Ivy looked out at the county spread dark and warm in every direction. The farmland. The distant thread of the highway. Somewhere out there, the Cherokee Purples on the vine.
Finn's hand found hers in the space between them on the seat. She turned. He was already looking at her — had been looking at her, she thought, for longer than she'd turned around to find — and the Ferris wheel crested its arc and held them there at the top of the world with all that light below. Finn Hargrove cupped her jaw in one broad, careful hand and kissed her.
His thumb traced her cheekbone, and she leaned into it and kissed him back with everything she had. The wheel began its slow descent, and neither of them noticed for a while. When she opened her eyes, they were halfway down, and the lights were coming back up around them. The gondola bumped to a stop. They got out. He kept her hand.
She found the cotton candy stand twenty minutes later.
"No," Finn said before she'd offered anything.
She bought the largest bag they had. Pink. Aggressively pink. She pulled a piece off and put it in her mouth and made a sound that was at least partially genuine and watched him try not to look at her while she did it.
"It's nothing but sugar," he said.
"It's happiness in a bag," she said.
He looked at the cotton candy with the expression of a man conducting a principled last stand. She offered him a piece. He declined with a single glance. She shrugged and ate another piece, and they walked past the ring toss and the spinning teacups and the whole warm noise of the park, and she didn't push it.
Then he stopped walking.
She looked up at him. He was looking at her mouth.
"You have—" he said.
She could see it happening — the settling of his expression that meant he'd assessed the situation and reached a conclusion — and then he kissed her again, slower this time, deliberate. She tasted the surprise of it on him when he lifted his head. The way he paused. The way his hand tightened slightly at her waist.
He came back for another.
She smiled against his mouth. "I thought it offended you."
"It does," he said, and kissed her again anyway.
She held the cotton candy bag at her side and let him. The park moved around them in all its loud and spinning colors. Ivy thought that this was the best use of processed sugar she had ever encountered, and she should put it in the vlog.
She would not put it in the vlog.
The sun came up while they weren't paying attention. They had ridden everything twice. They had eaten things on sticks. Finn had refused to ride the spinning teacups on the grounds that they served no purpose and then ridden them anyway whenshe'd pointed out that fun served a purpose, and had spent the entire rotation with his jaw set and his eyes forward like a man completing a task, which was possibly the funniest thing she'd ever seen. She'd bought him a lemonade at two in the morning from a cart staffed by a teenager who appeared to be asleep standing up. He'd found her a bench when her shoes started to hurt and sat beside her without being asked and said nothing, which was its own kind of language.
He drove her back as the sky went pink and then gold, the county roads empty and long in the early morning light, her shoes off and her feet tucked under her, and the stuffed bear in her lap. The frog was on the dash.
He pulled up outside her place at seven in the morning and cut the engine.
She didn't get out.
He didn't suggest that she should.
She turned in her seat toward him. He turned toward her. The morning came in gold through the windshield, and she thought she would remember this light; the way it found the angle of his jaw, the way it made everything look like something worth keeping.
She kissed him first this time. His hand was in her hair, and her hand was at his collar, and the bear had been relocated to the back seat at some point by mutual unconscious agreement. The morning kept brightening outside without either of them moving toward it.
She pulled back to breathe. He followed. She laughed, quiet and helpless, against his mouth, and felt him smile in response — the undefended one, the one that made her chest ache with how much she'd wanted to be the reason for it.
"I should go in," she said.
"You should," he agreed. Neither of them moved.
She kissed him again. He kissed her back as if he had opinions about her going inside, none of them in favor of it. She was working on a response to that when the knock came.
Three sharp raps on the driver's side window.
