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“I have never been more amped up and yet exhausted in my entire life.” She set a greasy paper bag in the fridge then ran and flopped on the bed. “The show was crazy.”
Her chest heaved as if she’d run the whole way here. Her cheeks were pink. Her shirt lifted an inch, exposing a touch of creamy skin.
“I saw you,” I said, peeling my eyes away.
“On TV?”
I nodded.
“I thought I was going to hate it, and I kind of did at first, but I also kinda loved the chaos once I found the glue gun and just went for it.” She rolled onto her side and propped her head in her hand. “It was like riding a roller coaster in the rain. The motion amps up your adrenaline, and it’s fun and exciting, but you also feel like you might hurl, and you get pounded in the face with a thousand tiny projectiles.”
It sounded a little like the way I felt when I was close to her.
I said, “You looked in your element.”
“Right?” She grinned at me. “If this is the kind of thing I’m in for every single day, I’ll probably explode. I don’t know if that’s going to be a good thing or a bad thing, but it’ll definitely be big.”
Every day? Did she mean every day they filmed? Or did she mean it the way it sounded? I asked, “Don’t these types of things have a set day of the week that they air?”
“You’d think so, but this one is some kind of truncated event, going Monday through Thursday for the next three weeks.”
Sounded like bad business. Viewers couldn’t be availableeverynight, let alone there would be a strain on the production staff and contestants.
“What’s the face?” Morgan asked.
“That sounds exhausting for you.”
“It definitely will be,” she said. “But it’s also really different. It’s unexpected. And it just might be good for me.”
This was the most jovial I’d ever seen her.
“I’m happy for you,” I said.
“Thanks. I’m happy for me, too, so long as they don’t make me appear too terrible. I want to hear all about your day, but it’s getting late, so we’ll have to chat on the go. Give me like two minutes.”
“All right.”
She hurried over to one of the boxes, then peered up at me through her thick lashes. “Turn around.”
I did as she asked, and listened to her rustling around behind me. Was she getting changed? Images of her stripping out of her purple shirt and slowly gliding her shorts down over her wide hips filled my head. Part of me hoped she’d stop there, decide not to put on anything else, and tell me what she really wanted to do was stay in bed tonight, together.
“Okay, ready,” she said.
I turned around and found her wearing horn-rimmed glasses and an oversized pink onesie with bunny ears on top. It was the opposite of what I’d imagined, and strangely delightful in its own way. “You look like Ralphie fromA Christmas Story.”
“Exactly!” She bounced on her toes.
I couldn’t help but smile.
“What should I expect at the carnival?” I asked.
“It’s a surprise.”
“I don’t think I like surprises.”
Her jaw dropped. “Everyone likes surprises.”
“Not me.”
