Chapter 8
Lola
Opening night arrives. I tell myself I’m going because I have nothing else to do, which is not entirely untrue. Doris Harrow’s house is quiet in the evenings and the walls are thin enough to hear the carnival music from three streets over.
Lying on a pine-scented mattress listening to other people having a good time while I run scenarios about Amber and evidence chains and how to access a legal system that currently considers me a fugitive is not restful. Not productive.
The carnival is a better use of my time.
This is what I tell myself as I put on the least-wrinkled of my limited clothing options and run my fingers through my hair in Doris Harrow’s mirror.
Purely practical. Reconnaissance. I’m working this event through the weekend and it makes sense to understand the full-operation layout before the crowds hit.
Doris is in the kitchen when I come downstairs. She looks at me like she has seen everything and has opinions about most of it.
“You look nice,” she says.
“I look the same as I looked this morning.”
“You brushed your hair, dear.”
I leave before this conversation can develop further.
The carnival at full capacity is not the same as the carnival in setup.
I knew this. I’ve worked enough events to understand the transformation.
The way a space in progress looks like exactly what it is, bones and logistics and the unglamorous infrastructure of public entertainment, and how that same space, lit and populated and running, becomes something else entirely.
Something that asks you to suspend your practical understanding of what it’s made of and just be in it.
I was not prepared for how completely Sweetwater Valley’s carnival would make that ask.
It’s the scale of it first. The string lights I’ve been walking past for days are fully live, and the effect at night is not subtle.
Thousands of warm globes strung at varying heights across the entire riverfront, doubling in the water below, so you’re walking through light and also somehow walking through the reflection of light.
The Ferris wheel is a turning wheel of color against the full dark of the sky, and the smells…
Tristan’s stall is open. I can smell it from the entrance arch.
Whatever he has running on the burners tonight has gotten more ambitious than the prep work I was part of.
It drifts through the whole ground in warm waves.
Fried dough, obviously, and the honey and sea salt thing that I have already had opinions about, and something savory underneath, something that smells like it’s been cooking for hours in a cozy kitchen.
My stomach does something simple and honest. It growls. I’m here for reconnaissance, I remind myself, and walk through the arch.
Tristan sees me before I see him. He’s behind the stall counter.
The full carnival stall now, with its proper serving window and the menu board above in his handwriting.
A small queue is already forming even though it’s barely opened.
He raises a hand when I come through the crowd, not with surprise, just acknowledgment.
Like he noted my arrival and is letting me know he noted it.
I go over. Partly because I’m working this stall for two days and I should understand the operation. Partly because the smell is extraordinary and my body has apparently decided that Tristan equals food equals safety and I am dealing with this biological data point at arm’s length.
“You came,” he says, and it’s not I knew you would or I’m glad. It’s just the fact of it, clean and without weight.
“Reconnaissance,” I say.
“Of course.” He’s already plating something. I watch his hands, which move with the same swiftness I’ve been watching all week.
He doesn’t slide the plate through the serving window. He picks up the pastry itself, small and warm between his fingers, and holds it out across the counter toward me. Not placed. Offered.
It’s not quite fried dough. It’s something I don’t recognize.
A small open pastry filled with something caramelized, soft cheese underneath, a scattering of herbs on top.
Up close it smells like honey and sea salt and something warmer underneath, something that is less about the food and more about the hands holding it.
I have a brief and inconvenient awareness of both simultaneously.
“Open,” he says quietly. Not a command. Just the word, offered the same way the pastry is offered, and I don’t examine why I comply.
I lean forward over the serving window and I let him place it in my mouth.
His fingers brush my lip softly in the transfer.
The pastry is extraordinary, the caramel giving under the soft cheese, the herb cut sharp against the sweetness, the salt landing last, and I am very carefully not thinking about the thumb across my lips.
He watches me eat it. Not in a weird way. Just present for it, the way he’s present for everything. Something in my expression says how much I enjoyed it, because his expression goes warm. He reaches for the display without breaking eye contact. His fingers find another piece.
