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‘I wanna show you something,’ he murmured, coming up behind her as she watched the house transform with tinsel and lights. She narrowed her eyes at him, feeling destabilised after watching Caroline hover around him, touching him and kissing him. With a disarming smile, he held his hand out, looping his pinkie finger through hers and leading her out of the living room, out of the warm glow of the fire and the candles, into the darkened hallway, up the stairs lined with young Crichtons.
Second door on the right and he gave her a quiet smile before ushering her in, flicking the light on as he followed her.
Posters lined the walls, Star Wars and Back to the Future, Dune and Spaceballs. Spaceballs. She mouthed the word, liking the feel of it. Action figures stood proudly next to the books ordered neatly on the shelves, a desk with a model of the solar system and a record player. He lifted the clear lid, took a moment to run his fingers along the records on one of the shelves before tugging one out and slipping it from its sleeve. ‘Watch this,’ he tenderly dropped it down, raised the arm and glided it over before lowering it, the first crackles before the needle found its groove, strains of electric guitar strumming through the speakers wired to the player.
His eyes closed, he bobbed his head to Bowie, humming the words of one of the first singles he ever bought, ‘leaned back on my radio-o-o.’
‘Music?’
‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,’ he nodded, ‘but that’s not really what I wanted to show you.’
‘What, then?’
He shrugged, nodded around at the room, ‘my teenage sanctuary. That angsty boy you saw? This is where he’d go hide when I couldn’t take Betty.’
‘I don’t think I could ever have imagined having such...privacy until Moya. To be able to...express oneself with the things around you,’ she shook her head, swallowed thickly as she slowly pushed around the planets in the solar system.
‘I mean, I did have two sisters, so privacy wasn’t as easy as you might have thought,’ he tried to joke, cringing when he said it. ‘There’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘Close your eyes,’ he smiled and gave an encouraging nod when she frowned. ‘Now come here, there we go. Lie down.’
The back of her knees hit the edge of his mattress and she jolted as he guided her down, ‘John, what-?’
‘Just trust me, okay? Keep your eyes closed until I tell you to,’ she felt him move from her side, heard the click of the light switch. And then he was by her side again, sitting down next to her on the bed, reclining so they were both squeezed on his narrow mattress, the backs of their fingers touching, ‘open your eyes, Aeryn.’
Complete darkness at first. And then the barest glimmer of light. Soft green, a five-pointed star. And another. And another.
‘You said you missed seeing the stars because of all the light last night. I did as a teenager, too.’
‘I don’t recognise the constellations.’
‘They're not the most accurate, but I was thirteen when I did it. That’s Ursa Major there, and Ursa Minor, see, those ones up there. Big bear and little bear. And there’s Camelopardalis, and Leo, right there, see?’
She hummed and nodded, listening to him tell her of his stars until they faded to nothingness, lulled by the soothing cadence of his voice and imagining, just for a moment, that there was a child nestled between them, with a shock of black hair and clear blue eyes, and rapt attention for their father’s tales.