Chapter 21. Callan
Callan
“There’s the fun house,” I suggest.
Lenore hums thoughtfully. “We could do that,” she says. “Or we could compromise and go on the Ferris wheel.”
“How is that a compromise,” I ask.
“It’s less exciting than death and more exciting than a fun house.”
I laugh. “I thought you wanted to go through the fun house.”
“I’ve changed my mind. I could use a bit of excitement in my life.”
I stare up at the giant wheel, a sunburst of lights flashing through every color. I want to make her happy, after whatever was bothering her when we left the antique mall earlier. “You’re going to be the death of me,” I mumble, but the words are drowned in pitchy screams from the Scrambler.
Lenore leans into me. “What was that?” she half shouts over the crowd. Even mingling with the smell of burnt popcorn and blooming onions, the vanilla clinging to her skin is unmistakable.
I raise my voice a smidge. “Nothing.”
We get in line for the Ferris wheel. It’s short but slow-moving, a trickle as they load each gondola and send it off.
After waiting about ten minutes, we’re up.
Lenore disentangles herself from the stuffed snake, mussing her hair in the process, and piles it on the opposite bench with the plastic flamingo toy.
She slides over to make room for me to climb in beside her.
“No standing,” an attendant with braces says. “No rocking. Keep your arms inside the bucket at all times.” He latches our door and tests his weight against it, then gives a hand signal to the ride operator.
The wheel lurches forward and our gondola sways gently. I brace an arm across the back of the seat, my body tensing against my will.
“I hope you’re not scared of heights,” Lenore says, sounding paradoxically delighted at the prospect.
“It’s not the height that’s the problem,” I say. “It’s more that the kids running this whole operation look like they’re still in high school.”
“Have you ever considered the possibility that you might be ageist?”
“I wouldn’t trust any ride that can be erected in less than a day to someone who isn’t even old enough to buy beer.”
She pats my knee in a there, there way. “It’s too late to turn back now, champ.”
The wheel stops abruptly, but the gondola keeps swinging. Her hand grips my knee.
I point at her. “Aha. Admit it. You’re scared, too.”
She snorts. “Of course I’m not. Look”—she points at a group of children waiting in line below—“even the ten-year-olds aren’t scared of a Ferris wheel.”
“Yeah, because they haven’t learned to fear death yet.”
“Well, that’s dark.”
The wheel shudders into motion again, gears groaning.
“Thank you,” Lenore says.
“For what?”
“For going on this ride with me, even if we’re maybe going to die,” she says. “But also for bringing me here, and for everything you’ve done for me lately. You don’t have to spend all this time with me, but you’ve been doing it anyway. It’s been nice to feel like I’m not totally alone.”
“Are you alone?” I ask. “In New York, I mean.”
“I don’t know.” She turns sideways on the bench, drawing her legs up in front of her. “Is anyone really alone in a city with eight million people?”
“I think feeling alone is less about the people around you and more about your state of mind.”
Her full lips curl in a wry smile. “You’re telling me I’m the problem.”
“No,” I hedge. “It’s not some moral failing. Maybe you feel like you’re alone because you’re not happy, and that’s not going to change, no matter how many people you surround yourself with. You have to figure out how to be happy with you first. Once you do that, you’ll find your people.”
Lenore studies me. The purple lights glimmer in her dark eyes and cast her olive skin in cool, ethereal hues. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re too honest?”
“I’ve been told it’s the Sagittarius in me,” I say humorously.
“Wow,” she says, “who is she?”
I shake my head blankly. “What?”
“The astrology girl you’re hopelessly in love with.”
A laugh leaps out of me, and she grins knowingly.
“It was one date,” I clarify, my whole body flushing warm.
“Let me guess,” she says. “Your signs weren’t compatible.”
I scratch a spot in my beard along my jaw. “Ah, no. It wasn’t that kind of date.”
I watch as comprehension unfolds on her face—and then her right eyebrow leaps, unimpressed. “You really are too honest.”
