Chapter 24
Mallory
Agreeing to wear this ridiculous hat should be enough of a victory for Dash, but somehow I let him convince me to go on one ride.
All the spinny things are out, so I agree to the Ferris wheel because it seems benign. Or rather, Dash shames me into it after I lobby for the bumper cars. “Bumper cars aren’t a ride,” he says definitively.
“I’d be riding in a tiny car. That makes it a ride,” I insist.
“No, you’d be driving in a small parking lot. You need to leave the ground for it to be a ride.”
“I’ve never heard that definition. What makes you the expert on what is or isn’t a ride?”
“Trust me, Marshmallow, I know what constitutes a ride. For one thing, it needs to be fun, and it should make your heart do a flip at some point. There should be a tiny bit of fear involved.”
I almost tell him that being with him today has already made my heart flip over itself several times, but he doesn’t need to know that. It’s been happening since the day we finally lost control and had all the amazing sex. And now, even though I’m mostly bathing in the afterglow of what I’m sure half the ladies in the county have experienced, I’m still all tingly inside.
When Dash grabs my hand as we walk through the carnival and try a few other games, I’m aware that no one seems to be looking twice at us. Our engagement is already old news. So is the idea of a couple holding hands while they walk around a public space.
So why do I suddenly feel his hand against mine like it’s leaving a heat seal on my skin? I can barely concentrate on anything except how my hand feels in his, and I find myself wanting his hands on more parts of me.
“I think you should kiss me.” All in the name of public displays of affection. I stop and stand in front of Dash so he either has to kiss me or move around me. He makes the right choice.
“Don’t have to ask me twice, hon.”
I feel a secret little thrill at the endearment. It’s meaningless, and he probably doesn’t even know he said it. For all I know, he’d say it to his sisters. But I don’t care. It has meaning to me.
“I like when you call me that.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said it. Maybe he’ll think it’s weird. I promised him honesty, though, so he might as well know.
“What? Honey?”
“Or the abbreviated version you just did. It’s sweet.”
It surprises me when he squeezes my hand, almost as though he’s doubling down on the affection. “You’re sweet.”
He brings my hand to his lips and kisses it. Like we’re a couple. Not the kind of fake couple we’ve been pretending to be. Somehow, today I feel like a real couple.
It’s the sex, obviously. It’s confusing me, and I need to get a grip before I catch feelings that have no business in our arrangement. And yet…we are keeping up appearances, after all. No harm in going along with it. If I let myself get swept up today, I’ll just talk myself down later on.
It’s fine. It will all be fine.
Meanwhile, Dash is steering me toward the bigger rides. The area with the kiddie rides felt comforting. I figure I could handle a merry-go-round or a rocking horse, but that’s not where we are now. The roller coaster towers overhead, and I fear that’s Dash’s idea of fun.
“You’re not serious with this.” I point at where the yellow cart whizzes by overhead, filled with screaming teenagers with their hands in the air. “I am not going on that.”
“You made that clear. How about a compromise?” He points at the Ferris wheel off to the right. It’s huge and light with neon stripes on the spokes, but I have to admit that it doesn’t seem to be moving very quickly. “Even old ladies can handle the Ferris wheel.”
His smirk is back, complete with a dazzling dimple in his cheek. I want to punch him for comparing me to the elderly, but I’m also a tiny bit curious about the ride. Not that I’ll give him the satisfaction of admitting it.
“Old ladies, eh?”
“Wait, here’s where you turn out to have spent time working at the circus as a child or something. And now you’re going to climb the outer rungs of the damn thing to prove a point.” He stares up at the giant wheel, which has just stopped to let off passengers from one of its buckets.
“Nope. Never been on one. Not gonna climb it. No way.”
“But you’ll go?”
“I’ll go.”
He squeezes my hand again, and a ripple of warmth courses over my skin. I like making him happy.
Dash leads us through the turnstiles, and we hand over our tickets. A few minutes later, a couple wearing actual prom king and prom queen sashes exits the ride, and we climb into the open cart. The attendant shuts the door and latches it. A second later, we’re rising into the air.
Dash keeps his hand on top of mine on the bench between us, watching my face as we glide higher. I don’t freak out. I’m not sure who’s more surprised about it.
“You good?” He has the worried look of a dad about to take his hand off a toddler bike and hopes his kid doesn’t fall.
“I’m good.” I gaze out over Napa Valley and let out a long exhale. “More than good. It’s pretty awesome up here.”
We’re shielded from the midafternoon sun blazing relentlessly behind us in our little red bubble. The light casts a giant Ferris wheel shadow on the field beyond the carnival, and I watch it move as we do.
Settling his arm around my shoulders, Dash leans against the bench behind us. “You’ve really never been in one of these?”
“Never. I always thought it would go speeding into the sky and then drop in some sort of gravity plunge.”
