He nodded.
Putting my own hands into the pockets of the jacket I had on, I hustled faster to catch up with his long stride. It was just barely starting to get dark, and there weren’t a ton of people around, but there were some. Little kids clinging to their parents. Couples holding hands. Groups of teenagers clustered together, sharing cotton candy and pointing at different attractions, like they were trying to decide what to do. I watched Alex keeping an eye on an older man pushing a wheelchair with a woman about the same age in it.
“Let’s get tickets first,” Alex said suddenly, putting his hand on the back of my neck and steering me toward a cart with a short line in front of it.
I guess he’d been serious about being okay with the touching thing. It wasn’t like I minded it. I liked the way he made my skin kind of tingle.
“Really?” I asked him, peering up at his profile. Part of me still couldn’t believe it.
His hand tightened a little as his gaze dropped to mine briefly before he looked around. “Yes, really.”
“We can leave whenever you want. I’m just happy to be here.” I thought about it. “But could we get a funnel cake for sure? Please?”
He snickered, but the corner of his mouth hitched up a little as he gave my neck another little squeeze. “You got it, Cookie.”
* * *
“It’s rigged,” I whispered right before shoving a handful of cotton candy into my mouth as we stood in front of a booth with figures lined up in rows that you were supposed to knock down with softballs.
“No, you just suck at throwing things,” Alex said, holding the cotton candy in one hand and pulling pieces off it with the other.
I must have been hanging out with him too much because I grunted. “Some people didn’t get to play softball,” I muttered.
“I can tell.”
I shot him a dirty look, but part of his mouth was flat in that amused expression of his.
“Money was tight?” he actually asked though.
Oh, he was curious about me. “Yes, but that wasn’t why. It took me six months to petition my grandparents into letting me wear pants. I can only imagine how me asking to play a sport would have gone,” I told him. “If I could’ve played something, it would’ve been volleyball.” I snuck my hand over to pluck some more cotton candy before I asked, “Did you play sports ever?”
“Soccer in high school,” he answered. “It helped me learn more control.”
“Were you any good?”
Oh, those eyes were crinkling. “I couldn’t be too good, that was the whole point.”
I groaned even as I smiled at the employee that I’d given a handful of tickets to—for the balls I’d gotten—and turned to the shit talker who’d sat on the Ferris wheel with me a few minutes ago, looking super interested in his surroundings, like he had never been so high in the sky before. He was a good actor. But more than anything, I appreciated how much of a good sport he was being letting me do this. I’d half expected him to wait around while I got on.
He’d bought so many tickets, I’d almost asked if he wanted to get a refund on some of them.
He had no idea that it meant the world to me actually, and when I’d tried to tell him that, he’d shoved the cotton candy in my face and told me to help him eat it.
So I’d dropped it.
“Let’s see you do better then, hotshot,” I said.
He held the spun sugar out, and I took it. I couldn’t see his eyeballs, but I knew we didn’t have too much time left even though it was quickly getting dark. I figured we could get away with no one seeing the real color once it happened, at least as long as they didn’t do their glow thing. Alex handed the guy a few more tickets and took the balls from him.
“I have to knock them all down to win the big one?” Alex asked him.
The young man scratched at his neck, clearly bored. That’s when I noticed there was a tattoo on the back of his hand: three black triangles. The “sign” of the Trinity.
I didn’t miss the way Alex’s cheek kind of twitched, and I definitely didn’t miss the determined glint in his eyes as he casually lifted his arm and threw the first ball, apparently not caring he had a fan right here.
He knocked down a clown.
He threw the next and the one after that and knocked them all down too.
