Cosmic by celeste, p.26
Cosmic by Celeste, page 26
Celeste doubles back to a quiet corner, a small glass-walled room that smells like ethanol and spent ambition. She sits on the edge of a stainless-steel table, legs swinging. Thad joins her, leaning back against the window, watching the slow ballet of workers and machines.
He waits, trying to find the right words, then starts: “I’ve been thinking about the next few months. About what happens if we actually pull this off. The board’s expecting me to stick around, keep things steady. But my band,” he hesitates, then laughs, “Winter Daggers got offered a European tour. Eight weeks, thirty shows, no real money but a ton of exposure.”
Celeste’s lips twitch in a smile. “Let me guess. You want to do both.”
He nods sheepishly. “I want to try. I want to see if I can make this work, here and there.” He glances at her. “You think it’s possible, or am I setting up to fail?”
She’s quiet for a while, watching the condensation bead on the inside of the window.
“I think,” she says, “that people like us are designed to fail. And then do it again, better.” She shrugs. “Your mother ran the company and raised you while writing a dissertation on olfactory receptors. Why can’t you run a company and play rock star at the same time? The only thing that scares me is…” She trails off, searching for words. “Is that you’ll be so good at one of them that you forget the other matters?”
He reaches over, takes her hand, and his thumb traces the veins on the back of her wrist. “I’m not going to forget. I couldn’t, even if I tried.” He pulls out his phone, swipes at his calendar, and shows her a color-coded grid. “See? Green for Chic Alchemy, black for the tour, and blue for what Natalie called ‘mandatory decompression days.’ I figure if I survive, you’ll still be here?”
She arches an eyebrow. “Unless I’m off running the division. I hear there’s a rumor about a satellite lab in Japan.”
He laughs. “What, you don’t want to be here when I stumble back from tour with half my hearing and a new tattoo?”
Celeste pulls him in for a kiss, brief but serious. “I want you exactly as you are, including the parts that make no sense to anyone else.”
There’s a brief tap at the glass. Maya, grinning, holding up a sample vial. “Hot off the press,” she mouths, then mimes, “call me” before vanishing again.
They sit like that for a while, hands intertwined, watching the company they nearly lost come back to life one production run at a time.
When they finally stand to leave, Thad’s phone vibrates. The caller ID says “BAND MANAGER,” the all-caps threatening a world of chaos waiting to be unleashed.
Celeste squeezes his hand. “Go,” she says. “You were born for this.”
He answers, listens to the first wave of complaints about border crossings and festival time slots, and laughs until he can’t breathe. He looks over at Celeste, who is already halfway down the hall, waving for him to catch up.
He does, and as they walk the length of the production floor, every eye in the room turns to watch.
For the first time in years, he doesn’t mind being the center of attention.
CHAPTER SIXTY
They landed in Provence at the edge of a morning so golden it looked fake, the sky still holding the pink afterburn of dawn. The car, ancient and tinny, incapable of anything resembling air conditioning, wound them up a road cut between stone farmhouses and vineyards. Celeste had her head out the window, and Thad had both hands on the wheel, pretending not to watch her in the mirror.
He’d rented a place that looked like it’d been extruded from the earth, all honeyed stone and battered shutters, a terrace shaded by the ghosts of grapevines. They dumped their bags and left the door open, the cicadas already shrilling against the silence of the country. He grabbed his camera. She grabbed his free hand. By the time they reached the first lavender field, the heat was rising off the hills in waves, and the air between the rows shimmered like a trick of memory.
The flowers hit first, not with their color, but with the way they absorbed the sun and released it as scent. Not the clean, soapy lavender of supermarkets or spa brochures, but something more urgent: resinous, almost animal, with a sharpness that prickled the back of his throat. Thad stopped at the edge of the field and stood, struck stupid by the scale of it. He’d seen purple before, stage lights, velvet, and the bruises left by old guitars, but this was another planet. Every stem was alive with bees, a low, lazy hum that sounded exactly like applause.
