He breathed a sigh of relief. They’d established with Jace’s mom that she was okay with the almost-seventeen-year-old being on his own a bit, but Evan wasn’t sure he was. Jace was talking animatedly (Jace was talking animatedly!) with a teenage girl who was also in the line. Evan narrowed his eyes.
“Oh, calm down,” Emmy said, apparently still reading his mind. “He’s right there.”
Evan watched the girl laugh at something Jace said, and then when they got to the front of the line, Jace bought the girl one of the deep-fried monstrosities. He turned to Emmy, his eyebrows raised. “And that’s why his mom works sixty hours a week? So he can buy some girl he hardly knows an overpriced meat donut?”
“Shhh! He’s coming over!”
“All right,” Evan said, clapping his hands together once the boy reached them. “What’s next?”
“Seed art,” said Emmy decisively.
“Huh?” said Evan, momentarily distracted from his mission to protect Jace’s purity.
“Yeah, like portraits of famous people made out of seeds. You know, like Lucille Ball or Abe Lincoln?”
“We are going to make pictures of I Love Lucy out of seeds?” Evan said. Now he’d heard everything.
“No!” she scoffed. “We’re going to look at the pictures. In the fine art building!” She grabbed his arm, and he hated how much he liked it. “It will be right up your alley, Professor Winslow.”
“Yeah, um, actually…” Jace began, reminding Evan anew that he was there. Shit, he sucked at this chaperoning thing. Both he and Emmy turned to their charge. “I was thinking I might split off from you guys for a bit?”
Evan was about to answer with a “Hell, no,” when Emmy said, “Who’s your friend there?” Evan followed her gaze. The girl Jace had been talking to was still hanging around the donut stand, and she was doing it in a very obviously fake casual way.
“Her name’s Brianna. She’s showing her cow here.”
“She’s showing her cow here?” Evan repeated. The Minnesota State Fair must have either messed with his hearing or lowered his IQ or both, because he was apparently reduced to repeating everything Emmy and Jace said. But in his defense, phrases like “seed art” and “showing her cow” weren’t things that easily computed in his brain.
“Yeah, it’s a 4-H thing,” Jace explained, and Evan didn’t even bother asking what 4-H was. “She’s raised a Jersey and now she’s part of the 4-H Dairy Showcase.”
The 4-H Dairy Showcase. Yet another mystery phrase.
He opened his mouth to object, but Emmy said, “You have to bring her over here for us to meet her first, and you have to keep your phone on.”
“But—” Before Evan could get a full sentence in, Jace bounded off to fetch his dairy date.
“Oh come on,” Emmy said. “He’s nearly seventeen. And I think it will be good for him. It’s not like he ever talks to anyone, let alone girls, at home. I mean, in Dane.”
Evan didn’t miss the way she corrected herself. Didn’t like it, either. Of course, Dane wasn’t her home, but still, it grated on him. And it grated on him that it grated on him.
So, basically, he was turning into a cranky old man. He might as well start shaking his fist and yelling, “Get off my lawn!” Knowing Emmy was right, he swallowed his fear and smiled through introductions and listened as Emmy extracted information from Jace’s new friend. She was from Owatonna, which he gathered was a rural Minnesota place. She had been raising cows since before she could walk. She was in town for the duration of the fair with her parents. She was going to give Jace an insider’s tour of the livestock barn.
It was all very on the up-and-up. For God’s sake, given what he knew about the social lives of some of his college students, who were only a couple years older, Jace and Brianna’s date was practically taking place in the fifties. So after extracting one more promise to check in via text periodically, Evan reluctantly watched the teenagers depart.
“It’s going to be fine,” said Emmy, and when he didn’t respond right away, she grabbed his hand and said, “Come on, we have seeds to marvel over.”
Evan was, as Emmy had predicted, really into the seed art.
She watched him make his second round of the exhibit, getting right up close to the display panels like he was a detective looking for evidence.
She tried not to check out his ass while he did so.
