Summer in the City: The perfect feel-good summer romance

by Emma Jackson

We shuffled onto the carriage and tried to find somewhere to stand where we weren’t pressed together. We failed. I came up to his armpit which, luckily, was a very fragrant armpit despite it being the end of another long, hot day. I couldn’t help but notice how he shielded me from other people trying to squeeze in on top of me.

  ‘Tough day?’ I asked as we started moving.

  ‘Not especially. Why?’

  ‘You look very grim. We’re going to Coney Island Boardwalk not Alcatraz – even if we don’t find Trevor, it’s going to be fun.’

  ‘I don’t like fairgrounds,’ he said simply and turned his head to look out of the window.

  O-kay, I mouthed, and he looked back at me as though he’d caught it out of the corner of his eye. I was so close I could see the little dots of stubble peeking through just beneath his bottom lip. It was a very firm-looking bottom lip, the line straight across like it had been drawn with a pencil and ruler or chiselled. His cheekbones were like that too: angular, sharp, uncompromising in their attractiveness.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked.

  ‘Me?’ We swayed as the train moved on the tracks, our bodies aligned but not touching, forwards and backwards. ‘I love them. I’m not allergic to fun.’

  He didn’t bite back at my little dig. ‘I meant your day. How is your work going? You said you were struggling with your book and helping me was supposed to alleviate your writer’s block.’

  ‘Oh.’ I tightened my grip around the grab rail, a little flummoxed by the sheer fact he’d remembered and asked. ‘I am making a little ground. I’m still majorly panicking, and my deadline is a better work of fiction than anything I’ve ever written but…’ I shrugged ‘…that’s kinda normal.’

  ‘Panic is normal?’ He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Absolutely. This is our first stop, c’mon.’

  I was not allergic to fun. I was simply not a fan of places like Coney Island, packed full of people barely secured into towering rides and screaming as they plummeted towards the ground. Noelle wasn’t to know that though, so I was doing my best not to sulk about her comment on the train.

  We got to the Boardwalk as the sun was setting; the coloured flashing signs a garish contrast to the soft pinks and peaches spilling across the sky. We walked along the wooden decking and the pop music was blaring so loudly I couldn’t hear the sea but I could see it, lapping at a sandy shore, glittering with the fading summer light. Would I be able to convince Noelle to take a walk down there with me, or would she be too suspicious of my intentions?

  ‘Oh wow, d’you smell that?’ She breathed in a deep lungful, and looked at me with that smile she had, like she’d figured out some secret to life no one else had.

  ‘Fried onions?’

  ‘No, the sea. Fresh air. Isn’t it so much easier to breathe now?’

  ‘Definitely.’ After a stuffy hour crammed onto public transport, anywhere would have felt more refreshing than a subway carriage but there was a tang of salt beneath the waft of food, which helped me shake off some of the fatigue of the office. Perhaps I would be able to convince her to walk down to the shore after all. ‘So, where is this office we’re supposed to meet him at?’

  ‘He said to head for the margarita hut and take a left by Hook a Duck. It’s a prime location.’

  Only if a prime location could also be a small tin shed, down an unlit alleyway between the games and beverage huts. There was also no one there.

  ‘Great,’ I muttered. ‘It’s the bar all over again. This was a long way to come to get stood up. Or worse.’

  When she offered to call the man, I’d forgotten that I’d made her agree not to meet up with people anymore if they could provide us with the information over the phone. And then she’d gone ahead and made the arrangement. I could hardly leave her to go on her own after the incident at the bar, even if I suspected the only reason we were here was because she wanted an evening at the fair.

  ‘He’s probably just gone to fix a ride. That’s his job right?’ She shook her head and turned on her heel. ‘Let’s give it a half hour and try again. We can get margaritas and corn dogs. You ever had a corn dog?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so,’ I said warily, following her back the way we came. I avoided looking at the swooping, spinning cars of the ride in the distance, but the shrieks fading in and out carried over to us and made me just as tense.

