Chapter Twenty-Eight
Blake
“I told you this would be a great date.”
“You were right,” I said, doing my best to drink my IPA, but it was extremely difficult when Izzy was walking so fast. She’d decided after our shower that she wanted to take me on a date, and who was I to stop her, right?
Last night was so perfect that I want the opportunity to top it, Phillips.
In my humble opinion, that sounded like one hell of a good time.
Was I surprised when we ended up at the zoo? Yes. Was it hands down the best date I’d ever been on? Also yes. I mean, what was better than beer, food trucks, and wild animals? She bought me snacks, took me on the train, and forced me to lie down in the shark tunnel so I could have “an entirely different underwater-viewing experience.”
Everything in the world seemed better with her. More fun. Fucking happier .
“What’s the hurry, Shay?” It felt like she was practically running . “The zoo doesn’t close for an hour.”
“I know, but Skyfari closes in twenty minutes.”
“Sky what?”
The words were barely out of my mouth when she stopped and pointed, grinning. I followed her finger, and oh, hell no. It was one of those ski lift things, where you rode around and viewed the zoo from above.
No fucking way.
I hated heights. I’d hated heights since Jason and I had gotten stuck on a ski lift when I was nine and we’d had to sit still, dangling over the side of a mountain, for over an hour.
It’d been terrifying.
I’d gotten over it and dealt with heights when necessary, but I was definitely not going to subject myself to this nightmarish little zoo ride that was more than likely maintained by a staff of disengaged sixteen-year-olds.
No, thank you, I would rather eat glass than get on that thing. I rubbed my forehead and said, “I don’t think—”
“This is my favorite thing at the zoo,” Izzy said excitedly, beaming up at me and kind of bouncing a little. “My grandparents used to get mad at me when we came here because all I wanted to do was ride it, over and over again. They’d be all only one time and I’d cry inconsolably and then we’d end up riding it for hours.”
“What a little shit,” I said, in love with the way her eyes danced when she told that story.
“Right?” She wrapped her arms around my arm, and her eyes were all squinty when she grinned up at me and said, “I think it’ll be the perfect way to end a perfect weekend, don’t you? Just the two of us, watching the sun set from our quiet spot on top of the world?”
I opened my mouth to politely decline, to explain how you couldn’t pay me enough to ride the Skyfari, but then she kissed my arm. Just an offhanded little peck that she probably hadn’t even realized she’d done, but something about the subconscious gesture wrecked me. I looked down at her and stupidly said, “I do. Let’s go.”
This is no big deal , I told myself as she bought tickets and handed them to the kid at the gate. Just a quick little ride around the zoo; easy peasy. Hell, there were little kids up there; what the fuck was I feeling nauseated about?
I was a grown-ass man.
Izzy was talking a mile a minute as we waited in line, and even though I was listening and responding, nothing was sticking. My eyes were too focused on the lift cars that just kept coming and coming.
When we reached the front, Izzy grinned. “Here we go.”
“Yeah,” I said, forcing my lips to smile as we walked over and stood on the white loading line. The car came around and scooped us up, and then a blond kid who looked no older than fourteen— Ryker— latched the bar for us.
Yeah, this is a terrible idea, putting our lives in the hands of a Ryker.
I wrapped both hands around the bar and looked straight ahead, needing to see anything but the ground below.
“Hey, Blakey,” Izzy said as the kid stepped back and our car started climbing that cable, “scooch closer.”
And then she wiggled a little closer to me, dear God , making the car rock.
“Stop that,” I hissed, glancing over at her out of the corner of my eye.
“What?” She was looking at me in confusion, which tracked. I’d sounded like a total lunatic.
“There was a sign that said you shouldn’t rock the cars,” I said calmly, forcing myself to sound normal. “So we should probably follow the rules.”
“I think they mean don’t shake them back and forth on purpose,” she teased, sounding (rightfully so) like she was amused by how seriously I was considering the Skyfari regulations. “I’m pretty sure you’re allowed to move.”
“Yeah, but it’s best if you don’t, though,” I said, injecting boredom into my voice. “Sitting still is probably the way to go.”