She sighed. She was going to miss him so much. Honestly, she’d never met anyone like him. She couldn’t really put it into words, but he felt like…protection. Not in a gross, sexist way, but more like he stood between her and the grasping world that always wanted something from her. He was a buffer, which had been such a profound relief.
“This is extraordinary,” he said, coming to stand by her. “Folk art at its finest.”
“Hey!” she exclaimed. “Maybe you could study this.”
“I just might,” he said. Then he pointed to one of the creations. “Who is that?”
She laughed. “Katy Perry.”
“Right,” he said.
“You have no idea who that is, do you?”
“I do not.”
She took his arm. “Come on. Next stop, the midway.”
“I’m not really a ride person,” he said.
“Too bad.” She tugged to get him moving. “We lost Jace, and I need someone to go on the Ferris wheel with me.”
Twenty minutes later, they were ascending said wheel.
“When you said ‘Ferris wheel,’ I was imagining something…gentler,” Evan said as they rose toward the top of the ride.
It was true. The ride was actually a double Ferris wheel, or at least that’s what everyone called it, and it consisted of two wheels that rotated both on their own and around each other, like a binary star system.
“We’re at the top!” she said. They had slowly been working their way up, pausing every few feet as a new car on the bottom was loaded. Man, she loved this view—she’d forgotten how much. “That’s the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota,” she said, pointing to the experimental farm fields that abutted the fairgrounds. “And look at the fair! It seems so huge when you’re down there, but you can see everything from up here. Everyone looks like ants!”
She turned to him and was startled to find he wasn’t looking at anything she was pointing out. He was looking at her with a strange, intense expression.
“Come back to Dane with me, Emmy. Finish your album.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I—ahhh!”
The deceptive thing about the Ferris wheel at the fair was that once it got going, it went fast. This was no mild county fair kiddie ride.
“Ahhh!” she shrieked again, no longer able to focus, through the exhilaration, on mustering an argument as to why she couldn’t return to Iowa.
Maybe this was what Mrs. Johansen meant. Live the life that’s in front of you. As they spun faster and faster, there was no room for anything else, for the past or the future, or for worries that someone would recognize her. All she could do was hang on and enjoy the ride—literally. Live the life that’s in front of you. This was an extreme example, in that circumstances were forcing that stance. But why couldn’t she, in theory, do this every day?
She looked at Evan again. He was still staring at her, but the intensity that had been in his gaze earlier was gone. He was grinning from ear to ear, his wide smile looking like it was in danger of cracking open his face.
She laughed, and he did, too. They laughed like there was nothing to worry about in the world, not now or ever again.
It was over too soon.
But, somehow, its effects lingered.
As they made a dinner of Pronto Pups, lemonade, and warm chocolate chip cookies, they talked and laughed easily, delighting in the sights and sounds of the fair. They visited the refrigerated building where the fair’s dairy princesses were having their likenesses sculpted in butter, had their skulls read by an old-fashioned phrenology machine, and lost a ridiculous amount
of money playing skee-ball.
“Oh, hang on now!” said Evan, pointing to a darts game where players tried to pop balloons pinned to a board at the back of the booth. “I don’t like to brag, but I am actually a killer dart player.”
“You are?” Emmy said, delighted by the idea. It seemed so at odds with his serious persona.
“Yep. I think I spent more time playing darts in the grad student pub during my PhD than I actually did studying.”
“Really?” said Emmy, still unable to picture it.
“Yep.” He reached into his back pocket for the wad of game tickets they’d bought. “It was my escape from all the shit that went down with my dad.” He huffed a bitter laugh. “I used to pretend the dartboard was him, and later, the goddamned photographers who stalked the trial.”
She chuckled. “Oh, I know that impulse.”
He pointed at the prizes that were hung from the booth’s ceiling. “So pick one out, my friend.”
“Aren’t these things always rigged?”
In response, Evan cracked his knuckles and accepted the five darts the operator handed him in exchange for his tickets.
