“I’m not,” I say. And then I stop.
Jack looks at me.
The thing I was going to say is:I’m not running from something dangerous to you.Which I don’t actually know if it’s true. I thought it was true when I arrived. I chose Sweetwater Valley specifically because it was nowhere. Because whatever is following me is a legal problem and not a violence problem. Because the men looking for me carry badges and file reports and don’t generally torch small-town carnivals.
But Amber had a partner that I don’t know much about yet. I know this because the heist was too clean for one person. And Amber’s partner is not a known quantity.
The part of me that has been refusing to fully thinkabout this for three days sits up now, in the middle of a late-night carnival, and makes itself felt.
“You’re not what?” Jack asks.
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
He stares at me for quite some time. He knows it’s not nothing. He’s too intelligent to not know. But he does something that Archer didn’t do and I find I can breathe around it. He lets me have it. The unfinished thing, the stopped sentence, the choice to close a door. He nods and doesn’t push.
“Come on,” he says. “I want to show you something.”
The something is the Ferris wheel in its last rotation of opening night. He knows the operator, of course, and they have one of those wordless exchanges that mean a long history of mutual tolerance. Then we’re in a car and the wheel is turning and Sweetwater Valley is falling away below us in concentric rings of light.
From up here the carnival is a different shape. Smaller, contained, the logic of its layout visible in a way it isn’t when you’re inside it. I can see the food row and the game alley and the shadow maze and the river path and the pier. I can see, from this height, what I couldn’t see at ground level. That the whole thing is built around the river. Every element oriented toward it, drawing the crowd toward the water.
“Why the river?” I ask.
“The town was founded on it. Mill, fishing,everything. The carnival started as a river festival. Boats, floating lights, the whole shebang. It moved to the ground eventually but it kept the orientation.” He looks out over the valley, relaxed and comfortable in the swaying car in a way that suggests this is a regular spot. “Sixty years of the same celebration. People come back and they know where everything is. Where they stood last year and the year before.”
“That sounds nice,” I say. It comes out more honest than I intended.
He looks at me. “Not something you’ve had?”
“Fixed geography?” I shrug. “Not really my thing.”
“Whose thing is it? You’re born into it or you’re not.” He looks back at the valley. “I wasn’t, for a long time. Three years on the circuit, different town every month. You learn not to know where things are.”
“What made you stop?”
“Ryan.” Simple, immediate. “He asked me to come home, and I realized I’d been waiting for someone to ask.” He pauses. “I didn’t know that until he asked.”
I look out at the valley. The river is a dark ribbon below, the lanterns long gone, just the reflection of the carnival in its moving surface.
“I don’t have a Ryan,” I admit. Which is not a sentence I meant to say out loud. That is a sentence that surfaced from somewhere below the levels I’m currently monitoring and got out before I could catch it.
Jack doesn’t make it a moment. “You might,” he says, and it’s not pointed, not loaded, just placed there. Anobservation.
I look down at the carnival from four stories up and think about Archer’s hand on my wrist and Ryan in the lantern light sayingright now, I want you to stay for the lanternsand Tristan’s forearm against mine.
And Jack, beside me right now, who has been beside me in one form or another since that night at the pub and hasn’t once made me feel followed.
I glance at him. He’s already looking at me. The Ferris wheel car rocks gently on the updraft and we are very close in the small space of it, the carnival spread below us and the sky very dark above, and this stupid bond lighting up like it’s made of gold.
I close the distance.
The kiss is intense. My mouth on his, warm and direct, and he produces a tone that is soft and sincere. His hand comes up to my jaw. One hand, steady, not pulling, just holding, the way you hold something you weren’t expecting to be given and want to be careful with.
He kisses me back.
Not with the urgency I might have expected from Jack, who does most things with enthusiasm. He kisses me slowly. Deliberately. Like he’s decided that if this is what he’s getting he’s going to be entirely present for it, and the care of it does something to me that the urgency wouldn’t have, something that hits in the chest rather than the nerves.
The car rocks.