“Blake.” Her voice was less confused and more concerned now. “Are you okay?”
“Sure,” I said, forcing myself to move my head just enough to smile at her. “You?”
“I’m good,” she said, her eyes narrowed as she watched me. “Having fun?”
“Yes,” I said, swallowing as I saw the other cars, the ones heading back toward the starting gate, moving off to her right.
Something about seeing how high they were made my stomach drop.
Why the hell am I being such a pussy?
“Ooh, look at the rhino,” she said, looking down at the ground beneath us. “That thing is massive.”
“Yeah,” I said, turning my head back to the forward-facing position, gripping the bar, and closing my eyes behind my sunglasses. “Enormous.”
“Is that an ostrich?” she asked, and I felt the weight shift when she leaned a little to look down. “I wouldn’t have thought they’d be friends.”
“Yeah, same,” I managed, freezing every muscle in my body to offset her movement, definitely not looking down at the animals.
“Blake.”
“Hmm?”
“There aren’t any ostriches. Are your eyes closed?”
I sighed but still didn’t open them. “Maybe just a little. I’m tired.”
“They’re squeezed shut, you liar,” she said. “What is going on with you?”
I sighed again, keeping my eyes closed because in addition to not wanting to see how high we were, now I didn’t want to see her looking at me like I was a nutjob. “I maybe don’t love ski lifts.”
“What?”
“It’s no big deal,” I said, working hard to maintain a relaxed voice, “but they just aren’t my thing.”
“So why are you on one?”
Because you kissed my arm. That wasn’t a rational answer, so I went with “You wanted to and I thought maybe I liked them now.”
“Look at me,” she said, and she sounded like she wanted to laugh. “Blake.”
“I don’t want to,” I said, keeping my eyes closed. I honestly wasn’t sure if that was making it better or worse, but I knew the zoo geography enough to know we had to be getting close to the monkey island, a place I definitely didn’t want to hover over.
“Okay,” she said, clearing her throat. “Um, maybe if you…”
She didn’t trail off, but my ability to listen to her did, because the lift stopped.
It fucking stopped.
It wasn’t supposed to stop, it was supposed to keep circling around and around. That was its job, right? To keep moving on a constant loop? I wasn’t sure what was going on, but why would the ski lift just stop?
Ryker, what the fuck?
“Try opening your eyes?”
“I’m good,” I said, swallowing. “Really. Don’t worry about me, I’m good, just look around at the zoo and have fun while we wait for this thing to start moving. I’m fine, I promise.”
“Well, you don’t look fine,” she said, her voice soft. “Your knuckles are literally white and you’re sweating even though it’s starting to get cold. How can I help you?”
I loved her more at that moment than it was right to love her this early in our relationship, and I really wanted to open my eyes and look at her face.
But that seemed to be physically impossible for me.
It was like my eyes were glued shut.
“I promise I’m okay, Iz,” I said, “I just really need this thing to start moving. Why isn’t it moving?”
“Oh, this happens all the time,” she said calmly. “Nothing’s wrong, I promise. Sometimes they’ll have to stop and, like, clean out a car because a kid spilled, things like that. I know because I destroyed a lift car with an ice-cream cone when I was seven.”
That made me smile in spite of this hell. “So on-brand.”
“Right?” she said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “It was like a hundred degrees, I was with my brother, and I dropped a large cone the instant we took off. By the time we got back, melted ice cream was all over our shorts and the seat, and the sticky chocolate was even dripping down onto people walking below.”
“Nice.”
“Do your brothers know about your aversion to heights?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Jason is exactly the same.”
“Okay, what’s his phone number?”
Obviously she was going to call him, which wasn’t going to help anything at all, but I was so incapable of any thoughts other than what the fuck, Ryker that I gave her my brother’s number.
A second later, I could hear the FaceTime ringing.
Oh, shit. She’s FaceTiming him.
I thought he wouldn’t answer because he wasn’t going to recognize her number, but then I heard, “Yeah?”
“Hi, Jason, um, I’m sorry to FaceTime out of the blue, but I’m with your brother and we have a little situation.”
