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He knocks down every target in under a minute as the booth worker stares.
I clap once. He turns to me, all smug. “See?”
“I always knew you were talented.”
The sarcasm earns me a murderous look, but he takes his oversized prize, a ridiculous plush wolf nearly as big as his torso, and carries it.
He hugs the wolf closer. “You’re the one paying for everything, by the way.”
I laugh and keep paying.
Fried pastries dusted with sugar. Chocolate-covered strawberries. Candied nuts. Mochi ice cream. Some obscene layered crepe full of cream and strawberries that he insists looks vulgar and then steals three bites of before I can try any.
At one point, he has the cat tucked into one elbow, the wolf trapped under the other arm, and a stick of caramelized fruit in one hand, while still trying to point at another stand.
I stop walking and just look at him. “You have too many things in your hands.”
“No, I don’t.”
I reach over and take the wolf before he drops it. He resists for exactly one second, then lets me hold it when he realizes it frees up a hand for more theft.
“Let me help, prince.”
He looks at me, then away, cheeks just a little warmer.
A bit later, we sit on a bench under a string of lights. He eats something covered in cinnamon sugar that’s already dusting his fingers, and he pretends not to lean his shoulder into mine when he gets tired, which is a thing he does badly, every time, and a thing I never mention.
Then he asks out of nowhere, “How did you end up with Kenji?”
He doesn’t look at me. He’s watching the lights or the path or any of the twenty other things in this garden that aren’t me, which tells me it’s been sitting in the back of his head for a while and he’s only just now gotten the courage together to hand it over.
I lick my lips. “My father got into debt with them. They asked for a son as payment.”
His head comes up. “And they accepted it?” The disbelief in his voice lasts only a heartbeat before it’s swallowed by anger. I can’t help smiling because I know exactly what I’m looking at. None of that fury belongs to me. It’s burning for me.
He catches the smile, and it wrong-foots him. “Why are you smiling?”
“I’m glad they did.”
“What do you mean?”
I just look at him, and the longer I do, the harder it becomes to imagine a version of my life that doesn’t end here, in this moment, with him.
I lean in until my nose finds his, and stay there in an Eskimo kiss. “If they hadn’t, I probably never would have met you.”
I whisper, close to his lips, “I’d do it all over again.”
I keep our noses pressed together, watching him try and fail to find a sentence that fits this.
And then, instead of any of that, he closes the gap.
He presses his lips to mine.
And I become the happiest person on this entire earth.
Ilya
By the time we get to his place, the city is already dark.
