Orbital

She nuzzled her head up against his uneven chest, ebbing and flowing with the tide of his steady breathing. Her fingers tracing the back of his arm, covered with scars and oddities accumulated over years of growing up.
"I never dreamt this," she whispered quietly to his heart.
He inhaled deeply and exhaled a rumbling chuckle that originated from somewhere deep within his chest. Her head danced on his body as his muscles tensed mirth in globules. She smiled, sure he could feel her lips extend and curve upwards. You know what they say about laughter.
"Oh, is that so?" He wheedled, feigning soft menace.
They lay still, enjoying each other's heartbeats and even breaths. The carpet beneath them clean and the blanket on them thick, they both hovered on the edge of uncomfortably warm, neither wanted move for fear of shattering the peace. He craned his neck upwards and looked outwards through the glass.
"I can see Jupiter from here." His voice sounded strange, as if the words had first reverberated through a deep chasm before finding their way through his mouth.
She propped herself up on one elbow, disappointingly robbed of his kick-drum heartbeats. Looking out the window she chanced upon many shades of white, cream, silver, gold, orange, red, yellow, black. Unable to tell the difference between stars, planets, and satellites, she waited quietly.
"Many people looking at the planets pass right over Jupiter. Mercury is the closest, and so hot that metal becomes water; Venus is how Earth might become because of greenhouse gasses; Mars has little green men and ice; Saturn has those beautiful rings that Hollywood loves to remind us of in all the outer-space movies; Uranus is a perpetual joke, but our knowledge of it is still there; Neptune has the coolest name and has cartoon characters named after it; and Pluto...well Pluto is the baby of all the planets, has a cartoon character named after it, and is argued over its legitimacy as a true planet." A long silence. " Which is your favorite?"
"Hmm," she breathed, "I like Neptune the best."
"What does poor Jupiter have?" he softly pressed on. "Sure it's big, but the sun's bigger. It's got lots of colors, but none as pretty as Mercury's ember-red or Vensus's emerald-green." He paused but continued staring single-mindedly at a single point that she could not make out. "Jupiter's storm doesn't even compare to Saturn's rings."
He broke his gaze away from the night sky to stare into her eyes. She realized she was crying, but, for the life of her, she couldn't understand why. He smiled that diagonal line that she had come to know as wistful and looked seriously into her eyes, brushing away a tear with the knuckle of his right pointer-finer. He understood.
"It's beautifully tragic, isn't it?" his gaze shied away from hers, "Jupiter is the biggest, the most colorful. It's ignored. It has a storm that never stops, you know? Earth could fit into that storm and get blown away in an instant. People don't know. People don't understand." She lay still, waiting. "It's hard to love what you don't understand, don't you think?"
Tears streamed down her face. She smiled through them, once again resting her head on his broad chest, pressing her ear up to his heart. It beat softly. Hypnotically. Her tears trickled into his belly-button and pooled there. His heartbeat made her tranquil. She heard him from far away.
"I guess that's the trick though. Loving something you can't fully understand."