  ‘Oh, you have to try one.’ She was practically bouncing along, wearing a bright green sundress that tied up with a bow at the back. I wanted to hook my finger in it and pull her back against me. To get her from stop focusing all her happiness on the crazy, clichéd madness around us and maybe concentrate a bit on me. I wished I could show her I enjoyed fun too, but nothing about this situation was making me relaxed. We had time to kill at a fairground, so she was no doubt going to suggest going on rides until we chased up the lead for my no-account father again. I was between a rock and a hard place and she was the only soft thing nearby.

  ‘You weren’t kidding about loving funfairs, were you?’

  Margarita Island was bustling with customers queuing and standing around the small shaded tables. She beckoned for me to catch up before she began threading her way through the crowd to find the end of the queue. We were forced to squeeze in close and it was hard to avoid brushing up against her. ‘My family come here at least once every summer,’ she told me once we’d joined the line. ‘And when Lucy, Tim and I were in middle school, Mom and Dad would let us travel here by ourselves. We’d spend a couple of weeks saving up all our allowance, then blow it on all those rigged games and cotton candy and make ourselves sick. It was brilliant.’

  ‘Lucy and Tim are your brother and sister?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, two of them. Lucy is oldest, then me, then Tim.’

  ‘He was the one who called you at the bar the other day.’

  ‘Yep.’ She averted her gaze and we shuffled closer to the window, which was bordered by rope lights. So, she still wanted to avoid talking about dating, did she? I might have taken some pleasure in persisting on that topic, just to rile her, but tonight I found I had no desire to ruin her good mood. Fond family memories were precious things.

  When we got to the bar, she insisted on ordering and paying for the drinks and we made it over to a table near the edge of the boardwalk.

  ‘Who are your other siblings then?’ I asked, taking a healthy gulp of alcohol.

  ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  She shrugged a little and licked some salt off her lips. ‘After Tim, it’s Sam, then the twins, Alfie and Teddy, then there’s Daisy, the baby – who is now thirteen.’

  ‘Are you close?’

  ‘There’s no option but to be close, growing up in a modestly sized house, as one of seven.’ She laughed.

  ‘I don’t believe that’s true.’

  She cocked her head at me like she didn’t understand, and it occurred to me that maybe she didn’t. For all her smarts about people, she couldn’t fathom not being close to her family. Something like envy filled me. I had my fair share of love with my immediate family, so I understood it, but I also knew that family didn’t always have to love you. That was the whole reason we were here after all.

  ‘It must have been a challenge though. How did your parents manage when you were small?’

  ‘Oh, organised chaos I suppose you’d call it. And we all had to pitch in. We still do.’

  ‘You helped a lot with the younger ones then?’

  ‘Helped, dangled them out of windows by their ankles, whatever you want to call it,’ she joked. Or I assumed she was joking and when she saw the concern in my expression, she laughed. ‘I’m kidding. I mean, that happened once, and it was Tim doing it to Sam, but we got there before he dropped him.’ She wrinkled her nose as she thought about it. ‘I think it was hardest for Sam actually. He’s naturally quiet and kinda stuck in the middle. Lucy, Tim and I only have a year between us each. Then Sam’s four years younger than Tim.
He’s closest in age to the twins but obviously they are their own little unit too.’

  ‘What about Daisy?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s a lot younger, but Daisy…well, let’s just say, nothing fazes her. I reckon she could handle anyone or anything.’

  She sounded a lot like another Kingston woman I knew. I looked around and experienced an odd sense of detachment. My father had been here. He’d walked by this beach and these rides, worked on them. I drained the rest of my cocktail, eager for the sharp tang of citrus to cut through the dull feeling in my chest.

  ‘Take it easy there, bud.’ Noelle raised her eyebrows. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to carry you back to the train if you drink too much on an empty stomach. Ready for a corn dog yet?’

  ‘Is there nothing…healthier available?’

  ‘We’re at the funfair, Stephen, live a little.’

  ‘That’s why I like healthy food. To increase my probability of living a lot.’

  ‘Pssh. A little of what you fancy does you good too y’know.’

