Lola
I walk away from the maze and back into the carnival with the energy of a woman who has been told to go be with someone else by the man she wanted to be with, which is… That’s a new experience. I’ve had a lot of experiences. That’s a new one.
You’d be surprised.
I remember Jack’s expression in my head, the absolute composure of him, the confidence he had in making that statement about another person, and I decide that I am annoyed.
I am annoyed for several reasons, in order of increasing annoyance:
One: I was very clear about what I wanted and what I wanted was Jack, in that private, discreet area,continuing what we started in the dead end of the maze.
Two: Jack was also clearly very keen and then chose to be noble about it. Nobility is its own kind of infuriating when you are currently experiencing the frustration of someone who was headed somewhere good and got redirected.
Three: Archer.
Archer! For crying out loud.
I walk through the game alley with my hands in my pockets and I think about Archer on the river path, his fingers around my wrist, his face at my neck in the unforgettable way of an Alpha doing ascent assessment.I know what that was and I know what I felt during it and I am not prepared to examine those two things in close proximity right now.
The point is: I was not planning on Archer today.
I was planning on Jack.
Jack has redirected me to Archer like I’m a package being rerouted. I am not a package. I am a person with preferences and one of those preferences was Jack, right now. Instead, I am walking through the carnival alone, and slightly furious and, underneath the furious, still annoyingly keyed up from the maze.
The dead end.
I push that thought away. It only makes things worse.
I find a bench at the edge of the food row and sit on it. The carnival is doing its lunchtime transition around me. I do a frank internal assessment.
Am I actually opposed to Archer?
I run the inventory.
The river path. The wrist. The neck. TheI’m not afraid of youand the way his expression softened when I said it. The shoulder-to-shoulder in the afternoon, the warmth of it, the shorthand we’ve been building.
Okay. I am not, in the factual sense, opposed to Archer.
I am opposed to being managed. To having someone else decide the sequence of events in my own life.
You’d be surprised.
I hate that I’m curious.
I’mverycurious.
I sit on the bench and I am annoyed and curious in equal measure as the carnival moves around me. I wait to see what happens next, because something is clearly going to happen next. Jack has set something in motion and stepped back to watch it run.
I don’t wait long. Archer finds me in twelve minutes. I know it’s twelve minutes because I’ve been counting, which is either good tactical awareness or a sign that I’m more invested in this than I’m admitting, and I’m not examining which.
He comes from the direction of the river path, which means he came from outside the carnival ground, which means he was somewhere else when Jack contacted him, told him, somehow communicated the situation. Through the pack bond, probably. No privacy settings, as previouslyestablished.
He’s carrying flowers. I stare at the bright blooms. They are wildflowers. Not a florist arrangement, not the romance of something purchased from a shop. Actual wildflowers, the kind that grow along the river path, a loose, gathered handful of them in the colors of late summer. He is carrying them like he is not entirely sure what to do with his hands.
He stops in front of the bench.
“Jack sent you?” I ask.
