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“Relax, Hayes,” Jett said, giving my hand one last infuriatingly gentle pat before letting it go. “I’m not stealing your girl.” He clapped Sterling on the shoulder then, entirely unbothered by the fact that Sterling looked ready to commit a felony. “Come on,” he said, turning toward the parking lot. “Ryder’s waiting, and if we’re late again, he’s gonna start filing grievances.”
Sterling didn’t move.
Jett sighed dramatically, then glanced back at me with a conspiratorial spark. “He pretends he’s the reasonable one,” he said with a shake of his head before he hooked two fingers in Sterling’s sleeve and tugged. “Lover boy, we’ve got work.”
Sterling hesitated again. “I meant what I said,” he murmured to me.
“About what?” I asked, although I knew. Sterling just winked at me as he let Jett pull him away, his muscles tight and shoulders tense as he glanced back a few times like he hated every inch of distance between us.
Jett didn’t miss him doing that. “Fuck,” he muttered around a laugh as they walked, loud enough for me to hear. “You’re in trouble.”
He meant Sterling, but standing there with my pulse rattling in my throat, I wasn’t entirely sure it didn’t apply to me, too.
“Good night, Sienna,” Sterling called as he walked away.
“Good night, cowboy,” I replied, because my self-preservation instincts had apparently left the building. I watched him go until he disappeared into the cluster of men and trucks, swallowed by the dark beyond the carnival lights.
My heart thudded unevenly, my palms still buzzing where his hands had been.
“Well, well, well,” a voice drawled behind me. “How was your not-a-date?”
I spun around.
Hattie stood there, triumphantly clutching a corn dog in one hand and a funnel cake in the other, her eyes sparkling with nosy glee.
“It wasn’t a date,” I said.
“Did you ride the Ferris wheel alone?” she asked.
“No.”
“Did you emotionally bond at a height that violated various safety codes?”
I glared. “Maybe.”
She took a huge bite of her corn dog. “Then it was a date.”
“Shush,” I muttered, but there wasn’t much heat in it.
She studied me for a second, her expression softening. “You okay?”
I thought about the house in Boston and the man who’d lived there with me. About the way my story had poured out on that rickety Ferris wheel, and the way Sterling had held it without flinching.
I exhaled slowly. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I think…I’m starting to be.”
Hattie bumped her shoulder lightly against mine. “That’s something.”
And it was.
As the Ferris wheel turned slowly behind us, its lights spinning lazy circles against the night, I had the sinking feeling that…
Some traps weren’t things you fell into.
Some traps were people.
And this time, I wasn’t sure I wanted to escape.
STERLING
