Chapter 8 #2
Something catches in my chest. I pick up the rings. My first throw is testing the angle, weight, the physics of this setup. It catches the center bottle and doesn’t land. I adjust.
Second throw lands.
“Nice,” Jack says.
I don’t look at him because his face right now is doing something that I don’t need to see clearly. I throw again.
The third lands.
“You’ve done this before,” he comments.
“I’ve done a lot of things before.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It keeps being true.”
He comes to stand beside me. Not behind, not opposite, beside, with the confidence of someone who doesn’t observe personal space as a firm boundary but does it without aggression, so it reads as closeness rather than encroachment. I’m aware of his arm near mine. I throw again.
The fourth lands.
“Okay,” he says, “that’s… you’re actually good at this.”
“It’s geometry.”
“It’s also instinct. You can’t teach that part.” He pauses. “What else are you good at, besides the obvious naked activities?”
“Lots of things.”
“Name three.”
“Reading people. Leaving at the right time.” I pause. “Spatial memory.”
“Spatial memory,” he repeats. “Like, once you’re in a space you know it?”
“More or less. I can walk a floor plan once and it’s there.” I throw again. “Useful for knowing where the exits are at all times.”
He’s quiet for a second, and I feel him looking at me with that version of his attention that’s deeper than the playful surface, the part that’s actually quite sharp.
“That’s not a standard skill set,” he says.
“No,” I agree.
“Lola—”
“Three more throws,” I say.
He lets it go. He’s good at reading the line between pushing and closing a door, better than I expected. He steps back slightly, gives me the space, and I throw the last three in sequence.
All three land.
Jack makes a sound of pure delight. The young woman running the stall is staring. I pick up the trophy and look at it. 1964, pressed tin, slightly tarnished, a small figure on top that might be a person holding a pie or might just be time-worn beyond recognition.
“It’s yours,” Jack says.
“It’s sixty years old.”
“And it’s yours. You earned it.” He bumps my shoulder with his. “First person to ever want it, first person to ever win it. Seems right.”
I look at the trophy for a moment longer than I mean to. Then I put it in my jacket pocket where it sits, small and solid, pressing against my ribs.
“One more game?” Jack asks.
“Jack—”
“One more. Your choice.”
I choose the axe throw, because I’ve done it before and because the look on Jack’s face when I ask for it is too good not to choose it for that reason alone.
Archer finds us at the axe throw. He doesn’t join us. He stands at the edge of the alley with his arms crossed and watches. I’m aware of him the way I’m always aware of him, that directional pressure, the sensation of being tracked by something that doesn’t need to announce itself.
I throw the axe. It hits the board and lodges.
Jack cheers. The teenager running the station looks like he’s reassessing his life choices.
I turn to collect my second throw and my eyes find Archer automatically, before I can route the look elsewhere.
He’s watching me with that expression, the recalibration one, the one that means he keeps arriving at a version of me that’s different from the one he expected.
He nods. Once, briefly. The way you nod at something you’ve seen clearly and acknowledged. I nod back. I don’t know why. It happens before I decide to do it.
Jack looks between us and wisely says nothing.
When I turn back for my third throw, Archer has moved.
He’s closer than he was, still not in the game space but at the edge of it, and the snow smell of him has reached my side of the alley.
I breathe it in without wanting to. My body does something that is either territorial awareness or something more dangerous.
I throw the axe. It lands clean in the center.
“Okay,” Jack says, very quietly, “I’m a little in love with you.”
“Stop,” I urge.
“Professionally. As a fellow carnival games aficionado.”
“Still stop.”
He grins. I look away.
Ryan appears at nine o’clock. His entry is different from how the others arrive. Tristan was there. Jack descended. Archer materialized. Ryan is simply present, in the way that something large and quiet becomes present. Not through arrival but through your awareness suddenly reorganizing around it.
He’s at the edge of the central stage area when I see him, standing with the stillness I’ve come to associate with him, watching the crowd. He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the general space, and then—slowly, deliberately—he is looking at me.
Our eyes meet across the ground.
I don’t look away.
He moves. Not toward me, not directly. He moves through the crowd and comes to rest at the edge of the fire lantern display. When I follow—which I do, because my feet have been making decisions independently all evening—he turns to look at me at close range for the first time.
This close, in the full light of the carnival, I can see his face properly.
He has beautiful hazel eyes, deep and honest. His lips are full and quirk up just at the sides.
His blond hair looks soft enough to run my hands through.
He looks at me directly. Presently. Like he’s decided something and the over thinking portion has come to an end.
“You’ve been here all night,” he says.
“I’ve been working.”
“You’ve been here all night,” he repeats, and I understand that the first time was information and the second time is something different.
“I’m leaving soon,” I reply, which is true, which I have been meaning to do since eight, which I have not done yet.
“There’s no rush.” He says it simply, like a fact rather than an invitation. “The lanterns go up at ten. It’s worth staying for.”
I look at the display. The lanterns are waiting for their release, paper and light, the kind of thing that’s been done in every culture that ever wanted to say here, look, this is beautiful. I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen it and not stayed to watch it, and been fine both ways.
“Ryan,” I say, and his name in my mouth is strange. “What is it that you actually want?”
He regards me for a significant duration. The carnival noise is around us, the music from the stage and the crowd and the creak of the Ferris wheel, and in the middle of all of it he is very still.
“Right now?” he asks. “For you to stay for the lanterns.”
I don’t have an answer for that.
The lanterns go up at ten.
I don’t know why but I stay for the lanterns.
I stay while they rise in their dozens, orange and glowing against the black sky, drifting out over the river and reflecting in the water below. The crowd coo and aww at the beautiful sight.
Tristan appears at my left shoulder with something warm in a cup.
It’s hot cider, it turns out, which I didn’t ask for and which is exactly what I want.
Jack is somewhere in the crowd, I can hear him, and Archer is behind me, that familiar cold-air pressure.
Ryan is beside me, not close but present, watching the lanterns go with the same attention he gives everything.
And I am standing in the middle of it.
And I am not planning my exit.
And I am not running scenarios about Amber or evidence or the next move.
And I am not thinking about the ‘borrowed’ car with the slow leak in the rear left tire or the burner phone or the four hundred dollars in my jacket pocket next to a small tin trophy.
I am watching the lanterns go up, and the cider is warm in my hands, and the pack is here physically and whispering through the partial bond.
They’re around me. Not surrounding me. Around me.
In the way that weather is around you. It’s not containment, just presence, the vicinity of four people whose attention has oriented in a direction and the direction is me.
It doesn’t feel like what I thought it would feel like. It doesn’t feel like a wall. Or a cage.
It feels like something I don’t have the right word for.
A lantern clears the tree line and catches a current, lifting fast. I watch it go.
Somewhere between the entrance arch and this moment, I have not thought about leaving. Not once. Not even a little.
I should be thinking about leaving.
I look at the lanterns. I drink the cider.
I don’t think about leaving.