Chapter 12
Lola
I walk away from the maze and back into the carnival with the energy of a woman who has been told to go be with someone else by the man she wanted to be with, which is… That’s a new experience. I’ve had a lot of experiences. That’s a new one.
You’d be surprised.
I remember Jack’s expression in my head, the absolute composure of him, the confidence he had in making that statement about another person, and I decide that I am annoyed.
I am annoyed for several reasons, in order of increasing annoyance:
One: I was very clear about what I wanted and what I wanted was Jack, in that private, discreet area, continuing what we started in the dead end of the maze.
Two: Jack was also clearly very keen and then chose to be noble about it. Nobility is its own kind of infuriating when you are currently experiencing the frustration of someone who was headed somewhere good and got redirected.
Three: Archer.
Archer! For crying out loud.
I walk through the game alley with my hands in my pockets and I think about Archer on the river path, his fingers around my wrist, his face at my neck in the unforgettable way of an Alpha doing a scent assessment.
I know what that was and I know what I felt during it and I am not prepared to examine those two things in close proximity right now.
The point is: I was not planning on Archer today.
I was planning on Jack.
Jack has redirected me to Archer like I’m a package being rerouted.
I am not a package. I am a person with preferences and one of those preferences was Jack, right now.
Instead, I am walking through the carnival alone, and slightly furious and, underneath the furious, still annoyingly keyed up from the maze.
The dead end.
I push that thought away. It only makes things worse.
I find a bench at the edge of the food row and sit on it. The carnival is doing its lunchtime transition around me. I do a frank internal assessment.
Am I actually opposed to Archer?
I run the inventory.
The river path. The wrist. The neck. The I’m not afraid of you and the way his expression softened when I said it. The shoulder-to-shoulder in the afternoon, the warmth of it, the shorthand we’ve been building.
Okay. I am not, in the factual sense, opposed to Archer.
I am opposed to being managed. To having someone else decide the sequence of events in my own life.
You’d be surprised.
I hate that I’m curious.
I’m very curious.
I sit on the bench and I am annoyed and curious in equal measure as the carnival moves around me. I wait to see what happens next, because something is clearly going to happen next. Jack has set something in motion and stepped back to watch it run.
I don’t wait long. Archer finds me in twelve minutes. I know it’s twelve minutes because I’ve been counting, which is either good tactical awareness or a sign that I’m more invested in this than I’m admitting, and I’m not examining which.
He comes from the direction of the river path, which means he came from outside the carnival ground, which means he was somewhere else when Jack contacted him, told him, somehow communicated the situation. Through the pack bond, probably. No privacy settings, as previously established.
He’s carrying flowers. I stare at the bright blooms. They are wildflowers.
Not a florist arrangement, not the romance of something purchased from a shop.
Actual wildflowers, the kind that grow along the river path, a loose, gathered handful of them in the colors of late summer.
He is carrying them like he is not entirely sure what to do with his hands.
He stops in front of the bench.
“Jack sent you?” I ask.
“Jack suggested,” he replies. “I decided.”
I look at the flowers. “Are those from the river path?”
“Yes.”
“Did you pick them yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Just now?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I thought they were pretty and that you might like them.”
I imagine Archer crouching at the river path pulling wildflowers out of the ground because Jack suggested he spend time with me. Something in my chest pulls tight which is something that it keeps doing in this town without my permission.
“Sit down,” I say.
He sits. Not close, the Archer-appropriate distance, the one that is always slightly less than expected and slightly more than comfortable. He holds the flowers in both hands, forearms on his knees, looking at the carnival with the focus he gives everything.
He holds the flowers out.
I take them.
They smell like sunshine. Like the path in the evening. Like the air in this valley that I noticed when I first drove into it and have never quite been able to categorize.
“Jack said to take you somewhere,” Archer says. “A date, he called it.”
“He called it a date?”
“He used the word several times. I think he wanted to make sure I understood the category.”
“And do you? Understand the category?”
Archer looks at me warily. The look that has been evolving all week. Less suspicion, more of the curiosity that lives underneath the suspicion. “I understand dates.”
“Archer,” I begin. “You grabbed my wrist the first time we were alone together.”
