Chapter 11 #2
“I was nine,” she says, with the tone of someone who has thoroughly processed this and has no remaining feelings about it.
“And?” I urge.
“And she wasn’t wrong, which is annoying.” She finishes the noodles and sets the container down. “I don’t believe in fortunetellers.”
“But?”
“But I’ve been moving for a long time,” she says. And then she stops, the way she does, the sentence just going out like a light before it finishes.
I let it go, because I’ve learned to.
“How long?” I ask, casually, not loading it.
“Since I was about nineteen.” She looks at the stall row. “It’s not dramatic. I just didn’t have a reason to stay anywhere.”
“Until?”
She looks at me. “I didn’t say until.”
“You said didn’t have. Past tense.”
Her jaw sets and then un-sets, like she’s caught and is deciding whether to be annoyed at the catch or just acknowledge it. “You’re more observant than you look,” she says.
“I look plenty observant.”
“You look like you’re not paying attention to anything.”
“That’s the strategy.” I lean on the stall across from her. “The best way to make people comfortable is to look like you’re half-distracted. Then they forget to censor themselves.”
A beat. She regards me with the expression she gets when something lands differently than expected. “That’s manipulative.”
“It’s also genuinely who I am. I’m actually easily distracted. The strategy and my nature are the same thing, which makes it harder to argue with.” I pause. “Is it working?”
She considers this seriously, which I appreciate. “Yes. Which is annoying.”
“Everything I do seems to be annoying.”
“Not everything.” She says it before she decides to say it. I can tell by the fractional pause after, the catching-up. She doesn’t walk it back. “You make it easier to be here.”
I look at her.
She’s looking at the stall row. Her gaze is faraway and her hands are in her jacket pockets. She is carrying something enormous and managing it with extraordinary precision. She just said something true without armor on it and is now waiting to see what I do with it.
I do the right thing, which is: nothing, immediately.
Through the partial bond, I can feel a myriad of emotions coming from her.
Regret. Guilt. Sadness. But the worst one is fear.
She’s terrified of something and it kills me to know she’s going through that alone.
If she could just open up to me, I might be able to help.
The whole pack would help, I know they would.
But… she has to let us in first. Which means waiting until she’s ready. So I just have to put up with these emotions until then.
“I’ve got something else to show you,” I say.
“Lead on.”
I get her to the maze by nine-thirty, which I hadn’t planned exactly. But the maze is empty at this hour and I know she would enjoy it. She walks in without hesitation, which confirms that.
The maze in daylight with the lights off is a different thing than the maze at night. It’s dimmer than outside but not actually dark, just shadowed, the canvas walls enclosing the space. We navigate the first two turns easily and she’s mapping it, I can tell.
“Left at the T,” she says.
“Right, actually. Left goes to the dead end.”
“I know. Left is faster.”
I look at her. “The dead end is faster?”
“Not through it. There’s a gap in the canvas on the east wall of the dead end. About shoulder-width. Takes you to the exterior corridor.”
I stop walking. “How did you—”
“Spatial memory,” she says, already turning left. “Come on.”
I follow her into the dead end.
It’s a small space. That’s the design, the dead end is meant to feel like a mistake, close walls and a canvas ceiling and no exit. She goes straight to the east wall, finds a gap with the confidence of someone who discovered it days ago, and spins around to show me.
She turns and I am right behind her. The dead end is enclosed and I have been following closely. We are very near in the shadowed space, her back near the canvas wall and the gap behind her and me between her and the way we came in.
She looks up at me through long eyelashes like she’s perfected how to look at me like this. “Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re very close.”
“It’s dead end,” I reply. “Tight space.”
“Mm.” She looks at me with the expression she gets when she’s decided something and hasn’t announced it yet. The pre-decision look, the one that happens in the half-second before she acts, because Lola always acts, she doesn’t linger in the deciding.
She doesn’t linger now.
Her hand comes to my chest. It rests there while she tilts her chin up and the half-second is over.
I kiss her.
Or she kisses me, or we kiss each other, the distinction is irrelevant. It’s warm and immediate and she makes a sound against my mouth that is nothing like the managed exhale-laugh I’ve been hearing all week. The bond that she hates hums between us, very excited about this moment.
