Chapter 19 The Ferris Wheel
The Ferris Wheel
Eliza
Mid-September, Saturday
The boardwalk carnival is exactly as tacky as advertised, and I love every inch of it.
Flashing lights, the smell of fried everything, carnival barkers shouting about impossible prizes, and a Ferris wheel that looks like it was assembled by someone with a very casual relationship to safety regulations.
Julian eyes the whole setup with the same suspicion he applied to the mini golf course, which means he's about to have opinions.
He studies the bumper-car arena. "The bumper cars look structurally questionable."
"That's part of the charm."
"The charm of potential injury?"
"The charm of not knowing whether you'll survive. Very exciting."
He looks at me, one eyebrow raised. "You have a strange definition of exciting."
"I'm a marine biologist. I've been stung by jellyfish, bitten by crabs, and once got trapped under a kelp canopy until my dive partner helped me out. A rickety bumper car is nothing."
"That's a lot of near-death experiences for someone who studies plants."
"Kelp isn't a plant, it's a protist. And don't change the subject. Bumper cars. Now."
The bumper car arena is chaos, teenagers crashing into each other with gleeful abandon while a bored attendant watches from a platform. Julian and I each claim a car, his blue, mine red, and position ourselves at opposite ends of the arena.
He leans over the side of his car. "Rules?"
"Stay in your car and prepare to lose."
"There have to be some rules. No hitting the children, presumably."
"Fine. No hitting the children. Everything else is fair game."
The buzzer sounds and we're off.
Julian, it turns out, is annoyingly good at bumper cars. He navigates the chaos with the same precision he applies to everything else, dodging teenagers and finding angles I didn't see coming. Within thirty seconds he's rammed my car twice and is circling for a third hit.
"This is supposed to be fun!" I shout over the noise.
"I am having fun!" He grins at me, genuinely delighted, and then crashes into my car so hard my teeth rattle.
"Oh, it's on."
I spend the next five minutes hunting him across the arena, using other cars as shields, feinting left and going right, employing every dirty trick I learned from Naomi's competitive streak.
By the time the buzzer sounds again, I've gotten in four solid hits and we're both laughing so hard we can barely breathe.
"Draw," Julian declares as we climb out of our cars.
"That was not a draw. I clearly won."
"By what metric?"
"By the metric of me saying so."
"That's not a metric. That's authoritarianism."
"Welcome to my carnival dictatorship. Cotton candy next."
We wander the boardwalk, sharing a cloud of pink cotton candy that dissolves on my tongue against my teeth. Julian keeps trying to pull off pieces that are bigger than his mouth can handle, which leads to increasingly ridiculous attempts to fit cotton candy into his face.
I point at his forehead. "You have it in your eyebrow."
"I do not."
"You definitely do. Hold still." I reach up and brush the sticky pink fluff from his brow, and the gesture brings me close enough to see the way his eyes track to my mouth.
He wants to kiss me. He's been wanting to kiss me all night.
But he won't, because I haven't given him permission, and he's learned.
I step back, heart racing slightly. "Games. I want to win something."
"What do you want to win?"
"That ridiculous stuffed whale." I point at the prize wall of a ring toss booth, where an enormous blue whale with comically large eyes presides over a kingdom of lesser stuffed animals. "It's hideous and I need it."
"That whale is at least four feet long."
"I'm aware."
"You live in a one-bedroom apartment."
"I'm aware of that too. Are you going to help me win it or not?"
Julian steps up to the ring toss booth and pays for a round. The carny explains the rules: three rings on the bottles wins the whale, two rings wins a medium prize, one ring wins a keychain. Julian studies the bottles with scientific intensity.
He examines the bottle arrangement. "The rings barely fit those necks. Carnival games are designed to be nearly impossible."
"So you're saying we can't win?"
"I'm saying the odds are against us." He picks up the first ring. "But I've beaten worse odds."
He throws. The ring bounces off a bottle rim and clatters to the ground.
He tilts his head. "Hm."
"'Hm' is not confidence-inspiring."
"I'm recalibrating."
The second ring lands on a bottle. The third misses entirely. Julian frowns at the booth like it's personally offended him.