Celeste plunged in, the flowers reaching her hips, her hair silvered at the ends by the brutal sun. She didn’t pick or trample; she traced the rows with two fingers, then knelt and let the bees land on her wrist, unafraid. He followed, shooting photos in bursts, each one catching her in a new profile: scientist at rest, goddess of the harvest, a girl who would never be bored by the same thing twice.
“Do you know how many species of lavender there are?” she called back to him, not expecting an answer.
“Four?” he guessed.
She smiled, plucked a spike, and rolled it between thumb and forefinger. “Forty-seven, at last count. However, only three are worth anyone's time to distill for use in perfume. This is Grosso. It’s a hybrid, bred for yield and the way the oil cuts through even the worst humidity. See how fat the flower heads are?”
He squinted and shrugged. “They look like the rest.”
“You lack discipline,” she said, but the tease was affectionate. She handed him the stalk. “Smell.”
He did, and it hit with a jolt: not soft, but metallic and almost peppery. He tried to imagine it on her skin or bottled and splashed onto the wrists of strangers in Tokyo and Madrid. He couldn’t; it was too much itself, too alive to be trapped in glass.
She watched him as he processed, arms crossed but eyes soft. “You’re not taking pictures anymore,” she observed.
“I like the live version better,” he said.
That got a laugh, and she pulled him in by the belt loop. “You’re corny, Thaddeus.”
“I prefer sincere.”
“Mm. I prefer you.” She kissed him right there in the dirt, and he tasted the perfume of her sweat and the acid of travel on her tongue. He would never get tired of that surprise, the way she switched from clinical to greedy in a single breath.
They walked for an hour, maybe more, the sun carving new tan lines into their skin and the purple dust painting their shoes. Every few yards, Celeste would kneel to inspect a mutation, a blight, or a particularly industrious bee. She pointed out the landmarks: the silvery sage that lined the irrigation ditches, the twisted olive trees that had survived a thousand winters, and the pale yellow of broom flowers, which some sadist had tried to banish as a weed but were now a staple of the local gin. He listened, actually listened, letting her words color the world until it felt richer than any city he’d ever played or slept in.
They stopped at a rise, the slope falling away toward a crumpled blue horizon. There was a bench, barely upright, its wood carved with initials and sunburned graffiti. They sat, arms pressed together, sweat drying on their skin.
“Tell me again why you left?” she asked, not accusing, curious.
He thought of New York, the noise and the glass, the way even success tasted faintly of blood. “I wanted to see what it felt like to not be haunted,” he said. “Turns out you can outrun ghosts, but not yourself.”
She nodded. “You seem lighter.”
“You make it easy,” he said.
She was quiet for a long time, watching a single bee stagger along the seam of her jeans. “I thought I would miss the lab more,” she said. “I thought I would be restless. But this,” she gestured to the valley, the impossible sweep of color, “is almost enough.”
He squeezed her knee. “Almost?”
She smiled slyly. “I have other cravings.”
They sat in silence for a while, content to let the sun work on them, the warmth lulling their muscles into a state of near peace.
Eventually, she said, “Do you ever regret it?”
He knew she wasn’t talking about the company or even about leaving. She meant the choice, the leap into something unstable, the partnership that was equal parts science and volatility.
He shook his head. “I would regret not doing it. The rest is calibration.”
She turned and rested her chin on his shoulder. “The board called again this morning. Natalie says they’re happier than they’ve ever been, which is suspicious.”
“I trust Natalie to keep them suspicious,” he said. “I like this model, I as an owner, you as an icon. I can play music, and you can run the universe.”
“I don’t want to run the universe,” she said, then reconsidered. “The bits that smell good.”
He laughed, and the sound startled a cluster of birds from the hedge behind them.
He set the camera on self-timer, propped it on the bench, and pulled her in close. She kissed his cheek as the shutter snapped, her hair blown across his mouth, the lavender behind them exploding in a blur of color. It was the kind of photo that could sell millions of bottles or at least remind them, years later, what it felt like to be young and invincible and so fucking sure.