I forced my eyes open and turned my head just the slightest, only to see Jason’s face on Izzy’s phone as he said, “What’s wrong? Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” she said, and then she turned the phone toward me. “But we’re on the Skyfari at the zoo, it stopped for a moment, and he seems a little tense. I thought—”
“Why the fuck are you on that thing, Blake?” Jason was yelling— when wasn’t he— and he sounded seriously offended by my situation. “Do you have a death wish? Did someone force you to board at gunpoint?”
“It’s not that high, Jason,” Izzy said calmly. “And I called you because I thought it might help Blake.”
“Yeah, you dick,” I said, shocked that it was somehow a little funny to me. “Help Blake.”
“Blakey is an idiot and cannot be helped,” Jason said, but he was shaking his head and grinning. “You got on a ski lift by choice, man, come on .”
“Aren’t you going to tell him that it’s no big deal,” Izzy said slowly, “and that everything’s going to be fine?”
“He’ll know that’s a lie,” Jason said. “Didn’t he tell you about the last time we were on one?”
“Jace,” I warned, nearly having a heart attack when the lift started moving again. “Don’t.”
“He did not ,” Izzy said, sounding amused.
Jason launched into the story in the way only Jason could, adding f-bombs as adjectives, adverbs, and even proper nouns.
“Our dad—King Fuck—let us go alone, if you can believe that shit.”
I stared at his stupid face as he told the story, and Izzy laughed her ass off.
“Blakey wouldn’t stop bawling, and the sound of that little shit screaming and crying was driving me nuts. Like, I was terrified, too, but the kid was howling so loudly that I wanted to gouge my eardrums out. So I started making up this story about the girl he had a crush on.”
“Rachel Devos,” I said, laughing because I’d forgotten all about the story. “Holy shit, you told me she was super into daredevils, and that as long as we didn’t die, our story was going to make her totally want me.”
Izzy started laughing at that, and Jason was grinning as he kept talking.
“It worked, though, because you stopped sniveling and started scheming, right?” He said to Izzy, “This little scrawnball was making plans on how we were going to be casually talking about it when we walked to school—because Rachel’s mom made her walk with us.”
“Poor girl,” Izzy said.
“No, I think she learned a lot from us,” Jason countered, which made Izzy laugh even harder.
“A lot she’s probably trying to forget,” I said around a laugh.
“All I know is that by the time we got rescued from the lift, I swear to God our ski pants were frozen to our bodies because we’d both peed our pants so many fucking times. I mean, it had been hours and we’d gone hard on the create-your-own-drink Coke machine beforehand.”
“That thing was so cool, though,” I added.
“Mom fucking hated it because Dad let us have as much as we wanted.”
“Hey, Jason, we have to go,” Izzy said, turning the phone back to herself. “We’re almost back to the gate now.”
I looked in front of us and I could see Ryker. We were almost finished, praise Jesus.
“Well, tell my brother to quit doing stupid shit,” my brother said. “And stop taking him on death-defying dates, Izzy, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, grinning. “Goodbye, Jason.”
My knees were a little wobbly when we stepped off the ride, and it felt like I was waking up after sleeping, to be honest. The late-day sun, the people, the noise—it’d all disappeared for a bit, it seemed.
But the one thing that hadn’t disappeared was her. I refused to overthink what she’d done and what had just happened, because that would force me to recognize the patheticness of all she’d had to witness, but the fact of the matter was that she’d rescued me.
Izzy had seen me at my most vulnerable, and she’d rescued me in the very best way.
“Hey.” I grabbed her hand and pulled her away from the zoo sidewalk and into the trees. I didn’t stop until her back was against a tree and her face was in my hands. I let my eyes drink in every detail of her face—those eyes, those freckles, that mouth—before saying, “Thank you.”
She blinked, long lashes like butterfly wings, and her lips turned up. “You’re welcome.”
“Will you be embarrassed if I kiss the living shit out of you at the zoo?”
Her eyes squinted as she grinned and shook her head. “Bring it on, Blakey .”