  ‘Oh, I’m aware of that,’ I said softly as my eyes grazed over her face. A pink flush stole across her cheekbones and my momentary thrill at her response immediately crashed as I remembered what I’d promised her. No flirting. Was she right and I was incapable of interacting with her any other way? I cleared my throat. ‘Look, I’ll eat the corn dog if it’s that important to you. But…only if you beat me at one of the games.’

  Her eyes immediately lit up. ‘Okay, you’ve got a deal. What game?’

  ‘You can choose.’

  ‘So sure you’re gonna win, huh?’

  I just smiled. I had what I wanted from earlier – her excitement focused on me – so it felt like I already had.

  We finished our drinks and she dragged me around the stalls, deliberating between hook a duck, basketball tossing and the shooting gallery, finally settling on the latter. ‘Ladies first.’

  ‘Great.’ She picked up the rifle and tucked it into her shoulder, squinting down the barrel at the sliding targets inside the booth. She blew impatiently at the wisps of hair straying across her face and I reached out without thinking, smoothly them back and tucking them behind her ear.

  Her eyes widened and caught mine. I dropped my hand and stepped back.

  She took a deep breath and proceeded to shoot down every single target, like a secret assassin or the terminator I’d likened her to the other day. A siren went off, red lights flashing, proclaiming her as a winner. She lowered her weapon, an impression left from the butt of the rifle in the smooth skin of her shoulder. She bit her lip, trying to control the huge, proud grin on her face.

  ‘You hustled me,’ I accused her, but I was smiling too.

  ‘This was your idea, and I did tell you I came here loads when I was a kid.’

  The attendant came over to ask her what she wanted to claim as her prize. She turned to the kid who was playing next to her, a little boy of nine or ten, struggling to hold the long rifle in his skinny arms, and offered for him to pick what he would like.

  ‘It hasn’t put you off kids then?’ I commented when she turned back to me finally after an in-depth discussion with the boy and his parents about how they’d been enjoying their day out.

  ‘What hasn’t?’

  ‘Having to help out so much with your younger siblings all the time.’

  ‘Of course not. And the thing is, the helping out goes both ways. For all the support I give, whenever I need it, they’re always there for me too.’ She picked up my rifle, attached by the long wire to the counter, and passed it over. I lifted it to my shoulder, looking for the little glass sight-finder, which was scratched and blurry. Not that there was much point in the exercise.

  ‘What could you possibly need help with?’ I asked, only half-joking. ‘Don’t you know everything?’

  She moved closer, my senses suddenly full of the scent of her coconut suntan lotion and the warmth of her body. She put her hand around mine to guide me into a better position with the barrel, my skin tingling from the touch of hers even as she quickly stepped back again. ‘We all need a little help from time to time, Stephen.’

  Chapter Eight

  By the time we’d eaten our corn dogs, Stephen looking like I was making him chow down on uncooked roadkill, and we’d played a round of hook a duck, which we both equally sucked at, over thirty minutes had passed.

  When we went to the little maintenance hut, we found a large man in overalls with curly dark hair and an attitude that made me think the rides gave him a permanent migraine. The conversation was brusque but efficient. Trevor had been good at fixing the dodgems but left to become a taxi driver. That was all he knew, although he did have the address of where Trevor had lived with a woman called Lorna for a while.

  As we left the hut and made our way back towards the games and rides, Stephen slipped his phone into his pocket, the new information tapped into it, and slowed down.

  ‘That address is back in Brooklyn. And now we’ve got another new profession. If he did ever become a taxi driver. This is starting to feel like a wild goose chase.’

  Any mood lift he’d experienced while we drunk margaritas and played carnival games had slipped away. ‘You can’t want to stop looking now? We’re getting closer.’

  ‘Are we?’ He furrowed his brow, dark eyebrows slanting down as he squinted at the flashing bulbs running all the way up the high-striker game. ‘I feel like there should be a quicker, smarter way than traipsing all over the city, hoping people remember him and don’t mind breaking data protection laws to give us his address.’