Dash chuckles. “How is that possible? When you watch a Ferris wheel spin, it’s just doing gentle circles. There’s never any plunge.”
I shrug. “Don’t know what to tell you. I guess I just pictured it that way in my mind and never bothered to look up.”
“Ha. Sounds like the way a lot of people form opinions. Few of them are true. Not that it matters once people latch onto a thing.”
He looks out over Napa, where rolling hills of green are peppered with neat rows of grapevines. At this time of year, grapes hang beneath the upper tufts of leaves, but we can’t see them from here.
“You speaking from experience?” I ask, putting my hand on his knee.
His lips tip up, but I don’t get a full smile. He looks more thoughtful than happy despite the view.
“Maybe. Probably.”
I wait, but he doesn’t say anything more. We’re about a quarter of the way up, so the entire carnival spreads out below us, and even more greenery is visible in the distance. The wheel stops so people can exit and enter below. We move again and stop again.
Dash still hasn’t said a word, but I wait for one more stop before prodding him.
“Care to elaborate?”
He turns toward me again, and his lips are on mine before my brain has time to catch up. I realize he has no intention of elaborating. And a moment after that, I forget why I asked.
As the Ferris wheel sweeps us higher, I forget about the view. Dash’s lips roam across my cheek and down to my jaw, where he nips at the skin and soothes it with his tongue.
My entire body sighs against him as I find his lips again. And then his tongue. Searching. Swirling. Melting against each other until I’m shifting to get closer. To find more points of contact between us.
“Wait,” Dash says against my lips. “I have an idea. Stay right there.”
I start to explain that there’s not exactly a lot of room to go anywhere else, but then I realize what Dash has in mind as he moves to the floor of the small vessel that’s almost reached the top of the wheel.
There isn’t a lot of space in our round bubble of a Ferris wheel car, so he seems to change his mind, placing his large hands on my hips and shifting me to one end of the bench.
My eyes go wide partly because he’s managed to cram himself into the space at my feet, but mainly because of the cocky grin he gives me as he gently moves my knees apart.
“This is your idea?”
He nods and licks his lips. “To make up for the hat.”
“I kinda like the hat,” I say, slouching down and sighing as Dash starts kissing the inside of my thigh. “But I like this more.”
Dash runs his hands up the sensitive skin of my inner thighs, and I stop talking. His breath is hot against my skin. His tongue even hotter.
His hands continue moving until they reach the apex of my thighs. I suck in a breath when he grazes my center with a finger, swiping gently back and forth until I can’t see straight.
“When I saw you in this dress this morning, all I could think about was how much I wanted to kiss you here.” He plants a row of kisses up my inner thigh. I sigh again. “And here.” His lips land where his finger was a moment ago, and I gasp.
“God, Dash. Yes.”
Sliding my panties to the side, he runs his tongue straight up my center in one long stroke, and I’m pretty sure our Ferris wheel has morphed into a roller coaster. I’m dizzy, moaning, feeling…every swirl of his tongue, every inch of his hot mouth, the edges of his teeth when he nips at my clit. Then he sucks hard. And I see stars.
The magic of the Ferris wheel reaching the top, looking out over beautiful vineyard views, feeling the warm air on a sunny afternoon, and then this… Dash with his tongue between my legs, taking me higher than any Ferris wheel ever could.
I want the feeling to last. I want the moment to stretch into minutes and hours. When Dash slides a finger inside me and keeps working circles with his tongue, I can’t hold myself back.
“Fuck, honey, you taste so good,” Dash murmurs.
That does it. Every pleasure center in my body fires at once, and the stars in my eyes turn to comets and whizzing meteors. I’m lost in space, found by Dash, and out of control.
I’m caught between closing my eyes to the best orgasm of my life and peeking to make sure we haven’t reached the bottom. As much as we want engagement cred, I don’t want the Ferris wheel operator to catch us like this. But we’re nowhere near the bottom.
I pull Dash up and press my lips to his. Wrapping my arms around his neck, I pull him close and open my mouth to taste myself on his tongue.
We spend the rest of our Ferris wheel time like this, locked in a forever kiss that only stops when we reach the bottom and the attendant asks, “Do y’all want to go around again?”
Dash barely breaks the kiss to answer. He yanks a handful of tickets from his pocket and shoves them in the guy’s hand, along with a twenty-dollar tip.
We ascend once more, the Ferris wheel sweeping us into the sky. “Just one more round,” Dash says. I assume he means once more around the Ferris wheel. But then he drops to his knees again, and I see he has other ideas. Better ideas.
It’s gotten windy, a late summer breeze that does little to disperse the stagnant heat of the day, but I’ll take it. The dog days of summer hit hard around here, and a wind strong enough to flutter the leaves feels great.
