to a similar approach as Callum had done.
“Look up there,” Marcus murmured, taking Callum’s hand to point at three stars in a wonky line and a fourth one right underneath. “Do you see those four stars? I’m pretty sure they belong to the Ursa Major constellation,” he explained, “but to me, they always looked more like someone with a parachute and it’s always been comforting to seek them out, you know? Because no matter where I am in the world, they always look the same as they do at home.” He swallowed. “I hadn’t seen them in a while.”
“Definitely looks like a parachute if you ask me,” Callum said with a smile in his voice and Marcus realised that he’d been holding his breath waiting for the other one’s reaction. He’d never really shared this with anyone, always having felt a bit ridiculous for painting his own pictures into the sky, but it felt right to share this with Callum, the one person he knew he’d never have to feel judged by.
They went quiet afterwards, both staring up at the dark night sky, their gazes travelling through the field of stars stretching out above them. The world lay quiet around them and Marcus felt as if everything around the two of them was gradually ceasing to exist. It was just him and Callum up here, their chests rising in a matching rhythm, shoulders and thighs pressed together, and Marcus felt his breath come in a little easier, as if an invisible weight on his chest had finally been lifted.
Marcus had often heard other people talk about how insignificant they felt when they were looking at the stars, how small, and as if nothing down here actually mattered. And in the past, he’d found himself agreeing with them – it was rather difficult, after all, to see importance in the mundanity of his life in the face of the endlessness of the universe. But now, on that Italian mountainside with Callum next to him, Marcus suddenly couldn’t shake the feeling that this, right there, was somehow the most significant moment of all.