Chapter 16
Lola
All week, I’ve been following the same pattern. I do prep work with Tristan all day and enjoy the carnival at night. I help out where it’s needed and have fun when it’s not. Toward the end of the night, one of the guys always finds me and walks me back to the pack house.
Every night, they offer me a room to sleep in.
They insist they have a spare one, a guest room.
Jack is the first to offer his own bed if I’m more comfortable there.
But I always choose the couch. It feels right at the moment.
A room would be too permanent. It would be like I’m choosing to make this less temporary.
Saturday arrives like a held breath finally released. The carnival at full weekend capacity is a different creature than anything I’ve been moving through this week, and I know this from the moment I step onto Main Street at nine in the morning and feel the change in air pressure.
The town has expanded overnight. The population of Sweetwater Valley has apparently doubled or tripled, cars lining every approach road, families and groups moving through the main street with the energy of people who have been anticipating this and are ready to spend that anticipation.
By the time I get to the stall it’s already loud.
Tristan is calm. This is one of the things I’ve noticed about him, the way his baseline doesn’t shift with the noise around it.
He runs the same pace at full-service as he does at prep.
He’s unhurried, everything in its place, and when I tie on my apron and take my station he nods at me with approval.
“Why’s it so much busier this week?” I ask. I swear last weekend only had a fraction of the amount of people.
“There’s fireworks this weekend,” Tristan replies, like that explains everything.
I still don’t get it. Maybe it’s a Sweetwater Valley thing. Perhaps these country folk don’t get to see fireworks too often.
“Ready?” he asks.
“Always,” I say.
The first rush hits at ten and doesn’t stop.
Working the stall in full service is different from prep.
Prep is quiet and internal and tactile. This is external, constant, the demand of high-volume service where your hands are doing one thing and your brain is doing three others.
The noise is continuous and the crowd is a physical pressure at the serving window.
I find it, unexpectedly, steadying.
Not calming. That’s a different thing. Steadying, the way that being in motion is steadying for me. Having a task that requires all of my bandwidth so that the other bandwidth, the part that runs Amber and law enforcement and evidence chains, has to stand back.
Tristan and I run the stall in a rhythm we’ve built over the week, and it holds under the load.
He doesn’t tell me what to do and I don’t wait to be told.
By noon we’ve served more people than I’ve interacted with in the previous month combined and the stall smells like everything he’s made.
I’ve eaten two pieces of fried dough standing at the prep station between rushes, which is the fuel-to-function approach I’ve developed under his influence.
Jack appears at the window at with the energy of someone who has been doing seventeen things simultaneously and is running on pure enjoyment.
“How’s the service?” he asks.
“Constant,” I reply.
“Good constant or bad constant?”
“Is there bad constant?”
He grins. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine.” I mean it, which surprises me every time. “The stall is well-designed. Traffic flows.”
“I’ll tell Tristan you said that. He spent three years arguing for that stall position.”
“He was right.”
“He’s always right. It’s extremely annoying.” He leans on the counter. “Break at two. I’m taking you to the games.”
“I’m working—”
“Tristan has it covered for an hour, he has the backup crew on today. Two o’clock.” He’s already backing away. “Don’t make me come in there.”
“You can’t come in here, it’s a food prep space…”
But he’s gone.
Tristan, without looking up from the serving window, says: “Go at two. The rush drops between two and four.”
“You planned this?” I ask.
“I plan everything,” he replies, which is entirely true. I return to the serving window with something that is not quite a smile but lives close to it.
The break happens at two as foretold.
Jack takes me through the game alley at full operation, which is his domain at its peak.
Every station is running, the sounds layered into something close to music, competition and laughter and the mechanical rhythms of games in play.
He knows every operator by name. They all light up when he passes.
His enthusiasm is real rather than faked. I watch this and file it.
We play three games. I win two. He wins one through what I’m fairly confident is cheating, which he denies with complete composure.
“You absolutely interfered with the ball trajectory,” I say.
“I was standing on my side of the booth.”
