Something
Hey @chordsykat! Thanks for the sneak peek and making me feel better the other day. This one’s for you!
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He didn’t look like much to the untrained eye. All limbs and not a muscle in sight. Blond locks that could use a trim toppling over a pronounced brow ridge. Sure, he was one hell of a guitarist with an affinity for unearthly dark tones and lower-than-low notes, but you’d never know for how unmistakably bright his whiter-than-white outfits always were.
But sat on the back of her Ducati, a blazing beacon in the darkness that had engulfed the desert; he was definitely something.
“It’s takes a long times to gets darks, ja? This ams whats these people call winters? Fff!”
“It’s Arizona, you Swede.”
“Woo, it’s likes an hundreds degrees, Caja!”
Before they’d dismounted, the temp gauge on the bike was reading eleven, Celsius. Warmer than Stockholm in January, for certain. It had been a while, but she still remembered her first tour of the states.
Skwisgaar hadn’t experienced the American Southwest before, and he’d been a wide-eyed wonder since their bus drove by the first cactus. He was so green that an admission of having rarely left his home town and a hint of Swedish nationalism (complete with mistrust of people from Denmark whom he was still mislabeling as Dutch) barely surprised her.
Considering his timid nature and her status as centerpiece to a globetrotting musical hits factory, it was a wonder they ended up being friends at all.
But she couldn’t deny that he was, indeed, something special. The way he perched on the motorcycle, gangly legs scrunching his hands together as he admired the emerging light show of a million stars and one fat red moon contrasting an azure sky. So much like a storybook prince who had found his happily ever after.
So much like she was, once.
The Dane pulled a small titanium cylinder from her jacket pocket, tapped some fine white powder onto one of her keys, and took a nose full.
“You hurtings?” Skwisgaar asked, and the concern in his voice clung to the guilt she felt over doing such activities in front of virgin eyes. “We can go back to de buses.”
“Nej.” She lied. In truth, she was always hurting these days, due in part to certain occupational hazards. Which occupation had been doing more damage remained the true mystery, there. “T’is is special night. We should enjoy it.”
He smiled and turned his attention back to the universe at large. “Hej, Caja. You thinks we ams likes de stars up theres?”
Alone, cold, and burning. Sometimes, she did. “And ‘ow is that?”
“I means like special. Like how some has more lights than other ones? How everyone in the world can gets to sees the brightest ones? Likes that one!”
He kicked his long legs in a joyous display while pointing to the easily identified North Star. Even in a sky full of its brothers, even next to the great red moon, it sparkled like nothing else around it.
“Did yous evers see anythings dis..?”
“Radiant?” She had her eyes on him as she said it.
“Ja.” He affirmed. “Dats the words.”
“I ‘ave not.” She put her head on her knee and continued to look at him, still smiling like the innocent goof he was. It made her smile, too. “I promise to let you know as soon as I do, Skwisgaar.”
She would never get the chance to make good on it. She didn’t know it, but time would have other plans for them, soon enough. A different star burned on the horizon, and in a few years, life as they knew it would be nothing like the one they were living in the moment.
But, for that brief shining moment, there was something.
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