The phone lit up on the nightstand, casting a ghostly glow across the room. I wasn’t trying to snoop. I swear. I was just reaching for my water glass. But the preview message was impossible to ignore.
It wasn’t a text from “Mom.” It wasn’t a spam email. It was a push notification that read like the title of a bad romance novel.
I saw a notification on my boyfriend’s phone: “Your nocturnal rendezvous is confirmed.”.
My blood turned to ice. Nocturnal rendezvous? Who talks like that? Was he meeting a woman? A vampire? A high-end escort service that specializes in midnight trysts?
I looked at him, sleeping peacefully beside me, looking innocent. The rage bubbled up. I unlocked his phone, ready to catch him cheating. My thumb hovered over the screen, prepared to find texts, photos, coordinates to a motel on the edge of town.
I tapped the notification. The app opened.
It wasn’t Tinder. It wasn’t WhatsApp. It was SkyGuide.
It was an app for stargazing.
I stared at the screen, blinking. The “rendezvous” wasn’t with a woman named Trixie; it was with the Perseid Meteor Shower. The notification was just a reminder to look up.
He was planning to wake me up at 3 AM to look at a meteor shower.
The relief was so intense it made me dizzy. He wasn’t a scumbag; he was just a nerd. A romantic, space-obsessed nerd who wanted to share a celestial event with me.
Two hours later, he shook me awake, whispering excitedly about “peak visibility.” We dragged blankets out to the balcony. It was the middle of February. The wind was biting.
We froze to death. My teeth were chattering so hard I could barely see the stars. We huddled together like penguins, shivering violently while he pointed out constellations I couldn’t identify because my eyes were watering from the cold.
But at least he wasn’t cheating.
As I watched a streak of light burn up in the atmosphere, I realized that I would take hypothermia over heartbreak any day. I squeezed his hand, grateful that the only other body he was interested in was a celestial one.
