That’s all right.
I know it for both of us.
Chapter 8
Lola
Opening night arrives. I tell myself I’m going because I have nothing else to do, which is not entirely untrue. Doris Harrow’s house is quiet in the evenings and the walls are thin enough to hear the carnival music from three streets over.
Lying on a pine-scented mattress listening to other people having a good time while I run scenarios about Amber and evidence chains and how to access a legal system that currently considers me a fugitive is not restful. Not productive.
The carnival is a better use of my time.
This is what I tell myself as I put on the least-wrinkled of my limited clothing options and run my fingers through my hair in Doris Harrow’s mirror.Purely practical. Reconnaissance. I’m working this event through the weekend and it makes sense to understand the full-operation layout before the crowds hit.
Doris is in the kitchen when I come downstairs. She looks at me like she has seen everything and has opinions about most of it.
“You look nice,” she says.
“I look the same as I looked this morning.”
“You brushed your hair, dear.”
I leave before this conversation can develop further.
The carnival at full capacity is not the same as the carnival in setup. I knew this. I’ve worked enough events to understand the transformation. The way a space in progress looks like exactly what it is, bones and logistics and the unglamorous infrastructure of public entertainment, and how that same space, lit and populated and running, becomes something else entirely. Something that asks you to suspend your practical understanding of what it’s made of and just be in it.
I was not prepared for how completely Sweetwater Valley’s carnival would make that ask.
It’s the scale of it first. The string lights I’ve been walking past for days are fully live, and the effect at night is not subtle. Thousands of warm globes strung at varying heights across the entire riverfront, doubling in the water below, so you’re walking through light and also somehow walking through the reflection of light. The Ferris wheel is a turning wheel of color against the full dark of the sky, and the smells…
Tristan’s stall is open. I can smell it from the entrance arch.
Whatever he has running on the burners tonight has gotten more ambitious than the prep work I was part of. It drifts through the whole ground in warm waves. Fried dough, obviously, and the honey and sea salt thing that I have already had opinions about, and something savory underneath, something that smells like it’s been cooking for hours in a cozy kitchen.
My stomach does something simple and honest. It growls. I’m here for reconnaissance, I remind myself, and walk through the arch.
Tristan sees me before I see him. He’s behind the stall counter. The full carnival stall now, with its proper serving window and the menu board above in his handwriting. A small queue is already forming even though it’s barely opened. He raises a hand when I come through the crowd, not with surprise, just acknowledgment. Like he noted my arrival and is letting me know he noted it.
I go over. Partly because I’m working this stall for two days and I should understand the operation. Partly because the smell is extraordinary and my body has apparently decided that Tristan equals food equals safety and I am dealing with this biological data point at arm’s length.
“You came,” he says, and it’s notI knew you wouldorI’m glad.It’s just the fact of it, clean and without weight.
“Reconnaissance,” I say.
“Of course.” He’s already plating something. I watch his hands, which move with the same swiftness I’ve been watching all week.
He doesn’t slide the plate through the serving window. He picks up the pastry itself, small and warm between his fingers, and holds it out across the counter toward me. Not placed.Offered.
It’s not quite fried dough. It’s something I don’t recognize. A small open pastry filled with something caramelized, soft cheese underneath, a scattering of herbs on top. Up close it smells like honey and sea salt and something warmer underneath, something that is less about the food and more about the hands holding it. I have a brief and inconvenient awareness of both simultaneously.
“Open,” he says quietly. Not a command. Just the word, offered the same way the pastry is offered, and I don’t examine why I comply.
I lean forward over the serving window and I let him place it in my mouth. His fingers brush my lip softly in the transfer. The pastry is extraordinary, the caramel giving under the soft cheese, the herb cut sharp against the sweetness, the salt landing last, and I am very carefully not thinking about the thumb across my lips.
He watches me eat it. Not in a weird way. Just present for it, the way he’s present for everything. Something in my expression says how much I enjoyed it, because his expression goes warm. He reaches for the display withoutbreaking eye contact. His fingers find another piece.
“Again?” he asks.
