“Jack suggested,” he replies. “I decided.”
I look at the flowers. “Are those from the river path?”
“Yes.”
“Did you pick them yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Just now?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I thought they were pretty and that you might like them.”
I imagine Archer crouching at the river path pulling wildflowers out of the ground because Jack suggested he spend time with me. Something in my chest pulls tight which is something that it keeps doing in this town without my permission.
“Sit down,” I say.
He sits. Not close, the Archer-appropriate distance, the one that is always slightly less than expected and slightly more than comfortable. He holds the flowers inboth hands, forearms on his knees, looking at the carnival with the focus he gives everything.
He holds the flowers out.
I take them.
They smell like sunshine. Like the path in the evening. Like the air in this valley that I noticed when I first drove into it and have never quite been able to categorize.
“Jack said to take you somewhere,” Archer says. “A date, he called it.”
“He called it a date?”
“He used the word several times. I think he wanted to make sure I understood the category.”
“And do you? Understand the category?”
Archer looks at me warily. The look that has been evolving all week. Less suspicion, more of the curiosity that lives underneath the suspicion. “I understand dates.”
“Archer,” I begin. “You grabbed my wrist the first time we were alone together.”
“That was—”
“A perimeter security measure, yes, you explained it.” I look at the flowers in my hands. “I’m just establishing that your approach to date behavior has been unconventional.”
The corner of his mouth quirks. “I have a place in mind,” he says. “If you want.”
I observe him. In the daylight he is a problem I have been cataloguing since day one and have notsuccessfully resolved. He doesn’t look as intense in sunshine.
“Fine,” I concede to this crazy plan.
“Fine.” He stands, and offers his hand.
I take it.
The place he has in mind is a stretch of river bank about ten minutes from the carnival ground, accessible via a path I haven’t found on my own, through trees and down a gentle slope to a flat shelf of ground right at the water’s edge.
It’s breathtakingly beautiful. I don’t say this out loud because I’m still faking a moderate level of reluctance, which is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
