He grins. “I knew it. He didn’t deserve her.”
“Probably not.” I slot the frame section into place. “What about the family at the Ferris wheel? Dad, three kids, no second adult.”
“Was Dad nervous about the height?”
“Third kid held his hand the whole ride.”
Jack goes quiet for a second. “I missed that.”
“You were at the base. Couldn’t see the car.”
“Good kid,” he says.
We work through the frame disassembly and the sun moves gradually. The day is warm and relaxed and I am having a good day. Not a getting-through-the-day day, not a maintaining-forward-momentum day. Just: good. The good of physical work and easy company and the pleasure of being somewhere that has started to have the feel of familiarity.
The town has done this, gradually.
I notice it every day. The way Main Street has stopped being a space I’m mapping and started being a space I recognize. The way Elsie at the gas station says my name now when I walk in. The way the bookshop owner nods when I pass.
I have become, without quite deciding to, a known quantity in Sweetwater Valley.
I don’t know how to feel about this, so I slot it into the pile of things I’m sitting with rather than resolving.
* * *
The other Omega finds me on Tuesday. Or I findher, or we find each other, which is maybe the more accurate version of what happens when two people have the same instinctive response to a space and end up in the same corner of it.
The corner in question is located at the far end of the food row during the Tuesday morning partial service. There is a bench behind the last stall with a good sightline to the river and low foot traffic. I’ve been using it as a decompression spot between rushes.
She’s already on the bench when I get there.
She’s around my age, dark-haired, with the features I’ve learned to identify in myself from the outside. The alertness, the awareness, the way she’s sitting with her back to the stall wall rather than the open. She clocks me before I reach the bench and does the same assessment I do. We both land in the same place at the same time:not a threat, probably.
“Bench is free,” she says.
“Thank you.” I sit at the far end.
We exist in the external silence of two people doing internal cataloguing. The river appears through the gap in the stall row. The carnival is quiet, more locals than visitors today.
“You’re with Ryan’s pack,” she says.
I open my mouth to saynoand then stop. Because what I was going to say is a reflex, not an answer, and she’s an Omega, she can probably scent the reflex for what it is.
“I work their food stall,” I say. “Tristan’s.”
She looks at me with the knowing expression of someone who has done the math and is being polite about it. “Sure.”
“I’m not with the pack.”
“Okay.”
Theokayhas the same energy as theokayRyan does, which meansI hear you and I have opinionsand I find myself nearly smiling.
“I’m Dee,” she says.
“Lola.”
“Passing through?”
