Chapter 10 #3
“Yeah, I see.” He pointed back to the booth where the trivia took place. “We almost took first place back there.”
Amused, I bumped him with my hip. “We were robbed, and you know it.”
“Okay, okay.” He lifted his hands and relented. “We were.”
“They said they were asking ten questions and they asked nine.”
“Well…” He pulled a face.
I stopped in my tracks. “What?”
“There were ten questions.”
“No.” I shook my head and starting walking again. “There were nine.”
He ran his hand over his beard. “There were ten.”
“No!” The look on his face gave me pause. “Are you joking with me?”
He frowned. “I’m afraid not.”
“When I argued with that guy, you had my back the whole time!” I argued.
“And I’m going to always have your back in public.” He grabbed my hand and brought it to his lips as we made our way toward the Ferris wheel. “And I’ll call you on your shit in private.”
I bit my lip. “Okay.”
A woman walked by, loudly talking on her cell phone about her skyrocketing rent while corralling her three kids.
“That’s one of the reasons why I can’t wait for my house to be done,” he declared.
“Yeah, rent is wild. I don’t understand how they are justifying the hikes. My rent went up almost three hundred dollars, and they’ve done nothing different.”
“It’s been cheaper for me to live in a hotel since my lease was up in July than it would’ve been for me to do a month-to-month lease until my house is ready at the end of the month.”
“You’ve been traveling so much anyway so it wouldn’t have made sense to pay rent and pay for a hotel if you have the option to let go of one.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I don’t mind spending money. But I need it to make sense and that doesn’t make sense to me.”
We launched into a conversation about financial literacy and capitalism.
“—and don’t get me started on credit scores,” I complained, rolling my eyes. “That’s the most made-up shit.”
“Hell yeah,” he agreed. “You can pay the minimum balance or the full balance, and it does the same thing to your score. Paying off a loan hurts your credit score, but getting more credit cards can build it.” He shook his head.
“The score is contingent upon borrowing money, but you need a score to borrow money. And you need a borrowing history to get a score.”
He spoke with such elegant passion, I found myself staring up at him. Realizing he was done speaking, I quickly nodded in agreement. “It’s wild.”
“And they don’t teach enough about that when we’re young. The whole thing is a setup.”
A preteen kid tripped his mother up, and our conversation immediately deviated to the shenanigans in front of us.
Once she got up and it was clear that she wasn’t hurt, I tried not to laugh.
But I shifted my gaze to Russ and the moment our eyes met, we both cracked up.
I had tears in my eyes when he said she looked like she was on ice. We joked our way to our last ride.
“Look at the sky,” I marveled, standing in line for the Ferris wheel. The sky was the prettiest shade of powder blue. The streaks of sunlight burst from behind huge fluffy clouds. “It’s beautiful.”
“Yeah, it is,” Russ responded quietly.
I glanced at him and found him staring at me. I grinned. “You’re not looking.”
“Oh, I’m looking.”
I giggled, bumping him with my hip. “I meant at the sky!”
“Can you blame me?”
My stomach fluttered. Cocking my head to the side, I gave him a look. “Are you trying to seduce me?”
He leaned down, putting his lips against the shell of my ear. “Always.”
I nodded, placing my hands against his chest. “Well, it’s working.”
Moving his head so our foreheads touched, he stared into my eyes. “Oh, really?”
I nodded again, slowly. “Yeah,” I whispered as his lips came closer to mine.
Our mouths connected lightly. It was a sweet, chaste, quick kiss. And it put a smile on my face. But when I opened my eyes and saw the way he was staring at me, the breath left my lungs.
“You’re holding up the line!” the Ferris wheel attendant called out.
Breaking apart and looking around, we realized he was talking to us.
I covered my mouth to stifle my laugh.
“My bad,” Russ apologized to the man before ushering me forward.
Snickering, we made our way to the rusty blue-and-white Ferris wheel car with glass windows all around. Classical music pumped through the small speaker as we climbed aboard.