Then, one by one, he lined up his shots, flicked his hand, and popped five balloons.
“Yay!” Emmy was surprised at how happy his victory made her.
When the operator asked Evan if he wanted to pick a small prize or play again for the possibility of trading up for a larger one, he silently handed the guy more tickets.
And popped five more balloons.
She couldn’t pretend it wasn’t ridiculously hot. There shouldn’t have been anything inherently attractive about a man popping balloons with darts, and yet… The focus. The competence. The confidence. Damn, she was going to miss him.
“Ha!” Evan pumped a fist in the air, having completed his last round and scored a prize of the highest order.
“Take your pick.” The operator gestured toward the huge stuffed animals hanging from one end of the booth.
Since it appeared her choices were a giant Bart Simpson, a giant Dora the Explorer, and a giant Care Bear, she went with the Care Bear. “I’ll take the pink one with the rainbow on its belly.”
“Cheer Bear,” the grizzled carnival operator said—someone less kind would have called him a carny—and she laughed in delight, both at her prize and at the fact that this man knew Cheer Bear’s name.
As Emmy was turning to thank Evan, his phone rang. He picked it up.
“Where are you? Okay, but I don’t think—wait. Jace! Jace? Oh, hello Mrs. Kendall. Yes, I’m Evan Winslow, Jace’s chaperone. Well, I don’t want him to be any imposition.” There was a long pause while Evan nodded and furrowed his brow. “Are you sure, because really—” More furrowing. “Okay, if you’re sure.” Nodding. “All right. Let’s meet at the front gate, then.”
Emmy grinned as he hung up. “Jace and Brianna, sitting in a tree!”
He rolled his eyes. “That, as I’m sure you surmised, was Brianna’s mom. They’ve invited him to dinner. Apparently Brianna has three sisters. We’re going to the front gate now to do the meet-and-greet.”
Emmy hit the restroom before they arrived at the front gate, leaving Evan to meet Brianna’s parents. It was better for her not to talk one-on-one with people if she could avoid it.
“They’re dropping him off at our hotel around nine,” Evan said when she emerged. He paused and looked at his watch. “That will mean we’ll go four hours without having him around. Man, do I suck as a chaperone or what?”
She patted his arm. “What’s going to happen with her parents around?”
Evan looked almost pained. “He showed me a text from his mom saying it was okay.”
“Then stop worrying. I’m sure that defense will hold up in a court of law.”
“What?” he said, looking stricken.
“I’m kidding!” She hoisted Cheer Bear higher on her hip. “What do you say we go back to the hotel and consume a vegetable that has not been deep-fried? I’m beat.” It had to be ninety degrees, and she was wearing the baggy T-shirt and jeans uniform that she’d developed in Iowa. It had proven reliable as a disguise but it was hot as hell. She looked around and lowered her voice. “And I kind of want to quit while I’m ahead. I almost can’t believe I got away with this.”
Evan took the bear from her, tucked it under one arm, and offered her his other one. “You got it.”
Chapter Sixteen
Evan knocked on the door connecting his and Jace’s room with Emmy’s. “Food is here,” he called. They’d ordered salads and a bottle of wine from room service but had it delivered to him in order to reduce the possibility of anyone knowing that Emerson Quinn was in the hotel.
She swung open the door, and damned if she didn’t take his breath away. She had showered—as had he—and her hair was wet, starting to dry in waves around her face. And she was wearing her indoor clothes. The tank top and shorts were nothing remarkable. Hell, the shorts were one of the pairs she’d gotten at the mall in Dane. But the overall look was so familiar, so…her that it made his heart twist.
And she was holding that stupid, giant bear.
“Hey,” she said softly, smiling.
He had to stifle a gasp. She’d taken her colored contacts out, and the true blue of her eyes was a jolt to the system, like it was every time he saw them. He stepped back and gestured for her to come into his room, feeling a little like he should bow or something, like he was a footman making way for his queen.
