“Yeah?”
“You’re very close.”
“It’s dead end,” I reply. “Tight space.”
“Mm.” She looks at me with the expression she gets when she’s decided something and hasn’t announced it yet. The pre-decision look, the one that happens in the half-second before she acts, because Lola always acts, she doesn’t linger in the deciding.
She doesn’t linger now.
Her hand comes to my chest. It rests there while she tilts her chin up and the half-second is over.
I kiss her.
Or she kisses me, or we kiss each other, the distinction is irrelevant. It’s warm and immediate and she makes a sound against my mouth that is nothinglike the managed exhale-laugh I’ve been hearing all week. The bond that she hates hums between us, very excited about this moment.
My hand finds the canvas wall beside her head and the other finds her waist. She’s warm through the jacket and the dead end is very small. I am very aware of all of this simultaneously.
She kisses the way she does everything, fully committed, nothing held back, no pretense. Her hand on my chest curls into the fabric. Her other hand finds my jaw and the touch is electric. Deliberate. I pull her closer by the waist and she lets me. The canvas wall gives slightly at my hand but neither of us cares.
We stay there for a while, shamelessly making out.
The maze outside the dead end is quiet. The carnival is a distant noise. In here it’s just the shadowed space and her mouth and her hand in my jacket and the gravity of something that has been true for days and is now being honest about itself.
When we separate it’s gradual, not pulled apart, just slowing. Her forehead drops to my collarbone briefly. My hand at her waist doesn’t move.
“Okay,” she says, into my jacket.
“Yeah,” I agree.
She straightens. Steps back one step. I let her have it because that’s always the right call with her. Her hand leaves my jaw. Mine leaves her waist.
She looks at me in the dim light of the dead end and her expression is unarmored. Just for a moment, just inthis space, the vulnerability of someone who has been somewhere real and hasn’t had time to put the armor back yet.
Then she finds the gap in the canvas again.
“The exterior corridor,” she says. Businesslike now.
“Right,” I reply.
“They should fix the panel overlap.”
“Absolutely not,” I say. “That gap stays exactly as it is. You’re keeping your own exit route in the maze.”
“I keep exit routes everywhere.” She says it plainly, and then something in her face shifts. She’s heard herself, heard the truth underneath the statement, the weight ofeverywhere.She doesn’t look away. Just holds it for a second, lets it be visible to me.
I think about the fortuneteller.You’re going to spend a long time looking for the right place to land.
“The gap will be our secret,” I say.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t—” She stops. “Don’t be too nice to me.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not going to be here long enough for it to…” Another stop. Another light going out before the sentence finishes.
