Chapter 10. Kit
The carnival's set up in the fairgrounds just outside town, the kind of small traveling one that shows up for two weeks and then vanishes like it was never there, all string lights and calliope music and the smell of fried dough thick enough to taste in the air before we've even parked.
"This was your idea of somewhere cool?" I ask, though I'm already grinning, taking in the whole gaudy, glittering sprawl of it—the Ferris wheel turning slowly against the darkening sky, the game booths lined up in a row of primary colors, kids shrieking somewhere off to the left on something that spins.
"I thought you'd like it." Soren says it simply, hands in his jacket pockets, watching my face instead of the fairground.
"You've got a lot of restless energy most of the time.
Figured a place built entirely around noise and lights and moving parts might actually be able to keep up with you for once. "
"That's either the nicest or the most accurate thing anyone's ever said about me."
"Can't it be both?"
I don't have an answer for that, so I just grab his sleeve and pull him toward the ticket booth instead, and he lets himself be pulled, easy and unbothered, the way he's easy and unbothered about almost everything.
He's looking very good tonight.
He's wearing a new brown leather jacket, his nicest pair of boots, dark jeans, and a dark button-up. I'm in my Redline jacket, which isn't nearly as nice as his, a white T-shirt, ripped jeans with tears across the thighs, and Adidas sneakers.
We stop for milkshakes almost immediately because I see the stand and refuse to continue until I've had one.
Soren buys mine.
I inform him this counts as excellent date planning.
He informs me he wasn't aware there was a grading system.
There is now.
Then we hit the games.
I lose spectacularly at the ring toss, three dollars gone in about as many seconds, and I'm ready to walk away in defeat when Soren steps up to the same booth, studies the bottles for a second like he's reading a diagnostic panel, and lands three rings clean in a row.
"Okay, that's unfair," I say. "You've done this before."
"Physics is physics. Doesn't matter if it's a corner or a ring toss."
He collects his prize from the guy running the booth—a slightly lopsided stuffed fox, orange and white, one ear a little crooked—and holds it out to me without ceremony.
"For you."
"You already won me a milkshake."
"I didn't win you a milkshake, I bought you one." He nudges the fox at me until I take it. "This one I actually earned. Consider it superior."
I take the fox, and something in my chest just—lets go. All at once. No warning, no bracing for it first. I hug him against my chest with both arms, burying my nose briefly into his slightly lumpy head, and when I look back up at Soren, I know exactly what my face is doing.
The weirdest part is that I don't care.
I don't try to stop it.
"He's so soft," I say, and my voice comes out smaller than usual. "Look at his little face. He's got a crooked ear."
"He does."
"I love him."
I hold him up so Soren can see, turning him this way and that like he needs to properly appreciate the crooked ear from every angle.
"What's his name?" I ask.
"Whatever you want it to be. He's yours."
I consider the fox seriously, turning him over in my hands, and land on something without any real deliberation.
"Milkshake," I decide. "Since you didn't win me an actual one, he can be the milkshake. That way you still win, technically."
Soren huffs something that isn't quite a laugh, warm and surprised.
"That's completely illogical."
"It's very logical. I'm choosing to remember tonight as the night you won me two things."
I tuck Milkshake securely under one arm, pleased with myself, entirely unbothered by how pleased I clearly look, how young my own voice sounds to my own ears right now.
Usually, there'd be a flinch here. Some scramble to cover it. A joke to yank the moment back toward something safer.
Tonight, there isn't one.
I just feel warm and small and glad, and I let it sit there in the open instead of chasing it back down.
"Milkshake it is," Soren says, like it's the most reasonable name in the world, like nothing about the last thirty seconds needs managing or explaining.
He falls into step beside me, unhurried, letting me carry my new favorite thing exactly the way I want to carry him.
We eat corn dogs walking the midway, and I get mustard on my sleeve within the first bite, barely even noticing it happen.
Soren does, though.
Immediately.
The way he notices everything about me now.
"Hold still," he says, and before I can ask why, he's got a napkin out and is wiping the smear off my sleeve himself, unhurried and matter-of-fact.
"I could've done that," I say, though I don't actually mind.
Not even a little.
"I know." He takes another bite of his own corn dog, unbothered. "Didn't mean I had to let you."
"Thank you," I say.
I really want to say Daddy, but I don't.
"Ferris wheel," I say instead, mouth still half full, pointing at it with the last bite of corn dog. "Non-negotiable. I refuse to leave a carnival without going on the Ferris wheel. It's basically a legal requirement."
"Lead the way."
The line's short. The night's gone properly dark by the time we climb into the swinging little car, and the operator locks the bar across our laps.
We lurch upward in stages, the whole fairground shrinking and brightening beneath us in stripes of colored light, the calliope music going tinny and distant.
The haunted house is a cheap plywood maze with a fog machine working overtime and a teenager in a rubber mask jumping out at exactly the same spot every single time.