She threw the bear on one of the beds and moved toward the table room service had laid. “After everything I consumed today, there is no way I should be hungry now.”
“And yet,” he said, his own stomach growling at the sight of the two Caesar salads and accompanying bread basket.
“And yet,” she agreed, lowering herself into a chair.
“It must be a relief to have all those clothes off,” he said, sitting across from her. Wait. Did that sound pervy?
“It so is,” she said, twisting the corkscrew into the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc he’d ordered. She poured them both generous glasses and lifted hers in a toast. “To Jace.” Then the corners of her lips curled up like she had thought about a secret pleasure. “To romance.”
He knew she was talking about Jace and Brianna, but there was some empty part of him that those words fell into, and once there, they clattered around uncomfortably.
She took a drink of her wine, then lowered her glass and looked right at him. Looked at him so intently he felt like she could see into that hollow, unpadded, vulnerable place that kept getting poked by her words. “So things have been kind of weird between us lately.”
He opened his mouth to respond, though he wasn’t sure if he should agree or object. Before he could decide, she held up a palm to silence him.
“You know it’s true. Anyway, bear with me. I’m going somewhere with this.” He nodded, and she continued. “Do you remember when we were talking about Mrs. Johansen’s Zen outlook on life?”
“I do.”
“And how I made this probably mostly incoherent speech about how I keep trying to live the unexamined life or whatever and it keeps backfiring?”
He chuckled. “To listen to Maude or not to listen to Maude, that is the question.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding vehemently. “When I was on that Ferris wheel, I suddenly got it.”
“Got what?” he asked, sitting up straighter. She had leaned forward so much and had such a serious look on her face that he felt like a kid under the scrutiny of the principal.
“Live the life in front of you,” she said. “That’s what Mrs. Johansen says, right? When I was on that ride, that’s all I could do. You know what I mean?”
He nodded. “There wasn’t room for anything else.” He’d felt it, too. It wasn’t like they’d been in any real danger, but the ride had been just fast enough, just thrilling enough, that he hadn’t been able to do anything except let the exhilaration course through him. He didn’t tell her that
he thought part of the effect, though, had been her. Maybe the lion’s share of the effect. Watching her mouth fall open, listening to her shriek in delight, shivering when she grabbed his arm. It had been like that night on the porch—she was all around him, and there had been no choice but to lose himself in the experience. Lose himself in her.
Suddenly, she picked up her fork and started pushing her salad leaves around her plate. She’d clearly been working up to some kind of question or announcement or something, but now she was nervous. Not knowing what else to do, he picked up his own fork.
It was halfway to his mouth when she looked directly at him. “I don’t really know how to say this, so I’m just going to say it.”
“Okay.” He speared a crouton.
“Will you have sex with me?”
The fork clattered to his plate, bounced off it, and both fork and crouton went flying a very impressive distance.
She smiled. “Hear me out.”
He blinked rapidly, nodding. Talking wasn’t something he could do right now anyway.
The smile turned into a giggle. “You should put your hand down.”
Huh? Oh, right. His arm was still suspended in midair, holding a now-imaginary fork. He managed to lower it even though it felt like it belonged to someone else entirely, like it was no longer attached to his body. Perhaps because most of the blood in said body had traveled south in response to her bold question.
“The thing is,” she went on, “I never get to have sex, unless I’m in a relationship.”
He cleared his throat.
“I can’t do a casual hookup. It’s too risky. Is there a hidden camera somewhere? Am I going to—”
“Wait. What?” he interrupted, suddenly finding his words.
She looked startled. “Yeah, people filming you without you realizing?”
He knew what a hidden camera was. He just could not fathom the epic assholery that would compel a man to secretly film his sex partner. In general. But the idea of someone doing it to Emmy in particular? Jesus Christ, his poor body. Now the blood felt like it had rushed out of his dick and into his arms. His fingers flexed. He wanted to punch someone.
Famous (A Famous novel) Page 17
