Cosmic by celeste, p.27
Cosmic by Celeste,
p.27
She raised an eyebrow, feigning suspicion. “Are you taking me to a secondary location?”
“It’s close. No ransom required.”
He led her down the stairs, through a side gate, and into the orchard behind the villa. The air was thick with the scents of grass, loam, and the sweet, pungent aroma of fermenting fruit. She expected him to march her to some overlooked ruin or a makeshift concert on the lawn, but instead, he stopped at the edge of the garden where an old mulberry tree leaned sideways, branches tangled with last year’s birds’ nests. Beneath it, a blanket, two glasses, a bottle of red, and a scattering of pastries from the boulangerie: almond croissants, palmiers, and a crumbling wedge of clafoutis still powdered with sugar.
Thad swept a hand at the scene, bashful. “I was going for romantic, but it’s possible I overshot.”
She gave him a slow, clinical once-over, then dropped onto the blanket and patted the spot beside her. “Proceed.”
He poured the wine, filling both glasses to a depth that would have been considered excessive at most dinner parties. They sat shoulder to shoulder, picking at the pastries, watching the sky settle into the whole night. The stars came out in clusters, then legions, bright and dizzying and so thick it made her question the math she’d learned as a child.
After a while, Thad set his glass aside and walked into the dark. For a second, she thought he’d simply vanished, but then he reappeared from behind the mulberry, dragging a battered guitar. He tuned it by ear, the process slow and fussy, like coaxing a nervous animal into his lap.
“You’re not allowed to laugh,” he said. “Or, okay, you are, but only at the clever bits.”
She crossed her legs, grinning. “I’m an impartial judge.”
He played a single chord, minor, a little sour, then launched into a song.
It was rough, the opening bars stitched together from old heartbreak and stolen hooks, but the lyrics, she realized halfway through the first verse, were about her. Not her, but the night they met, the back-and-forth in the lab, the way her voice carried in glass rooms, and how it lingered after she’d left. He didn’t bother with metaphor; he called her the architect of memory, the thief of sleep, the reason he’d finally stopped running.
The second verse veered into the cosmic, and she caught references to nebulae, gravitational pull, and how two bodies could spiral together for ages before finally crashing. It was both embarrassing and beautiful, making her want to crawl out of her own skin.
He finished on a high, jagged chord, then let it ring, the echo swallowed by the open field.
She wiped her eyes, which was annoying, but she did it anyway.
“Not bad for a first draft,” she said, and he snorted.
“I’ll polish it,” he promised. “Make it less obvious.”
She shook her head. “Don’t. I like it obvious.”
He set the guitar down and scooted closer. “I want to record it,” he said softly. “For the album. If that’s okay.”
She nodded, not trusting herself to say more.
He leaned in, forehead pressed to hers. “You know, when I played in bands, I always thought the point was to get as far away from yourself as possible. Louder, faster, messier. But this,” he gestured at the orchard, the sky, her, “this feels like the only thing that ever made sense.”
She snorted. “You’re getting sentimental in your old age.”
He kissed her once, then flopped onto his back and stared at the stars.
She joined him, her head on his shoulder, the world spinning in slow, generous arcs above them.
They lay there quietly until she said, “I want to do something crazy.”
He didn’t move. “Define ‘crazy.’”
She propped herself on one elbow, facing him. “What if I open a lab here? Not in this orchard, but in Provence. For a year. I’ll keep working with Chic Alchemy, but I want to see what happens if I start from zero. No legacy. No old rules.”
He turned, and the look in his eyes was pure approval. “I think you should. I think you’d change the world again.”
She toyed with his sleeve, her nerves on edge. “Will you visit? Or will you get tired of jet lag and lavender?”
He reached up and brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’ll visit. I’ll write songs here. I’ll bring the band, and we’ll play at the weird little bar in town until they ban us.”
She laughed, the sound high and unguarded.
He pulled her close, and for a while, there was nothing but breath and the shuffle of leaves in the wind.
Eventually, she said, “You think we can keep this going? With both of us in orbit?”
He nodded with no hesitation. “If not, we’ll find a new orbit.”
They watched the sky, mapping constellations, hers named for wildflowers, his for half-forgotten chords. He traced patterns on her skin, naming each freckle after a planet, every old scar a comet or a sunspot.
At some point, she fell asleep in the crook of his arm. He lay awake, listening to the tiny, perfect noises she made, and wondered how anyone could ever mistake love for something simple.
He wanted to remember this forever, the way the stars burned holes in the dark, the taste of pastry still sweet on his tongue, the perfume of her hair stronger than any memory.
He promised himself he would.
He promised her, too.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
The next morning, Thad woke to find Celeste hunched over the kitchen table, scribbling in her battered Moleskine with the ferocity of someone amid a breakthrough. Sunlight angled through the window, catching in her hair and turning it white-gold at the tips. She was surrounded by an armada of coffee mugs, each at a different stage of abandonment.
He padded in barefoot, stealing a sip from the nearest cup, and peered over her shoulder.
“What are you plotting?” he asked.
She finished the line, underlined it twice, and grinned. “You know how most people bring home souvenirs? Shot glasses, magnets, cheap T-shirts?”
He nodded, wary.