“That was—”
“A perimeter security measure, yes, you explained it.” I look at the flowers in my hands. “I’m just establishing that your approach to date behavior has been unconventional.”
The corner of his mouth quirks. “I have a place in mind,” he says. “If you want.”
I observe him. In the daylight he is a problem I have been cataloguing since day one and have not successfully resolved. He doesn’t look as intense in sunshine.
“Fine,” I concede to this crazy plan.
“Fine.” He stands, and offers his hand.
I take it.
The place he has in mind is a stretch of river bank about ten minutes from the carnival ground, accessible via a path I haven’t found on my own, through trees and down a gentle slope to a flat shelf of ground right at the water’s edge.
It’s breathtakingly beautiful. I don’t say this out loud because I’m still faking a moderate level of reluctance, which is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
The flat shelf of ground has a blanket on it. A proper blanket, already laid out, with a basket at one edge that I did not see him carrying, which means someone put it here before we arrived.
“You planned this?” I ask.
“Jack planned this. I executed it.”
“Jack planned a river picnic for you to take me on?”
“Jack planned the logistics,” Archer corrects. “I would have chosen the location anyway.”
I look at him. “This is your spot?”
He says nothing, which is the Archer version of yes.
I sit on the blanket and he sits beside me.
He’s closer than his usual distance, which I register and don’t comment on.
He opens the basket, which contains things that are clearly Tristan’s work: small pastries, something wrapped in paper that turns out to be very good bread and cheese, two bottles of something cold.
“Tristan made this?”
“Tristan makes everything. It’s his primary contribution to operations.”
“What’s your primary contribution?”
“Perimeter security.”
“And flower-picking, apparently.”
He looks at the flowers, which I’ve set on the blanket between us. “Ryan’s idea,” he says.
“You picked them yourself.”
He looks at the river. I eat the bread and cheese and look at the river too.
It’s actually quite nice sitting next to Archer in a quiet place.
It’s different from sitting next to Archer in the carnival.
The carnival Archer is watchful, territorial, always slightly running his perimeter even when he’s present.
This Archer is present. The wariness is still there, it’s always there, but it’s lower.
I have, apparently, been classified as less of a threat now.
“Why did you actually come?” I ask. “Jack could have suggested all he wanted. It didn’t mean you had to do what he said.”
Archer is quiet for a moment, the considering kind.
“Because he was right. That you should… That I should…” He stops.
Tries again. “I haven’t been fair to you.
I came in assuming you were a problem. You were one.
A different kind than I thought, but.” His gaze slides to the river.
“I’ve been recalibrating all week and I should have led with something better than grabbing your wrist.”
“You should have,” I agree.
“I know.”
“And the neck.”
He goes very still.
“I’m not complaining about the neck,” I say, carefully. “I’m just including it in the inventory of unconventional approaches.”
An almost-smile. More visible than usual. “The neck was… necessary.”
“Mm,” I say. “Very clinical.”
“It was clinical.”
“Is that all that it was?”
He looks at me with a cheeky smile I have never seen on him before. “No,” he replies. “Not entirely.”
“Not entirely,” I confirm.
“No.”
“Archer?”
“Mm?”
“I’m going to stop pretending to be reluctant now.”
Something in his face goes very focused. “Okay.”
“Jack said I’d be surprised.”
“Jack,” he says, with the tone that says he’s deeply ambivalent about Jack being right about things, “is occasionally correct.”
“Occasionally,” I agree.
“More than I’d like,” he admits.
I look at him. At the river. At the wildflowers on the blanket.
At the basket that Tristan packed and the spot that is Archer’s spot that he brought me to.
I think about the first night on the river path, I’m not afraid of you, and the way he stood at the game alley entrance. I think about you’d be surprised.
“Your place,” I say. “Is it far from here?”
He looks at me. The focus in his expression sharpens. “A few minutes.”
“From here?”
“From here.”
I watch the river. “The bread was very good. Tristan should be told.”
“I’ll tell him,” Archer says. His voice has dropped a register.
“After.”
“After,” he agrees.
He stands and he offers his hand again. This time when I take it he doesn’t let go immediately.
He holds it and we walk back up the river path in the cooling afternoon.
The carnival hums through the trees and I am carrying wildflowers that he picked himself.
I am, despite everything, not reluctant at all.