“Yeah? When?” Everett asks. “Was ring toss big on the San Francisco sports circuit when you were growing up?”
“You have no idea,” I say. I toss one and it lands on top of Everett’s green ring.
“Hustler,” Everett mutters sarcastically, shaking his head. “Here to take me for all I’m worth.”
“Didn’t realize we were betting on this game,” I say as he picks up his next ring, misses again. “What’s on the table?”
Everett thinks for a minute as I throw and land a red ring. When I turn to look up at him, smiling, something in his expression has heat rising up my neck, into my cheeks.
“Lunch with me,” he says, chin tilting forward as if in invitation. “Not Cooper.”
I’m grateful that the carnival lights are already casting everything in shades of reds and oranges, or Everett would see how flushed my face is at this, as if he just offered up strip poker as a bargaining chip instead of a meal together.
“I already told you,” I say, fingers curling around my final ring. “I’m not having lunch with Cooper again.”
Everett’s eyes are locked on to mine, holding me there. “You never told me that,” he says softly.
I swallow, try to keep my shoulders steady as my breathing hitches. It takes everything in me to tear my gaze away from his, toss the ring in a lackluster movement toward the bottles. I don’t really want to win this bet.
But the ring flies in a perfect arc right toward the milk bottle in the middle and lands cleanly, no spin at all.
“Winner,” the attendant says flatly. He rummages aroundin a plastic storage bin behind him, eyes on his phone screen as he finally produces a rolled-up T-shirt and extends it in my direction. I have to lean over the booth to grab it from him.
We fall into step next to each other as we head away from the game, the T-shirt tucked under my arm. When I risk a glance up at Everett, he’s already looking at me.
“What?” I say, a breathy, nervous sort of laugh shaking out of me. When he doesn’t say anything, just opens his mouth and closes it like he’s reconsidered, I face forward again and try to appear nonchalant. “We could still grab lunch sometime,” I say.
“Right,” Everett says. “Meet somewhere between LA and San Francisco?”
I shrug a shoulder that feels about as casual as a marriage license. “Stranger things have happened.”
“Stranger than us happening again?”
I look sharply over at him, breath catching in my throat. But he’s staring straight ahead, at the spinning colors of the carousel. I follow his gaze toward the winking lights. Something about it feels like a memory, sharp edges sanded down by time.
I worry sometimes that there isn’t enough proof of us to call the time we spent together real. We were only ever seen by people when we were falling apart. Everything else comes in shimmering flashes and washed-out hazes, lens flares in corners blocking things out or letting memories mix together. I can’t call up Laurel or Hank and sayremember when,because we’re the only two who do, truly, remember. We are a carousel of moments that fell apart as soon as we tried to show anyone else.
I look up at Everett, something steeling in my chest. “I didn’t know we were even a possibility anymore,” I say, instead of the thousand other smarter things I could say right now. Things like,Weshould talk about what happened, orUpuntil two days agowe were locked in a who-hates-the-other-more competition. The answer to this question seems more important.
“I don’t know if I’m the one who needs to decide that,” he says. I glance down at my feet, the grass beneath them, because I don’t know what to say. There are too many things to sort through here, and half of me thinks it might be less complicated to just let it lie. But then I think about Everett’s lips on mine in the kitchen, his expression at the bottom of the stairs after dinner at Cooper’s, the way he touched my face in the cabin on the sailboat. How my heart reacted every time: a jump before it settled into some sure, steady rhythm, like I was exactly where I needed to be.
“Cooper and I went to that place on the beach that we found our third summer here,” I say finally, unsure why it’s the response I go with. “Do you remember?”Please remember, I think.
Everett looks fully at me, eyes the color of stormy gray waves, rough and intense. “I remember everything, Sutton,” he says. “I think all of my best days have been with you.”
It catches my breath, has me moving closer to him, startling as my chest brushes his and his hand grips my waist. I want to be able to say things like that to him. Want to be the one who opens the door to the possibility of this, but there’s still some part of my brain that snags on our history. On Laurel and Davi and Gabe, and how fragile our whole group is, how the two of us going anywhere near this again would inevitably destroy that.
But I still find my head tipping back, face tilting up toward Everett’s. My eyes are still closing when we press together, a breath apart. My phone buzzes in the pocket of my jacket, loud and jarring. I take a step back, blinking as I pull it out. “Food’s ready,” I say, holding my screen up like proof.
Everett doesn’t press or try to keep us here any longer. Instead, he nods us back in the direction of the trucks, andsomething about it reminds me of the way he was with the kid who asked for his autograph earlier, or who he was at a college party a decade ago. That was always one of the confusing parts about us. We could go from what felt like huge moments to casual in seconds. It was also what made it exciting.
But that was then. Now, it doesn’t feel quite as fun. It feels like we were just standing on the precipice of something and were yanked violently back from the edge, sprawling on the ground. I can’t fully get my bearings.
“Hey,” Everett says as we near the food trucks. “What’s your prize?”
It’s only now that I remember the T-shirt under my arm. I unroll it, a small smile eking onto my face before I turn it toward Everett, who groans.
“You can’t keep that,” he says, running a hand down his face.