“Your side of the booth has very flexible borders.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He’s already steering me toward the next station, hand briefly at my elbow, a touch that comes and goes before I’ve processed it. “Come on. Archer’s doing something at the central stage that I want to see.”
“Archer is doing something?”
“It’s the town talent segment. He does it every year.” He says it with delight I don’t understand yet. “He doesn’t know I’m bringing you.”
We head toward the stage and wait. The talent segment begins.
Archer plays his guitar.
I stand at the edge of the stage crowd and I watch Archer—impossibly, the same suspicious-perimeter-walking-wrist-grabbing Archer—sit on a stool in the center of the stage with the acoustic guitar from his bedroom. He plays something that has no right to be as good as it is, and I recalibrate.
He’s not acting in the theatrical sense. He’s just playing. With the same focus he gives everything, the same economy of movement. The music that comes out of it is unhurried and beautiful. The crowd has gone quiet so they can hear every bit of it.
Jack is watching my face.
“Stop,” I warn.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re watching me react to Archer playing the guitar.”
“I’m watching you find out that people contain multitudes,” he says unabashedly. “It’s one of my favorite things to watch.”
Archer looks up at some point and finds me in the crowd, which takes him less than a second. Something in his expression does the recalibration thing—but inverted. He’s recalibrating me seeing him. Being seen in something he didn’t advertise.
I hold his gaze.
He looks back at his guitar.
Jack makes a satisfied sound beside me.
“Shut up,” I say.
“I said nothing.”
“You were very loud about it.”
The afternoon builds into evening and the evening builds into something else.
I go back to the stall for the four o’clock rush and run it through to seven, when the backup crew takes the window and Tristan tells me I’m done for the day.
I untie the apron and fold it. I then try to calculate whether I go back to Doris Harrow’s, whether the evening is mine, whether —
“Come with us,” Tristan says. Not asking, but not directing either. That tone he uses that is an invitation rather than a requirement.
I go with them.
The carnival at night is different from the carnival at any other time and I knew this theoretically and I know it now in my body.
The lights. I’ve worked under them all week, I’ve seen them go on and go off, but at full Saturday night capacity they are something else.
The sparkle, the warmth, the way they turn the air into something amber and cozy.
The Ferris wheel in full color against the total dark.
The stage with its spotlights and the music that’s live now, something with a real beat, the crowd on the dance space moving.
The smells.
The smells at peak are extraordinary and it’s too much. It’s layered and dense, full of everything Tristan has made, the river underneath it, the crowd, and above all of it, surrounding me, the four of them. The pack.
I’ve been aware of their scent all week. It’s constant, background, present, and becoming part of the baseline. Tonight, in the bustling crowd and the warmth, they’re not background.
They’re foreground.
All of it is foreground.
We move through the central area together. The crowd is thick here, the dance space full, and the closeness required by the density means I am completely surrounded by them. Not in a contained way, but in the way our shoulders and arms briefly touch as we navigate the same space.
Ryan’s hand at my back, steering around a group stopped in the middle of the walkway. Archer close behind, his snow scent cutting through the heat of the crowd. Jack at my left, arm occasionally brushing mine. Tristan at my right, steady.
I breathe in and it’s all of them, all at once, layered and warm and…
Something shifts.
It’s a change in awareness, sudden and complete.
Like a signal that’s been background noise all week suddenly jumping to full volume.
Every nerve ending I have goes online simultaneously.
I’m aware of the crowd and the lights and the music and the smell and the heat and the four of them with a specificity that is overwhelming.
It’s not frightening, which is almost worse, because frightening I know how to respond to.
This isn’t frightening.
This is a pull. Deep and biological and older than any choice I’ve ever made. A current running from somewhere I can’t locate toward something I can’t name, and it’s all four of them, all at once, and it’s this town and this carnival and days of —
The crowd surges.
A group moves against the flow and the press of bodies increases.
The heat jumps and the smells jump and the music is very loud and the pack bond that shouldn’t reach me is reaching me and I can feel it, feel the edges of it, feel what it would be like to step into it, and my instinct says yes with a conviction that bypasses my entire rational mind.
I stop walking.