She turns her head to look at me. We’re close enough that she doesn’t have to turn far. Her eyes do that inventory thing, except this time it feels less like threat assessment and more like… something else. Something that doesn’t have a tactical application.
“You want to get to know me?” she asks. “With my clothes on?”
“Since the moment I first saw you at the bar.”
“I’m going to be leaving as soon as we figure out how to un-bond.”
“You’ve made that clear.” I hold her gaze. “What are you actually doing here, Lola?”
“The carnival,” she says, the same thing she said last night, the same deflection.
“Try again.”
Her chin lifts, just slightly. “I don’t owe you an explanation.”
“No,” I agree. “You don’t. I’m asking anyway, because I’m interested, and because whatever it is, it’s not nothing, and…” I pause. “And because this town looks after its own, and you might find that useful, depending.”
Something crosses her face. Quick and unguarded. Then it’s gone, tucked back behind those gorgeous dark eyes with the speed of someone who’s had a lot of practice keeping things there.
“I’m not yours to look after,” she says.
“You kind of are,” I reply, because I am who I am and I can’t help it.
And she…
She doesn’t tell me I’m wrong.
She holds my gaze for one second, two, and the air between us does something that has nothing to dowith the carnival or the river or the morning, and then she steps back—one step, deliberate, reclaiming the distance—and looks away.
“I’m going back,” she says.
“To Doris’s?”
“To wherever I want to go.”
“Obviously.” I push off the railing. “Same time tomorrow?”
She gives me a look that I choose to interpret as fond exasperation rather than its possible alternative, which is actual exasperation.
“Goodbye, Jack.”
“See you later, Lola.”
She walks back up the river path without responding to this, which is absolutely a response. I watch her go—the set of her shoulders, the even pace, the way she doesn’t look back even though she wants to, I’d stake actual money on it—and feel that gear-catch thing again in my chest, more pronounced this time.
Ryan is going to tell me to be careful.
Archer is going to tell me she’s trouble.
Tristan is going to make her something extraordinary to eat and watch her carefully with those quiet eyes of his.
They’re all going to do exactly what they do, and they’re going to feel what I’m feeling right now. That pull, that rerouting of attention, that gravity that some people have and most people don’t. Nobody is going to be able to do what I am absolutely, categorically not going to do.
Let her disappear.
She came into this valley for a reason, we bonded for a bigger reason, and she’s carrying something she hasn’t told anyone. She matches my energy like she was built for it, which nobody does, which has never happened in twenty-eight years of looking, and I am not going to let her disappear.
I watch her reach the edge of the carnival ground and turn onto Main Street without looking back.