“I want to bring home a perfume,” she said. “One we make, for us. Never sold, never replicated. Like an olfactory tattoo.”
He considered, then nodded. “I’m in on one condition.”
She cocked her head.
“I get to help name it.”
She rolled her eyes, but the smile was genuine. “It’s a deal.”
They spent the rest of the day hunting for ingredients, first at the Saturday market, where the stalls overflowed with citrus, spices, and an abundance of herbs to reverse a famine. In the fields behind the villa, Celeste snipped lavender and wild thyme with surgical precision. Thad found a stand of cypress and came back sticky with resin, triumphant.
They raided the villa’s pantry for edible suspects: black pepper, cocoa nibs, and dried apricots. Celeste eyed a jar of honey, then dismissed it as “too literal.” Thad pocketed a chunk of salt from the kitchen, certain he could smuggle it past her defenses.
By late afternoon, the kitchen was a chemistry set gone feral. Celeste arranged the finds in neat rows and then rummaged through the box of oils left by the villa owner. She uncapped the vials, letting Thad smell each one, challenging him to name the notes before revealing the labels. He did better than either of them expected, and she let him have a moment of smugness.
Then, the real work began.
She showed him the structure, top, heart, and base, explaining how the first impression should be a spark, something that vanished quickly but set the stage for what lingered. He grasped it instinctively and compared it to a song’s hook versus its refrain.
They began blending, first in tiny beakers and then on test strips. Some combos bombed: orange blossom and black pepper fought until the air turned acrid. Others sang cypress with thyme, lavender with a bare scrape of salt.
They circled each other, sometimes arguing, laughing so hard they had to start over. She let him take the lead on one mix, and he dialed in a ratio that was a little too much but weirdly perfect. She adjusted it, then adjusted again, and after a while, neither could tell who had contributed which note.
They sat at the table, dabbing the blends onto strips, rating them on a scale that shifted with every memory invoked.
“This one’s the walk in the fields,” he said, holding up a strip heavy on thyme and lavender.
She sniffed, eyes closed. “And a little of the fancy gin you found at the airport. There’s a juniper bite in there.”
He grinned. “Good catch.”
Another strip: citrus and a whiff of something dark, almost burnt.
“Our first dinner,” she said, nostrils flaring. “The lemon in the salad, and you charred the sardines.”
“I call the ‘rustic,’” he protested, but she waved him off, already onto the next.
They tested and joked and reminisced until the kitchen smelled like a flashback to everywhere they’d ever been happy.
As dusk fell, they assembled the finalists and blended a last, careful batch. The base was resinous, like the cypress sap that still stained Thad’s palms. The heart was lavender and salt, echoing the sweat on her skin and the late-summer haze of the fields. The top, Celeste insisted, was a spike of citrus, “for the surprise of it,” she said, and maybe also because the memory of it would never last long enough.
They poured the finished blend into a crystal vial she’d packed from home, a little thing with a stopper shaped like a tear. He labeled it with a strip of masking tape and wrote, in block letters, “FIRST AND ONLY.”
Celeste uncapped the bottle, dabbed a drop onto her wrist, and offered it to him.
He inhaled, and the world tunneled, sun, salt, skin, the pulse of her blood under the surface.
She watched him with something close to reverence.
“Smell is the only sense that goes straight to memory,” she said. “No detour through language. No filter. It happens.”
He nodded and kissed her there, right where she’d marked herself. Then again, for luck.
She pressed the bottle into his hand. “Keep it safe. If you lose it, I’ll know.”
He slipped it into his pocket, feeling the weight of it, real and improbable.
That night, they lay together in the dark, the bottle between them on the nightstand, its scent slowly invading every corner of the room. They didn’t speak, didn’t need to. The story was already written, encoded in every breath.
He’d keep it forever, this memory in a bottle. A secret, a promise, a proof of existence.
She would, too.
Books IN the series
January – Cosmic by Celeste By Wendy Cheairs- Song: Cosmic Love
February- Trouble Under the Ghost Light By Diana Marie Dubois- Song: Trouble
March- Georgia Heart By Jewelz Baxter – Song: Good Directions
April- Flip the Switch By Mandy L. Woodall – Song: The Devil You Know
May- Everything is for You By Michelle Savage – Song: Everything I Do
June- Fuel By Dawn Winters – Song: Fuel
July- Got My Eyes on You By RR Born- Song: Or Nah
August- Into the Deep End By Samantha Conley- Song: I Prevail
September- Heaven Don’t Have a Name By Annelise Reynolds- Song: Heaven Don’t Have a Name
October- Untitled By Dixie Painter Song: Rumor
November- Bury Me in the Darkside By Beth A. Freely- Song: Bring Me The Horizon
December- Popular Monster by Screaming Mimi – Song: Popular Monster
About The Author
Wendy Cheairs
Wendy Cheairs lives with her husband and tailless cats, who all think they run the house. Now that she is writing full-time, her fiction runs the gamut of horror, fantasy, urban fantasy, and romance to whatever comes to mind in her over-caffeinated brain. Raised in the southwestern part of America, she hides from the desert sun in the writing cave, avoiding setting ablaze as a redhead. She also writes under W.M. Dawson and Sage Knight.
Social Links: https://linktr.ee/wcheairs
Wendy Cheairs, Cosmic by Celeste
