Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Ivy had not expected an amusement park.
She had expected somewhere nice, somewhere with a menu, somewhere that would give her hands something to do and her eyes somewhere to look that wasn't directly at Finn Hargrove in a dark green flannel that fit him like an argument she was losing. She had not expected the lights.
They came up over the hill as he turned off the county road. The whole park was laid out below them in the early evening, strung with color, the Ferris wheel turning slowly against a sky that was just starting to think about pink. Ivy pressed her hand to the window like a child and didn't care.
He was good at the games. She shouldn't have been surprised; the man had hands built for precision.
But watching him at the dart booth was something else entirely.
He stood at the line with the easy stance of someone who had assessed the situation and found it manageable.
He threw three darts in quick succession.
Two balloons popped, and then a third. The teenage attendant handed over the stuffed animal.
It was a large bear. Brown. Extremely round. She took the bear and hugged it.
She won him a frog.
She'd drifted toward the age-and-weight booth mostly because the man running it had a magnificent mustache, and then the man had looked her over and offered to guess her age in exchange for a guess of her own, and Ivy had looked at the man running the booth — the posture, the hands, the way he held his weight — and said forty-three, one-seventy-eight, and he'd stared at her for a full four seconds before handing her the prize selection.
Finn accepted the frog with the dignity of a man who was going to put it in the cab of his truck and never speak of it again and also keep it there indefinitely.
He took her hand, and they walked toward the Ferris wheel.
The gondola rocked slightly as it sealed them in, and the park dropped away below them in a wash of light and noise, and then they were rising and it was quiet in the way that high places were quiet, the world made small and manageable beneath them.
Ivy looked out at the county spread dark and warm in every direction. The farmland. The distant thread of the highway. Somewhere out there, the Cherokee Purples on the vine.
Finn's hand found hers in the space between them on the seat.
She turned. He was already looking at her — had been looking at her, she thought, for longer than she'd turned around to find — and the Ferris wheel crested its arc and held them there at the top of the world with all that light below.
Finn Hargrove cupped her jaw in one broad, careful hand and kissed her.
His thumb traced her cheekbone, and she leaned into it and kissed him back with everything she had.
The wheel began its slow descent, and neither of them noticed for a while.
When she opened her eyes, they were halfway down, and the lights were coming back up around them.
The gondola bumped to a stop. They got out. He kept her hand.
She found the cotton candy stand twenty minutes later.
"No," Finn said before she'd offered anything.
She bought the largest bag they had. Pink. Aggressively pink. She pulled a piece off and put it in her mouth and made a sound that was at least partially genuine and watched him try not to look at her while she did it.
"It's nothing but sugar," he said.
"It's happiness in a bag," she said.
He looked at the cotton candy with the expression of a man conducting a principled last stand.
She offered him a piece. He declined with a single glance.
She shrugged and ate another piece, and they walked past the ring toss and the spinning teacups and the whole warm noise of the park, and she didn't push it.
Then he stopped walking.
She looked up at him. He was looking at her mouth.
"You have—" he said.
She could see it happening — the settling of his expression that meant he'd assessed the situation and reached a conclusion — and then he kissed her again, slower this time, deliberate.
She tasted the surprise of it on him when he lifted his head.
The way he paused. The way his hand tightened slightly at her waist.
He came back for another.
She smiled against his mouth. "I thought it offended you."
"It does," he said, and kissed her again anyway.
She held the cotton candy bag at her side and let him. The park moved around them in all its loud and spinning colors. Ivy thought that this was the best use of processed sugar she had ever encountered, and she should put it in the vlog.
She would not put it in the vlog.
The sun came up while they weren't paying attention.
They had ridden everything twice. They had eaten things on sticks.
Finn had refused to ride the spinning teacups on the grounds that they served no purpose and then ridden them anyway when she'd pointed out that fun served a purpose, and had spent the entire rotation with his jaw set and his eyes forward like a man completing a task, which was possibly the funniest thing she'd ever seen.
She'd bought him a lemonade at two in the morning from a cart staffed by a teenager who appeared to be asleep standing up.
He'd found her a bench when her shoes started to hurt and sat beside her without being asked and said nothing, which was its own kind of language.
He drove her back as the sky went pink and then gold, the county roads empty and long in the early morning light, her shoes off and her feet tucked under her, and the stuffed bear in her lap. The frog was on the dash.
He pulled up outside her place at seven in the morning and cut the engine.
She didn't get out.
He didn't suggest that she should.
She turned in her seat toward him. He turned toward her. The morning came in gold through the windshield, and she thought she would remember this light; the way it found the angle of his jaw, the way it made everything look like something worth keeping.
She kissed him first this time. His hand was in her hair, and her hand was at his collar, and the bear had been relocated to the back seat at some point by mutual unconscious agreement. The morning kept brightening outside without either of them moving toward it.
She pulled back to breathe. He followed. She laughed, quiet and helpless, against his mouth, and felt him smile in response — the undefended one, the one that made her chest ache with how much she'd wanted to be the reason for it.
"I should go in," she said.
"You should," he agreed. Neither of them moved.
She kissed him again. He kissed her back as if he had opinions about her going inside, none of them in favor of it. She was working on a response to that when the knock came.
Three sharp raps on the driver's side window.
They went still. Ivy opened her eyes. Finn lifted his head.
Devon Park was standing on the sidewalk in a jacket that cost more than her monthly rent, looking in at them through the glass with an expression of careful neutrality that she recognized from every professional meeting they'd ever had. He raised one hand in a small, contained wave.
Ivy stared at him.
Finn stared at him.
Devon pointed at the window with a polite, patient gesture that said When you have a moment.
Ivy looked at Finn. The easy warmth of the last twelve hours had not left his face entirely, but something had come into it — a stillness, a watchfulness, the particular quality of attention he gave to things he was assessing. His jaw had done the thing it did.
"I've been trying to reach you since midnight," he said to Ivy.
She reached back and found Finn's hand. His fingers closed around hers without hesitation. She felt something settle in her chest. Someone had her back.
"The network called," Devon said. "They're ready to green-light the show, Ivy. Full season order. They want an answer by Monday."
The morning was very quiet. Somewhere down the street a bird was doing something cheerful and uninformed about the situation.
Ivy knew she was supposed to feel cheerful at this news.
Knew it was a cause to celebrate. To pump her fists into the air.
She held onto Finn's hand, waiting for him to loosen his grip.
To pull back. To do the reasonable, self-protective thing that she would not have blamed him for, not with his history, not with everything she now knew about what leaving had cost him.
Finn's hand didn't move. His lips weren't turned down in a frown. He grinned at her —not a full grin, but one that was full of pride.
"Congratulations," he said. "This is what you've worked so hard for. I'm so proud of you."
She looked at him. At the steadiness of him in the early morning light, his vine bouquet on the dash, the frog visible through the truck window on the back seat.
"I want both," she said. "I want the show, and I want you."
"I'm not going anywhere," Finn said. "Except in front of my television to watch you cook. And… if you want…I'll come up a couple of weekends during taping. If that's allowed."
She laughed — sudden, helpless, the kind that came from relief moving through you too fast to do anything else with. She leaned up and kissed him, brief and certain, and felt him kiss her back with the same certainty, and she thought: this is what it feels like when something holds.
Behind them, Devon cleared his throat. "I think there's been a misunderstanding. They don't want a solo show. They want both of you. The Tomato Couple Cooking Show."
"Me?" Finn said at the same time that Ivy said, "No."