It's somehow perfect specifically because it's so bad.
"This is genuinely terrible," I whisper, gripping Soren's hand tighter as we shuffle through the dark, strobe lights flashing intermittently overhead. "The special effects budget was clearly nine dollars."
"I think that's the appeal."
Something drops from the ceiling—fake cobweb, definitely—but I still yelp and grab his arm with my free hand.
He laughs, low and genuine, and doesn't let go of my hand the entire rest of the way through, keeping his hand firm and steady around mine even as I flinch at every cheap jump-scare and fog-machine hiss, grounding me through it without making a single comment about how tightly I'm holding on.
We come out the other end into the cool night air, and I'm laughing, breathless, still clutching his hand like I forgot to let go.
Then I realize, all at once, standing there under the string lights with a slightly lopsided stuffed fox under one arm and his fingers still laced through mine, that I am in real trouble.
Not the fun kind.
Not the easy, low-stakes kind of trouble I've let myself feel about plenty of people over the years, the kind that fades the second the night ends.
This is something else.
Something that's been building quietly for weeks now, in sushi restaurants and bowling alleys and at a gravel pull-off on the side of a switchback, and I can't pretend anymore that it's just enjoying good company.
I like him.
I like him in a way that scares me a little, in a way that feels dangerously close to wanting something I don't know if I'm allowed to want again.
I don't say any of that out loud.
I just squeeze his hand once.
He squeezes back.
We keep walking, still holding hands.
We've started hanging out almost every day, one excuse or another—a coffee run, a spare hour after his shop closes, a text that starts as what are you doing and turns into three hours of nothing in particular.
I text him good morning most days before I'm even fully awake, and he answers within minutes, always, like he's been waiting.
We go back and forth all day about nothing important—a customer story from the shop, a joke Ni made, whatever ridiculous thing King said at the bar, an annoying customer during one of the few shifts I get at the grocery store—until one of us finally says goodnight far later than either of us means to.
On one of those slow, easy nights, we're sitting on his tailgate outside the shop after closing, sharing a bag of gas station chips because neither of us wanted to actually go anywhere.
The conversation drifts, easy, the way it always does with him now.
"Can I ask you something," I say, "and it's not a heavy question, I promise."
"Go ahead."
"What's your favorite part? Of the whole Daddy thing. If you had to pick."
He thinks about it properly, the way he thinks about everything.
"Bedtime routines," he says. "Not anything complicated. Just the repetition of it. Same steps every night, no matter what kind of day came before it. There's something steadying about that."
I laugh.
"What?" he asks, smiling, warm and patient.
"I wasn't expecting that! That's very you. Structure again."
"I like things with a shape."
He steals a chip out of the bag.
"What about you? What's your favorite thing to do when you're Little?"
"Coloring," I admit, easier to say now than it used to be. "Having somewhere to put my hands that isn't a throttle. Somebody letting me pick a stupid color and not asking me to explain why."
"That's not stupid."
"It feels a little stupid."
"It's the same thing as my bedtime routines," he says. "It's not about the coloring. It's about somebody in the room who isn't expecting anything from you except exactly what you're already doing."
"What about dealbreakers?" I ask. "Things you specifically don't like."
"I'm not big on constant noise for its own sake. I like things loud when they're supposed to be loud, quiet when they're supposed to be quiet."
He says it lightly, no aim behind it, and I feel it land somewhere close to home anyway, gentle instead of pointed.
"You?"
"I like being told exactly what to do. Specifically. Not vague."
I reach for another chip, mostly for something to do with my hands.
"I do better with a clear instruction. Sit here. Wear this. I don't do great with open-ended stuff."
"Noted," he says, and that makes my stomach do something warm.
"You're gonna use that against me one day, aren't you?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"You do. You've got that face. The one where you're already planning something."
I point a chip at him, accusing, delighted.
"I contain multitudes," he says, like he did that day, perfectly serious.
I laugh so hard a chip nearly goes down the wrong pipe, and he reaches over and thumps my back twice, competent, unbothered, already moving on before I've even finished coughing.
We sit there a while longer, not saying much, the shop's security light humming overhead and the night gone properly cold around us.
It's easy.
The kind of easy that doesn't need filling with noise.
I find myself leaning into his side without deciding to, my shoulder against his arm, and he shifts just slightly to make room for it, like he'd been leaving the space open the whole time in case I wanted it.
"I should probably head home," I say eventually, not moving.
"Probably."
Neither of us gets up.
"Five more minutes," I say.
"Take ten." He settles his arm loosely around me. "I'm not in a hurry to send you anywhere."
I stay closer to twenty, actually, chips long gone, my head tipped against his shoulder and his arm settled loosely around me.
Somewhere in that stretch of comfortable quiet, I stop keeping track of exactly how much I like this.
Because counting it feels like tempting it to end.
And for once, I don't want to brace for the ending before it even comes.