My hand finds the canvas wall beside her head and the other finds her waist. She’s warm through the jacket and the dead end is very small. I am very aware of all of this simultaneously.
She kisses the way she does everything, fully committed, nothing held back, no pretense.
Her hand on my chest curls into the fabric.
Her other hand finds my jaw and the touch is electric.
Deliberate. I pull her closer by the waist and she lets me.
The canvas wall gives slightly at my hand but neither of us cares.
We stay there for a while, shamelessly making out.
The maze outside the dead end is quiet. The carnival is a distant noise. In here it’s just the shadowed space and her mouth and her hand in my jacket and the gravity of something that has been true for days and is now being honest about itself.
When we separate it’s gradual, not pulled apart, just slowing. Her forehead drops to my collarbone briefly. My hand at her waist doesn’t move.
“Okay,” she says, into my jacket.
“Yeah,” I agree.
She straightens. Steps back one step. I let her have it because that’s always the right call with her. Her hand leaves my jaw. Mine leaves her waist.
She looks at me in the dim light of the dead end and her expression is unarmored. Just for a moment, just in this space, the vulnerability of someone who has been somewhere real and hasn’t had time to put the armor back yet.
Then she finds the gap in the canvas again.
“The exterior corridor,” she says. Businesslike now.
“Right,” I reply.
“They should fix the panel overlap.”
“Absolutely not,” I say. “That gap stays exactly as it is. You’re keeping your own exit route in the maze.”
“I keep exit routes everywhere.” She says it plainly, and then something in her face shifts. She’s heard herself, heard the truth underneath the statement, the weight of everywhere. She doesn’t look away. Just holds it for a second, lets it be visible to me.
I think about the fortuneteller. You’re going to spend a long time looking for the right place to land.
“The gap will be our secret,” I say.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t—” She stops. “Don’t be too nice to me.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not going to be here long enough for it to…” Another stop. Another light going out before the sentence finishes.
“For it to what?” I prompt.
She shakes her head.
I look at her in the shadowed corridor of the maze, the canvas walls close and the outside world muffled to its low hum. I see for the first time, past the defiance and the sharpness and the impeccable competence, the actual person inside all of that.
She’s not angry at the world. I thought she was angry, and she is, but that’s not the base note. The anger is a response to something that happened, something real that she’s not telling us, that is chasing her.
The base note is she wanted to stay somewhere, and couldn’t, and had to become someone who moves instead.
“Okay,” I say.
She looks at me like she expected pushback.
“Okay,” I repeat. “I won’t be too nice.”
The breath she lets out is not quite relief. Something quieter. Like a door closing that was open in a draft, just settling.
“Good,” she says.
“I reserve the right to continue being exactly as annoying as I have been,” I add.
The side of her mouth shifts.
“That,” I say, pointing at her face, “is what I came here for.”
“You came here for help with your banner.”
“I came here for that,” I confirm. “The rest is just excellent planning.”
She shakes her head, and the smile is still there. I look at it like I looked at the trophy on the shelf, as something real and true, with a history I don’t entirely know yet, and sixty years of no one thinking to ask for it.
I’m asking.
Whatever she’s carrying, whatever is behind her, whatever it is that’s put that exhaustion in her posture, it’s real, and it’s serious. I’m starting to form a position on it that the rest of the pack needs to hear.
But right now she’s standing in the maze in the morning light and she’s smiling, and she’s showing it to me on purpose. I’m filing this one somewhere I don’t lose things.
“Come on,” she says, and turns toward the gap in the canvas, toward the exit route she found and kept for herself.
I follow her out.
I think I might follow her no matter where she goes.
We stop just outside the maze, in a small little pocket which is empty at this hour. She is looking at me with the expression she had in the dead end. The pre-decision look with that little gleam of mischief making it sparkle.
“Lola,” I start.
“Don’t start talking and ruin this moment.”
“I’m not talking—”
“Jack.” She takes one step toward me in the narrow space. The step closes most of the distance. She is very close and the partial bond is running at a frequency that is making my entire nervous system extremely opinionated about the next five minutes. “I know what I want.”
“I know you know what you want,” I say. “You always know what you want. That’s one of the things I find—”
“Then stop talking,” she says.
“I need to say something first.”