Locking the door with a firm click, the attendant’s thin lips were pulled into a tight line.
He was not amused.
“You know he’s cussing you out in his head,” I told Russ as soon as we started moving.
“As long as he gets us off this thing when it’s over, that’s fine,” he replied with a laugh.
“Oh, look,” I gasped, pointing to the way the sun was peeking over a thick stretch of clouds.
He draped his arm around my shoulders. “Yeah, that’s sick.”
We were both quiet, staring at the sky as we slowly ascended.
“Today has been so much fun,” I murmured.
“It really has. I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew it was going to be a good time with you.” His fingers danced over my shoulder. “Thank you for being here with me.”
“Thank you for planning this.”
“I planned it for you, but I enjoyed every minute of it.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed your first Magic World experience. Would you come back?”
“I would.” He ran his free hand over his short beard and chuckled to himself. “But I don’t think this place would’ve been half as much fun without you.”
My lips spread into a smile. “I was just thinking that I don’t know if I’ve ever had as much fun here as I have with you.”
Pulling me into him, he flashed a self-satisfied smile. “Oh, really?”
“Yeah. Before today, my favorite memory at this place was with my childhood best friend Leah, my cousin Ashlyn, and Ashlyn’s best friend Stephanie.”
“Why was that your favorite?”
“We were sixteen, maybe fifteen, and my uncle, Ashlyn’s dad, dropped us off.
It was a random, hot summer day. We were here from like ten o’clock in the morning to seven o’clock at night.
It was my first time being here without my parents, or any parents supervising.
We rode all the rides, flirted with all the boys, and spent all of the little cash we were given for the day.
” I giggled at the memory. “We all had a change of clothes with us, and I changed into this cute little outfit I’d put together.
I got so many compliments on my style. It was one thing to hear it in school or at the mall, but it felt bigger here.
That’s when I knew fashion was my passion. ”
That was the moment I knew fashion was my life.
“So that’s why you look so good all the time,” he observed.
I grinned. “Yeah, pretty much.” I sighed.
“Like I said, it was a great day. But then it started pouring down raining and we had to wait in the rain for an hour to be picked up. We danced in it and laughed about it, but I think three of us ended up sick. It was a mess. But it’s still one of my favorite memories. ”
“Sounds like it.”
I looked out at the vast sky. We were so high up on the Ferris wheel that it felt like we were in arm’s reach of the clouds. “It was a good day, but this day… this day has been perfect,” I murmured, still mesmerized by the sky.
You’re perfect.
“Why is that?” he wondered.
When I turned my face up to him, our eyes locked.
“You.” The admission spilled out of me in an unexpected breath. I ripped my eyes away from him and stared out at the sky. “The thought put into it.”
It wasn’t just something he thought would be fun for us to do. He heard me mention how I hadn’t been since I was a kid and he got us tickets. It was sweet. It was thoughtful. It somehow felt simultaneously nostalgic and new.
Using his forefinger and thumb, he turned my head toward his. He didn’t say anything. He searched my face and smiled in a way that made me warm inside. I felt open and vulnerable under his gaze. It didn’t scare me so much as it made me feel exposed.
He brought his mouth just above mine. “You are always a thought.”
My stomach fluttered.
His lips had just brushed mine. “You—”
The Ferris wheel jerked unexpectedly, and we both startled apart.
“Whoa,” Russ reacted, looking around. “The fuck is this?”
The ride kept moving but we were swinging harder than we were to begin with. “I knew this was a setup when I saw the rust on this thing!”
“And you laughed in that man’s face, so he put us in this rust bucket.”
My head fell back, and I let out a loud cackle. “You laughed, too! You think I wanted this? You think I wanted us dangling in the air on a rusty cord?”
Shaking his head, he ran his hand down his face. “The cord is rusty as hell.”
I snickered. “I think your boy is doing it on purpose.”
“All because you laughed in his face.” He shook his head. “You wrong for that.”
“There he is right there, mean mugging you.”