I laugh uncomfortably. “Maybe.” I didn’t intend to bring this up. I have no interest in reviewing my past involvements—most of them never amounted to anything. They didn’t mean anything. Not in the way Lenore means something.
“Do you make a habit of that?” she asks. “One-night stands.”
“Do you really want to have this conversation now?”
Lenore pats the fiberglass inside of the gondola, which produces a hollow noise. “We’re not going anywhere.”
I exhale through my nose. Well. I suppose if she’s asking … “Hard to make a habit of sleeping around in a town this size. You’d run out of people yesterday.”
“Two-night stands, then,” she surmises.
I shoot her a withering look. My body doesn’t seem to register that this is a hypothetical conversation; even dancing around talking to Lenore about sex has roused a certain awareness. My thoughts turn sluggish. All the blood pounding through my body seems to have been redirected elsewhere.
Lenore skims her teeth across her bottom lip and bats her lashes, feigning innocence. “I’m just trying to reconnect with the small-town lifestyle. Consider this part of my education.”
After a brief pause, I relent. “You remember the girl I dated back in high school,” I say, half a question. I don’t imagine Lenore paid especially close attention to my dating life, lost as she was in her own head.
“Natalie Freeman,” she says with distaste.
“Right. After we broke up, it felt like I couldn’t walk five feet without bumping into her, or something that reminded me of her. I learned my lesson pretty quick about getting involved with people you can’t avoid afterward.”
“Good thing she got pregnant with Gage Thompson’s baby and moved to Wisconsin.”
“Anyway,” I say pointedly, “ever since then, I’ve used dating apps to find women who are visiting from out of town, when—sometimes,” I falter. I was about to say when I need to get laid, but that sounds crass, even in my head. “I don’t think it happens often enough to call it a habit.”
We reach the apex of the wheel and it stops turning, our gondola swinging in place. Below, the fairgrounds are a riot of light and color and faraway screams, and past that, treetops and tumbling hills stretch on seemingly forever.
Lenore lets one leg slide from the bench, the other still folded in front of her. Her bottom lip is swollen from her biting it, and her dark eyes glitter in the strange purple light. “When was the last time you had sex?”
We are playing a dangerous game. That kiss we shared earlier tore up the rule book and scattered the pages to the wind. My thoughts aren’t bordering on inappropriate; they’re in full-blown indecent territory.
I clear my throat. “It’s been a while.” Eight or nine months. I haven’t kept track. Normally, by mid-September, the uptick in seasonal visitors to Whitbury would have provided me with ample opportunity to break this dry spell.
Absently, she picks at a stray thread in her torn jeans. “For me, too.”
I am so fucked.
I toss my eyes skyward, a prayer for some semblance of self-control. “You’d have no trouble finding someone. You know that.”
“Neither would you,” she says slowly. “So what’s stopping you?”
You. The word is right there, on the tip of my tongue.
I haven’t been able to bring myself to hop back on dating apps.
Not when it would take away from all the time we’ve been spending together.
Even when I’m lying awake at some small hour, aching for a release—it’s Lenore who occupies my worst thoughts.
Her soft thighs. Rumpled golden-brown hair, like she’s just rolled out of bed.
The scent of vanilla clinging to warm skin.
The top button on her cardigan is undone, revealing the small divot between her collarbones. Nothing about the way she dresses is outwardly provocative, but it’s indescribably sexy at the same time—like a birthday gift my fingers are itching to unwrap.
“Cal,” she prompts.
I drag my eyes up to meet hers, knowing full well that my thoughts are written all over my face.
Understanding passes between us like an electrical current.
My hand slides along the back of the seat as I lean a fraction closer to her, and she sits up in reply, until our noses are nearly touching.
Her perfume mingles with the clean scent of her skin, close enough to taste. I bury a hand in the back of her hair.
Lenore sucks in a breath, the quick and desperate sort you take right before someone dunks your head underwater.