He takes out his wallet. "One more round."
"Julian, we don't have to..."
"I want to win you the whale."
"It's a ridiculous whale."
"You said you needed it." He hands over more money and takes three new rings. "I'm going to get you that ridiculous whale."
This time he takes longer, adjusting his grip, calculating angles. The first ring lands cleanly. The second takes a moment, wobbling on the bottle rim before settling into place.
The third ring misses by millimeters.
"Damn."
The carny offers him a medium prize, a stuffed octopus about the size of my head. Julian looks at me, apologetic.
"I can try again."
"Julian. It's fine. I don't actually need a four-foot whale in my apartment."
"But you wanted it."
I take the octopus from the carny's hand. "This one can sit on my sofa without evicting me. I'm calling it an upgrade."
He looks at me for a long moment, something shifting in his expression. He looks toward the wheel. "Ferris wheel?"
"Ferris wheel."
The line is short, and we're loaded into a swinging car within minutes. The attendant locks the safety bar and steps back, and then we're rising, slowly, the boardwalk shrinking beneath us.
Julian settles into the seat beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch. The car sways gently in the evening breeze.
I turn toward him as the carriage rises. "I accepted the job."
He turns to look at me. "The research position?"
"And the trip. British Columbia. Early October to early January." I squeeze the stuffed octopus in my lap. "I officially signed the paperwork yesterday."
"Eliza, that's incredible." His face lights up with genuine happiness. "Congratulations."
"You're not upset?"
"Why would I be upset? This is what you've been working toward."
"Because I'll be gone for three months. Because we're still figuring things out. Because the timing is terrible."
"The timing is what it is." He reaches over and takes my hand, our fingers interlacing easily. "I'll miss you. I'll miss you like crazy. But this is your career. Your dream. I'm not going to be the reason you don't chase it."
"What if the distance makes things harder?"
"Then we'll figure out how to make it work. Video calls, scheduled times, all the things we talked about." He squeezes my hand. "I spent six months not showing up for you. Let me spend the next three showing up from a distance."
I look at him, at the sincerity in his face, at the way the carnival lights reflect in his eyes. He means it. I can see that he means it.
The Ferris wheel reaches its apex and pauses, our car swaying gently at the very top. Below us, the boardwalk spreads out like a miniature world, all lights and noise and small moving figures.
I tighten my grip on his hand. "I'm scared."
"Of the trip?"
"Of all of it. Of leaving. Of coming back. Of what we'll be when I return."
"What do you want us to be?"
"I don't know yet. But I know I want to find out."
I lean over and kiss him.
It's not tentative or careful. It's hungry, all the wanting I've been holding back for weeks finally released. His hand comes up to cup my face and he kisses me back with equal intensity, and I feel it everywhere, the rush of finally, finally letting myself have this.
When we break apart, we're both breathing hard.
I rest my forehead against his. "I've wanted to do that for weeks."
"I've wanted you to do that for weeks."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because you needed to be ready. Because I'm learning to wait for you to choose."
"I'm choosing now."
I pull him back in. The Ferris wheel starts to descend, but I barely notice, too lost in the feel of his mouth on mine, his hands in my hair, the solid warmth of him beside me.
The car reaches the bottom and the attendant coughs pointedly. We separate, slightly disheveled, and climb out. Julian is grinning like an idiot. I probably am too.
We walk back to the car, hand in hand, the stuffed octopus tucked under my arm. At the parking lot, Julian turns to face me.
He stops beside his car. "Tonight was perfect."
"It wasn't terrible."
"High praise."
"I'm a tough critic."
He leans in to kiss me again, soft and sweet. I catch the lapel of his jacket.
I keep hold of his lapel. "I wasn't finished."
"By all means."
I pull him back in and kiss him thoroughly, taking my time, making sure he knows exactly how much I mean it.
When I finally let him go, his eyes are slightly dazed.
I glance toward the passenger door. "You should take me home."
"Should I?"
"Yes. Because if you don't, I'm going to invite you back to my apartment, and I'm not ready for that yet."
"I can wait."
"I know you can." I kiss his cheek. "That's why I trust you."