When we looked to the right and saw the attendant staring at us, we cracked up. Twisting so my back was to him, I tried to hide my face. “He’s going to think we’re laughing at him.”
When our amusement died out, we were cuddled up with one another. Russ pulled me into him, my back to his chest and his arms around my waist as we stared out the window. His head rested against mine and I felt his breath against my cheek. I was comfortably content as I enjoyed the view.
The gentle sway of the ride as we ascended combined with the classical music playing over the speakers to create a vibe. The sun kissed my skin through the glass, and being in his arms, I was just as warm on the inside as I was on the outside.
“I never thought dangling precariously from the sky could be so peaceful,” I murmured.
“It is.” He kissed my cheek. “Are you tired?”
I languidly shook my head. “No. Just”—I smiled—“relaxed.”
“I like seeing you like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like you don’t have a care in the world.”
“With you, I don’t,” I admitted.
The words were true, but they slipped out of my mouth before I had a chance to swallow them down.
“Good,” he uttered, holding me tighter. “Because that’s exactly how I feel with you.” He paused for a moment. “You’re my escape.”
I repeated the statement. “Your escape.”
That wasn’t the first time he’d said that.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “I can forget everything and just be…”
His sentence trailed off, and we sat in a comfortable silence for a few seconds. His last words hung in the air as I pushed myself up so I could face him.
“Just be what?” I asked him.
He caressed my cheek with his forefinger. “Just be me.”
The sincerity and openness in his eyes pulled at my heartstrings. An unexpected sensation swept through me. I didn’t have the words to express how what he said made me feel. So instead of a verbal response, I leaned forward until my mouth met his.
He pulled out of the kiss just enough to speak. “Once we get off this ride, are you ready to head out?”
I nodded, letting our lips meet again. “Yeah.”
My arms wrapped around his neck, holding him closer. His hands grabbed my ass, pulling me into him. Our tongues caressed one another, devouring one another, and I lost myself in him.
Without warning, the door to our car swung open. “Not again,” the Ferris wheel attendant complained under his breath. “Hope you folks enjoyed your ride.” The annoyance in his tone was evident.
We pulled apart, and my face was flushed as I flashed a smile to the attendant.
“We did, thank you,” I answered.
“Please come this way,” he directed us with a little bit of an attitude. “Have a good day.”
As we exited the ride, Russ smirked. “Yeah, you too.” Draping his arm around my shoulders, he guided me down the sidewalk.
“I think he was a little bit of a hater,” I mumbled. “But I’d hate, too, if I had to work on a beautiful day like this.”
“Nah, he was mad because your fine ass was with me.”
Giggling, I rolled my eyes. “While I agree that I’m fine, that man was not checking for me.”
“You didn’t see the way he was looking at you.”
“I saw the way he was looking at us .”
He chuckled. “Yeah, okay.”
We made our way out of the park.
“Saturday after next, are you free?” I asked seemingly out of nowhere. “It’s almost three weeks from now.”
“That’s the weekend after I move into my place. I don’t have anything planned yet. What are we doing?”
I grinned. “My best friend is having a birthday party at Dowdy Lake, and I’d love for you to be my date.”
“Say no more. If you want me there, I’m there.”
“It’ll be a good time.”
“We always have fun together.” He kissed the top of my head. “No matter what it is.”
“That’s what I like about you. We could be doing absolutely nothing, and I’d still have the most fun with you,” I admitted.
“I was thinking the same thing when we were driving here. I hate the idea of a road trip. But a road trip with you would be a good look.”
“I think you like me a little bit.”
Chuckling, he shook his head.
For whatever reason, I didn’t notice that his arm was still around my shoulders until he removed it to open the passenger-side door to let me in. He walked around to the driver’s side and when he got in, he smiled at me. Without a word, he started the engine.
“Where are we going?” I wondered.
His smile grew as he pulled from the parking spot. “You’ll see.”
“Russ!”
“Do you trust me?”
“As far as I can throw you.”
He laughed. “We’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
He got us there in twenty.