  I chewed my lip. There was another option open to us. Now we knew he’d become a taxi driver, I could probably go to my dad and beg a favour. He’d be able to access the records of all the licensed taxi drivers and get a current address. But that was only if Trevor did become a taxi driver, like Stephen said, and was still doing it. Really, we needed something more solid, like a date of birth.

  ‘What if we give up tonight and he’s sitting in that house or apartment right now?’

  ‘It was twenty years ago. You’re the one who swears by character profiling. So far, his pattern has been to move on every couple of years. To find his current residency we’re going to have to follow a trail of breadcrumbs across ten more addresses.’

  ‘Possibly,’ I agreed. ‘But at most that’s ten days of looking. You’ve got two months left in New York. It doesn’t sound insurmountable.’

  ‘Only if those moves are around New York. For all we know, this rolling stone ended up in Australia,’ he said dryly.

  ‘It’s a fair point, but at the moment we have an address in Brooklyn, so no point worrying about it…unless you want to ask the lawyers to take over?’

  He sighed and looked back at me. His dark eyes were fathomless, filled with fifty per cent steely determination and fifty per cent enigma. ‘No. I’m not giving up.’

  ‘Good. In the meantime I know exactly what you need.’ I hooked my arm through his and began leading him through the attractions, around the crowds of kids and adults, queuing for cotton candy and turns on the carousel.

  ‘What do I need?’ he asked, suspicion colouring his voice as we approached the Wonder Wheel.

  ‘Some light relief.’ I dragged him through the gap in the barriers.

  ‘Look, I don’t think—’ he started.

  ‘You need to think less and do more,’ I interrupted, poking him in the lower back to herd him forward. He was stiff as a board; I could feel his muscles all tense and…hot.

  ‘I’m not in the mood for funfair rides,’ he gritted out through his teeth and tried to turn but I paid the attendant and clamped my hands on his shoulders, propelling him into the next free cage.

  It was one of the blue ones, which meant it would swing. Excellent. ‘Which is precisely why you need to go on one. Just one. C’mon. Sit, sit. We’ll have an amazing view.’

  He folded himself down onto the seat. It could have been the neon lighting, but his face w
as looking pale – maybe I’d made a mistake forcing him to eat the corn dog. I sat down too. It was cosy and I could smell the gentle spice of his aftershave. The cage swung as the attendant closed and checked the door. A second later we started the slow rotation and the balmy air moved just enough that I sighed. It was going to be so fantastically cool up at the top. I couldn’t wait.

  ‘So, tell me about you and Nick. Did you ever dangle your little brother out of a window by the ankles?’

  ‘Christ no.’ Stephen shook his head sharply and looked down at his feet. The column of his throat rippled with a hard swallow.

  It was such a vehement response that I was taken aback. I studied him for a moment – the sudden changes in his body language. He didn’t look great if truth be told. I mean, he looked as delectable as always, but he also looked a bit sweaty and drawn. And all his usual poise and control was strangely absent. His shoulders were practically up by his earholes.

  ‘Are you okay? Is the corn-dog-margarita-mix not agreeing with you?’

  He lifted his head and his brown eyes were even darker than normal, his pupils blown up wide. ‘I’m fine,’ he said tightly.

  No. He really wasn’t. I thought back to how tense he’d been when I bumped into him at the rooftop bar. He’d not gone near the edge once. Not even looked behind him at the view.

  ‘Stephen…are you scared of heights?’

  Finally, he nodded.

  ‘Like a proper phobia?’

  He paused for a moment and then gave another little nod.

  ‘Then why the hell’d you let me get you in here? That was pretty dumb.’

  ‘No need to be insulting.’ He gave a weak laugh.

  ‘True. But still.’

  ‘You are very bossy and surprisingly strong.’

  ‘Well, that’s true enough too I suppose.’ I glanced out the side; we were only a quarter of the way around. We still had the highest bit of the rise to do. ‘Right, so what am I going to have to deal with here? Are you gonna pass out or start screaming and trying to climb out the cage?’

  He shut his eyes. ‘Of course I’m not going to try and climb out – d’you think I’m insane?’