It registers a second too late that she is expecting something explosive—a kiss that steals your breath away.
A collision of lips and teeth and tongues; a battle of wills, like everything else between us.
Instead, the first brush of our lips is soft, tentative.
It doesn’t stay that way for long. Her mouth opens up for me, and her tongue tastes like cotton candy and lemonade—a shocking contrast to the cool mint still lingering after I threw away the chewing gum.
A strangled groan rumbles through me, the last vestiges of restraint slipping through my fingers.
Lenore kisses the same way she does everything else: devastatingly well, so good it threatens to ruin me for anyone who comes after her.
My hand slides around the small of her back, and I hitch her toward me. One leg swings over my lap, and then her knees are planted on either side of my thighs.
I drag my hands up her sides, appreciating the tight contours of her body beneath all the loose clothing. My palm slips beneath the sweater, across her collarbone, thumb resting in that divot right at the base of her throat.
I fist my hand in her hair, angling her head how I want it. My tongue slips over hers and she moans—a sound that makes my hips buck beneath her. Her body responds in kind, grinding against mine.
I’m caught somewhere between heaven and earth. We’re having sex with our clothes on, but it’s not enough. I’m starting to worry that nothing ever will be. I’ll never get her out of my system.
The Ferris wheel pitches forward. Lenore braces a hand against the bench behind me, but it doesn’t stop our front teeth from clicking together.
She hisses in pain and draws back to touch her fingers to her top lip, checking them for blood.
“Let me see.” I take her jaw in my hand and angle her to get a better look. Her mouth is wet and swollen, and her hair is tousled like we’ve just rolled out of bed. “No blood,” I say, like that’s the end of all our problems. In fact, it hardly scratches the surface.
I let go of her face. We take one look at each other and stumble into an awkward, breathless laugh.
“You seem to keep finding new ways to get hurt with me,” I say.
“I hope you’re not implying that I’m hurting myself on purpose.”
“No.” A smile tugs at my mouth. “More wondering why you’re so clumsy around me.”
Her expression shifts into something achingly vulnerable, those liquidy dark eyes dancing across my face, dark lashes fluttering. “You make me nervous.”
I almost laugh, because it’s hard to believe that I could ever make her nervous.
Lenore, who was confident to a fault when we were kids, never caring whether she made friends or what other people thought of her.
Something has changed in the intervening years.
Life—or loss—stealing away her assuredness like stealing the air from her lungs.
It hits me, staring into her eyes, that maybe that uncertainty was always there. Maybe the confidence was always the mask, and no one bothered to notice the vulnerable girl underneath.
The wheel turns again, creeping back toward the ground.
I’ve made a tactical error in kissing her here: We are stuck on board this thing for another go around, with no outlet for our frustration besides another heavy make-out session.
Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not into the idea of our first sexual encounter happening in a bucket suspended a hundred feet above a crowd of people.
Lenore slides from my lap and I reach beneath my waistband to make a quick adjustment. She watches me, biting her lower lip. “Where do we go from here?”
“That’s up to you,” I say.
“What,” she says. “You don’t have an opinion?”
I hesitate. I don’t want to give her the impression that I’m only after one thing, because it isn’t like that with her. But it’s also complicated. “I’m not sure what we’re doing here,” I say with a self-deprecating laugh. “You leave in a little over a week.”
“I know.”
I wince. “I don’t want things to get messy or weird between us.”
“Agreed,” she says.
“But,” I hedge.
“But,” she says, a small smile curving her lips.
“I do want you, for however long I can have you. Even if it’s only for now. Even if it’s only for a night.”
Her cheeks flush a pleased pink, and her eyes glitter in the Ferris wheel lights as she leans over to kiss me.
It’s different from our other kisses, an earnest press of her lips against mine, like sealing a promise.
I don’t know whether she’s agreeing to for now or for a night.
I’ll take whatever she’s willing to give me.