“Again?” he asks.
I should say no. I should take the plate and manage this myself. I should put a counter between his hands and my mouth.
“Yes,” I reply traitorously.
He feeds me the second piece the same way.
More deliberately this time. He knows what he’s doing now, knows I’m not stopping him, and the brush of his fingers at my lips is less incidental and more intentional.
The honey-salt taste of it blooms across my tongue and I breathe through my nose.
I focus very hard on the caramelized filling.
“Good?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, which is about the pastry and also not entirely about the pastry, and we both know it. Neither of us says so.
“Come around,” Tristan says, lifting the end panel. “You’re staff.”
“I’m not on until Saturday.”
“You’re here and you look like you want to see how it runs.” It’s not a manipulation, I’m pretty sure. He can see what I want before I’ve negotiated with myself about whether to want it, which should be alarming but warms me on the inside instead. “Come in.”
I go around. I go in.
The stall from the inside is compact and organized.
He has obviously done this enough times to know exactly what he needs and where, no excess, no gaps.
I lean against the side wall and watch him run the first rush.
He’s calm under pressure, not fast exactly but without wasted motion.
He talks to customers in that way he has and people leave the stall looking slightly better than they arrived, which I have noticed is consistently the effect Tristan has on his environment.
I start helping without being asked.
I can’t watch an operation run and not help. It’s a character flaw.
He doesn’t comment on it. He just adjusts. He moves slightly to give me the space I need, passes things before I have to ask, and within ten minutes we are running the stall together like we’ve done it a hundred times before.
It’s good. I don’t let myself think about why it’s good. I just run the stall.
Jack arrives at seven-thirty like a natural disaster with better hair. “She’s actually here,” he says, appearing at the serving window with the energy of a person who has been elsewhere being chaotic and has come to share it.
“I’m staff,” I say. “Tristan needed—”
“Tristan didn’t need anything, Tristan is an extremely competent one-man operation and you know it.” He grins at me through the window. “You wanted to be here.”
“I wanted to see how it works before Saturday.”
“Those are the same thing in this context.”
“They’re really not.”
“Lola.” He leans on the counter. “It’s opening night. You’re at a carnival. You’re allowed to just be at a carnival.”
The thing about Jack is that he’s not wrong in a way that I can dismantle, he’s just wrong in ways that I can’t explain without giving him information I’m not giving him.
I’m not allowed to just be at a carnival.
I’m allowed to be at a carnival for strategic reasons, and the fact that those reasons feel increasingly weak… that’s my problem.
“Go away, Jack,” I say.
“Come do the games with me when your shift ends.”
“I’m not—”
“One game. Ring toss. I fixed the spacing.”
I glare at him. “I know. I watched you do it.”
“Then you know it’s fair now, and you know you can probably beat it, and I know you want to try.” He says this with complete confidence that is also, unfortunately, completely accurate. “Thirty minutes. Tristan can spare you.”
“I can spare her,” Tristan confirms, without looking up.
“Traitor,” I say.
Tristan’s mouth curves.
I untie the apron.
The game alley at full operation is Jack in his natural habitat, which explains a lot about Jack.
It’s loud in a specific way. Layered noise, the mechanical sounds of the games underneath the human sounds of people playing them, the space where everyone is in competition with something and enjoying it.
Jack moves through it all with proprietary ease, nodding at the staff running each station, adjusting something here, checking something there, all while maintaining a running commentary that I am trying not to find as entertaining as I do.
“Ring toss,” he says, stopping at the station I’d analyzed the first morning. “The correction held. Want to try?”
I look at the setup. He did fix it. The center bottles are repositioned and the throw angle is genuinely winnable from the outside approach now. It still requires accuracy but not the geometric impossibility it was before.
“What do I win?” I ask.
He reaches under the counter and produces the small trophy from the other day.
I look at it. Then at him. “You put it as a prize?”
“I thought about what you said. About knowing what things actually are.” He sets it on the counter between us. “You want to try for it?”