I’ll have to consider weather forecasts and the meaning of coastal winds once Autumn Lake is growing grapes, and I momentarily feel overwhelmed by the long lists of tasks I’ll have very soon. I can’t let worries shadow all the new business opportunities for Autumn Lake, but the nerves are real. The wine-growing community is small. People will know if I screw this up, and it can’t happen.
Dash’s reassuring hand on my waist grounds me and settles my thoughts. For now.
Somehow, we’ve spent nearly six hours at the carnival, way longer than I intended when I suggested the activity. It’s been so much fun.
We’ve played most of the games, but we’ve only competed head-to-head in the basketball pop-a-shot…eleven more times. We’re at a dead heat, tied at six each, and I haven’t cheated since that first game.
At one point, Dash wrapped his arm around my shoulders and pulled me in for a kiss right in the middle of the game, but that cost both of us valuable seconds, so I couldn’t accuse him of distracting me for an advantage.
We’ve leveled up our prizes—except for the hat, which I will keep until the end of time—so by now, Dash is saddled with a human-sized stuffed bear, which he carries tucked under one arm like the third wheel on our date.
I’ve come to this event every year since it began back when I was in middle school, and I’ve never enjoyed it as much as I have today. The games are pretty much the same. The rides have only improved a bit.
That leaves me with the unescapable conclusion that I’m currently zooming around on a cloud because of the company.
“This way.” Dash taps the brim of my hat and pulls me down a row of games, some of which we’ve already played. We were in a dead heat at Whack-a-Mole until he won, but then I beat him at a game squirting water to inflate small balloons. “Let’s check these out.”
We’ve already checked out everything, but I’m not complaining if he wants to stay at the carnival.
“Competitive, are we? You looking to regain your dignity by beating me at something?” I tease, elbowing him in the ribs.
“We’re not going head-to-head on this one.” He leads me past several game booths and stops at one we skipped the first time around. It’s a simple ring toss, but he cautioned me earlier that it’s harder than it looks.
“I thought you said this one was sneaky, designed so the rings bounce.” Indeed, the rows of milk bottles mostly have rings lodged between bottlenecks rather than encircling them.
Dash nods but seems intent on trying. He hands the last of his tickets to a guy in blue-striped pants and a matching jacket and waits for him to retrieve a stack of rings. “Good luck,” he says, presenting Dash with five rings.
“Okay, it just takes a bit of finesse,” he says quietly as though giving himself instructions. The sign over the game says he only needs to ring one of the bottles to get a prize, which tells me it’s designed to be difficult.
Dash holds the ring like a Frisbee and lets it sail free. The first one goes sailing over the bottlenecks and banks off one before settling into the crack between two bottles. Same result on the second try.
“It’s supposed to be hard,” I say encouragingly, feeling in my purse for more tickets in case Dash wants to keep going after this round. From what I know of him, he doesn’t like to lose, so I doubt he’ll walk away without a victory.
“Yeah.”
The third ring hits the mark, landing cleanly around a bottle. The fourth misses.
I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath. Exhaling, I look at the sign, reassuring myself that one ring wins a prize.
“One more,” Dash mumbles, eyes focused on the field of bottles, which feel like they’re taunting us. He seems to be taking this so much more seriously than all the others, where we laughed and talked smack as we squared off against each other. It’s like he has a personal vendetta against the man in the striped suit. Or these three dozen bottles.
I want to ask why he’s so intent on winning at this particular game, but I don’t dare disrupt his concentration.
With a final skillful toss, Dash rings a final bottle, bringing his score to two. He stands up straight and looks at the row of prizes hanging at the back of the booth. I’m more interested in why he chose this game for some kind of personal showdown, so I don’t focus on his conversation with the booth operator, who goes to the back with a hook and takes a prize down.
But then Dash turns and holds his prize out to me. It’s a Rosie the Riveter lunchbox.
At first, I’m baffled. It seems like an odd choice for a guy who doesn’t need to bring lunch to work since there are two restaurants at Buttercup Hill and a catering staff.
“It’s symbolic. For my badass future wife who plans to grow an empire. I don’t want you skipping lunch.”
The breath leaves my lungs. I feel dizzy at the thought of this man caring enough to win me a lunchbox. And not just any lunchbox—one with the baddest badass of all emblazoned on the front.
My heart, which was already so full after spending the day here with Dash, now pushes its very boundaries in my chest. So much so that I put a hand against my sternum as though I can keep it from bursting.
“Dash…wow. That’s so incredibly thoughtful.” I feel tiny pinpricks of tears at the corners of my eyes, which is silly because it’s just a nice gesture. I shouldn’t be getting so emotional about it, but I can’t help it. “Seriously, thank you.”
I stand on my toes to reach his lips. It’s a kiss that has nothing to prove except how much I like him. Unlike all the ones for show, this one feels like it’s just for us.
Best kiss of my life.