He opened the passenger door. She gathered the vine in one arm and took his offered hand with her other and stepped up, and he closed the door and stood on the sidewalk for a moment looking at nothing in particular while he got himself in order.
He was taking Ivy Lopez out on the town. He hadn't been this straightforwardly happy about something in longer than he could immediately calculate, and the calculation could wait, because he was already rounding the front of the truck and the evening was warm and she was in his passenger seat with a vine of his best tomatoes and he was grinning like an idiot and there was nobody on this side of the truck to see it.
She reached over and took his hand when he climbed in. Her fingers slid between his and settled. Finn looked down at their joined hands on the center console and felt something in his chest do something he chose not to name at sixty miles an hour.
He needed that hand to shift gears. He did not take it back.
"What restaurant are we going to?" she said.
"We're not going to a restaurant."
She looked at him. "We're not?"
"We'd spend the whole night critiquing the food." He checked the mirror, pulled out from the curb. "I want your attention on me for once."
"All I do is think about you."
She said it as if it was a simple fact. Like she was reporting the weather. Like she was reading from a recipe.
Finn looked at her hand in his. Looked at her. Looked back at the road.
He noticed, then, the purse. Small. Barely more than a strap and a clasp. It was the kind of bag that held a set of keys and nothing else. No phone-shaped bulk. No glow from a screen.
Ivy caught him looking. "There's no one else I want to talk to tonight. The people who matter know I'm with you. And I know nothing's going to happen to me while I'm with you."
Finn's heart did something that had no business happening at an intersection.
The horn hit them like a thunderclap. He slammed on the brakes. The truck lurched to a stop, half into the intersection, the cross traffic sliding past with a second outraged horn for good measure. They sat frozen. Ivy's hand gripped his, both of them staring straight ahead at the red light they had absolutely just run halfway through.
Ivy made a sound. He looked at her. She had her free hand pressed over her mouth, and her shoulders were shaking.
He started laughing first. Or she did. It was impossible to establish afterward who was responsible because it happened at the same moment — both of them, completely, the kind of laugh that had nowhere to go but out. She laughed until she was leaning forward over the tomato vine, and he laughed until his eyes watered, and the light turned green, and neither of them moved for a full second after it did.
He took his hand back. Put both of them on the wheel, where they belonged.
"Both hands," she said, still catching her breath.
"Both hands," he agreed.
She settled back into her seat, the Sun Golds in her lap, the evening still warm and entirely intact. After a moment, she reached over and rested her hand on the console between them. Not taking his. Just there; close, available.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Ivy had not expected an amusement park.
She had expected somewhere nice, somewhere with a menu, somewhere that would give her hands something to do and her eyes somewhere to look that wasn't directly at Finn Hargrove in a dark green flannel that fit him like an argument she was losing. She had not expected the lights.
They came up over the hill as he turned off the county road. The whole park was laid out below them in the early evening, strung with color, the Ferris wheel turning slowly against a sky that was just starting to think about pink. Ivy pressed her hand to the window like a child and didn't care.
He was good at the games. She shouldn't have been surprised; the man had hands built for precision. But watching him at the dart booth was something else entirely. He stood at the line with the easy stance of someone who had assessed the situation and found it manageable. He threw three darts in quick succession. Two balloons popped, and then a third. The teenage attendant handed over the stuffed animal. It was a large bear. Brown. Extremely round. She took the bear and hugged it.
She won him a frog.
She'd drifted toward the age-and-weight booth mostly because the man running it had a magnificent mustache, and then the man had looked her over and offered to guess her age in exchange for a guess of her own, and Ivy had looked at the man running the booth — the posture, the hands, the way he held his weight — and said forty-three, one-seventy-eight, and he'd stared at her for a full four seconds before handing her the prize selection.
Finn accepted the frog with the dignity of a man who was going to put it in the cab of his truck and never speak of it again and also keep it there indefinitely.
He took her hand, and they walked toward the Ferris wheel. The gondola rocked slightly as it sealed them in, and the park dropped away below them in a wash of light and noise, and then they were rising and it was quiet in the way that high places were quiet, the world made small and manageable beneath them.