They walked back as the sun dipped, the light turning orange, then pink, then the blue of old bruises. At the crest of the hill, Thad stopped to look.
“You ever think about what happens next?” he asked.
Celeste looked at him, eyes dark and endless. “No. But I want to find out.”
They headed home, hand in hand, the dust from the flowers still clinging to their legs. They didn’t look back.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
The villa looked like it’d been built for a film set, then left alone long enough to become believable. Thad carried Celeste over the threshold, not in the performative, wedding-night way, but as a dare. She weighed nothing in his arms, but the stone floor was cold and uneven, and her laugh ricocheted around the entry like the call of some bird that wasn’t supposed to live in Europe.
Inside, the place was a pure fairy tale: low beams blackened by centuries of smoke, plaster walls the color of old teeth, sunlight crawling in through diamond panes and painting everything a shade warmer than real life. There was a fireplace big enough to roast a wild boar, a kitchen that managed to be both medieval and gleamingly modern, and a wine fridge already humming with anticipation.
He set her down, and she spun a slow circle, arms raised. “You have taste,” she pronounced, running a finger along the spines of antique cookbooks as if checking for dust.
“I have Airbnb,” he said. “But thank you for pretending.”
She opened the fridge and laughed at the impossible number of eggs inside. “Are you planning on feeding a rugby team, or is this some performance art about fertility?”
“I asked them to stock ‘basic provisions,’” he said, innocently. “Apparently, in Provence, that means enough to survive a siege.”
There were also three loaves of bread, six kinds of cheese, and a crate of cherries so ripe their skins split at a touch. He’d asked for flowers; the owner had delivered, with bouquets in every room, peonies in the parlor, garden roses in the bathroom, a single fat sunflower in the hallway, like a sentry.
The afternoon passed in a haze of pleasure and purpose. Celeste took inventory of the kitchen, immediately setting aside the knife set as “dangerously dull, but charming.” Thad unloaded his camera gear, and then the two of them sprawled on the tile and sampled half a wheel of brie, arguing about which wines to open and whether to start the fire now or wait for sunset.
They cooked together, if you could call it that. Celeste diced garlic with the concentration of a surgeon while Thad wielded a whisk like a weapon. By the time the food was ready, the kitchen looked like a crime scene. Their dinner was simple: pasta slicked with butter and lemon, grilled sardines, and a salad so bitter that it made their teeth ache. She tore bread into pieces, stuffing his mouth when he was too busy talking. He plucked olives from her plate and pretended not to notice when she used his shoulder as a napkin.
The only real interruption was a small wooden box left on the counter, tied with twine. Celeste noticed it first, turning it in her hands, frowning at the neat handwriting on the attached card.
“To the guest scientist,” it read in English but with a distinctly French sense of order. “We heard you collect such things.”
She untied the box, revealing a dozen vials of essential oils, each labeled in careful script. Juniper. Orange blossom. Clary sage. Even a miniature ampoule of absinthe-green artemisia.
She inhaled the whole box at once, then laughed, a genuine, throat-deep laugh. “They’ve outmaneuvered me. I have to admit, this is impressive.”
Thad leaned over her shoulder, taking in the rainbow of liquids. “I may have mentioned in my booking email that you’re a little obsessed.”
Her eyes narrowed, mock-disapproving. “You planned this?”
He shrugged. “I wanted you to have toys. In case you get bored with me.”
She turned, boxed his ears with her hands, and kissed him hard enough to taste the wine on his tongue. “You are ridiculous,” she said, “and possibly the only man alive who understands foreplay at the molecular level.”
They ate on the terrace, the sun sinking fast behind the olive trees, the air pulsing with the scent of tomato vines and the last of the jasmine. The table was set with mismatched plates, a bottle of rosé sweating between them, and candles flickering in old jam jars. Celeste poured, splashed a little on the stone, and watched as it soaked in and darkened the grout.
