He flicked that strange but beautiful gaze over to me. “I break jars as much as I open them,” he admitted quietly.
I bet. “What’s the heaviest thing you’ve ever lifted?”
That smooth forehead furrowed, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a couple of girls coming toward us, tilting their heads in our direction, their eyes glued to Alex.
He didn’t notice, or if he did, he ignored it.
“A fully loaded cargo ship.”
“Was it hard?”
He looked at me and raised an eyebrow.
So it was like that? I reached over and squeezed his forearm.
The muscles beneath my fingers flexed, and I whistled again, pleased with him for playing along, before I let go.
I guess now that I wasn’t on his shit list, and maybe since he understood I wasn’t trying to kidnap or take advantage of him, he’d decided he could be friendlier. I’d take it. Gladly.
We caught up to a family walking in front of us, four people across. A teenage boy wearing a shirt with the symbol of the Trinity on it was holding his arm out, letting his grandma use him as a cane. It was so sweet.
“How do you stay in shape? It’s not like you can go to the gym,” I asked as soon as we passed them. I took the final sip of our drink and threw the plastic into the nearest recycling bin.
“It’s natural.”
I groaned. Superior genes, my fucking ass. “Incredible, beautiful, rich, and a naturally fit. The world is so unfair.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him glance at me, and his voice was a little funny as he asked, “You think that about me?”
“I was talking about your sister.”
I was pretty sure he wasn’t even expecting the chuckle that snuck out of him.
I tipped my head and grinned at him.
The slight smile he’d made while he laughed slowly fell off, and I looked away.
We finished going through the mall and out the electronics store, heading to the parking lot where he put our things in the back seat. We got inside, and I purposely kept my mouth closed as he pulled out of the lot and drove in the same direction we’d come from. He drove and he drove. My mind must have been too busy originally to notice just how far away we’d been from his house.
But all of a sudden, the Ferris wheel I’d been eyeballing on the way to the mall got bigger and bigger. The next thing I knew, he was pulling into the dirt lot for the fair.
We were at the carnival.
I slowly swiveled in the seat to look at him. “Really?”
He put the car into park and turned it off before turning toward me too. “Yes, really.”
I shouldn’t have been so excited. I knew it. It was just a carnival, like all the others I’d driven by countless times. There were plenty of things I was used to doing alone. The movies? No problem. Out to eat? Every once in a while, but only because I was cheap and ate at home. Since my grandma had passed, I’d gone to two concerts, even though I’d been paranoid the whole time for no good reason.
But that was it.
It was stupid how excited I was, I thought, as I took in the Ferris wheel some more, and the rides that looked kind of sketchy but fun with all their multicolored lights on. There were booths with games and a couple cart-looking things with signs that claimed they had funnel cakes, corn dogs, and popcorn.
“You ever been to one of these before?” I asked, lifting my hands toward my mouth and blowing into them. The temperature was getting a little cooler. How fucking lucky had we been that it hadn’t been this cold while we’d been trying to get away?
“Nope.” He put his hands into the pockets of his jacket but not because he was cold.
He didn’t ask if I had, and I had a feeling he knew the answer. “We don’t have to stay for long. I’d be happy just getting a funnel cake, if you’ll let me borrow money. I only have four dollars left.”