They didn’t bother with small talk. There was too much history between them now, too much reality to pretend otherwise.
“So,” he said, “are you going to make perfume on your vacation?”
She sipped, considered. “No. I’m going to make memories. Then, later, when I’m back in the lab, I’ll distill them into something worth remembering.”
He toasted her. “To distillation.”
She touched her glass to his, the sound echoing off the valley. “Thank you for getting us here.”
He leaned back, feet up on a second chair. “You know the company’s not going to collapse without us.”
She smiled. “I know. I trust Natalie to threaten any dissidents into line. Besides, the best thing we ever did was make ourselves obsolete.”
He watched her, the softening lines at the corners of her mouth, the way she twirled her hair when she was pretending not to be nervous. “I’m not obsolete. I’m exploring my other talents.”
She raised an eyebrow, skeptical. “Like what? Brooding on the patio? Composing tragic ballads about consumer goods?”
He set his glass down. “Like being your house husband. I could get used to this.”
She snorted. “You’d last a week, then die of ennui.”
He reached across the table and took her hand. “Try me.”
They finished the meal in silence, feeling at ease and comfortable. When the sky turned indigo and the first stars began to flicker out, they cleared the plates, leaving the rest for the morning. Inside, the rooms had cooled, the flagstones cold under their bare feet. Thad drew her in, arms tight around her waist, and nuzzled the side of her neck.
“Do you want dessert?” he whispered, lips brushing her skin.
She shook her head. “You.”
He carried her upstairs, her legs clamped tight around his hips. The bedroom was simple: a bed, a battered armoire, a window thrown open to the night. He set her down and peeled her clothes with slow precision, pausing at every freckle, every scar.
She undressed him in return, faster, more desperate, then pushed him onto the bed and straddled him, hair falling in a curtain around his face. The first time was quick, a shudder and a gasp, his hands gripping her hips so hard it left bruises. The second time, she took control, rolling him onto his back and pinning his wrists with her hands.
She ran her tongue along his jaw, then stopped. “Wait,” she said, sitting up and reaching for the little wooden box on the bedside table.
She opened a vial of clary sage and dabbed a drop onto her wrist. Then another, sweet orange, behind her knee. She touched a finger to his lips, slicked with a clear, peppery oil.
“Tell me what you smell,” she challenged.
He inhaled, mind racing. “Citrus. Grass. Something like… rain, if rain was a flavor.”
She rewarded him with a slow, deep grind, her breath catching at the friction. She mixed the oils as she moved, layering scent on scent until the whole room was a chord of green and gold and earth.
When he came, it was with her name on his lips, the world narrowing to the space between their bodies. When she came, it was quieter, a pulse, a tremor, her nails digging crescent moons into his shoulders.
They lay tangled, skin slick, the sheets damp with sweat and perfume. Outside, the countryside lay shrouded in the hush of sleep, but inside, they were wide awake, remaking the universe in the dark.
He traced the line of her back, memorizing it.
“Can we stay forever?” he asked, half joking.
She rolled over and pressed her palm to his chest. “No. But we can remember how it felt.”
He nodded. “That’s enough.”
They drifted off, the open window spilling night air and the distant scent of lavender. The last thing he heard was her breathing, even and sure, the promise of morning waiting beyond the edge of sleep.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
The day bled out in a smear of gold and vermilion, and the villa seemed to float in its own little pocket of dusk. Celeste showered in the clawfoot tub, the water scalding hot, the room steaming thick with lavender and soap, and the high, almost narcotic pitch of orange blossom. When she emerged, the windows were lit from the outside, flickers of candlelight doubled in every pane.
She found Thad on the terrace, hunched in a hoodie, sneakers on the stone, hands buried in his pockets. He looked up at her, face shadowed but eyes warm. “Don’t hate me,” he said, “but I need to kidnap you for an hour.”
