Page 47 of Sharp Lies

I shrugged. “I think quickly. What can I say?”

Instead of answering, Warren stuck his fingers right into my ribs and started tickling me, and soon I was way too busy trying to get away from him to even remember any of the men we didn’t want to see—or the reasons we didn’t want to see them. By the time we got our tickets and got through the gates, my mind had turned to more important matters.

Like what I wanted to eat first and which rides we were going to go on.

***

WE SPENT THE FIRST hour just walking through the carnival taking everything in and deciding what we were going to do, although that wasn’t my preference. I wanted to jump on every ride we saw, eat at every booth that had an offering, and play every game we passed, but Warren had a plan.

“You came to a carnival with a plan?” I asked, not sure whether I was horrified or amused.

“Of course,” he said, like this was the most obvious thing in the world. “Come here and see what they have, then build our schedule from that. That way we make sure we only do the stuff we absolutely want to do, rather than wasting our time on things we’ll regret later.”

I felt my eyebrows rising sky high and fought the laugh that wanted to break out of me. “Wasting our time on things we’ll regret later? Is that... Is that how you live your entire life.”

“When I’m doing something I care about, yeah,” he said, looking out over the crowd. When he turned to me, though, his eyes were dancing. “Why do you think it took me so long to warm up to you?”

“Let me guess: You were seeing what I had to offer and trying to decide whether I had things you wanted to do or not.”

The sarcasm in my voice was heavy, but Warren didn’t respond to it.

“‘Course,” he replied. “I could see that you were beautiful and probably incredibly fun. You’d been out on the road doing whatever the hell you wanted to and had the laughter in your eyes to prove it. But I wanted to watch and see whether I thought you had anything beyond that before I spent any time trying to get to know you.”

Okay, that made a certain sort of sense. Sure, it was also sort of insulting, but it did have a very Warren-esque logic to it. “And what did you decide?” I asked, deciding to see it as a joke rather than an insult.

He turned his head and ducked down a bit, his next words for my ears only. “I realized that you were even better than I could have hoped,” he said, his lips brushing the hair around my ear and sending shivers down my spine. “I realized that I never could have dreamed something like you, and that you’d be worth every second of my time. And that I’d be lucky to have you.”

I felt my entire body light up like one of the old-fashioned lanterns above us, and wondered how I was even still walking when my joints felt like they’d melted. “Is that so?” I breathed. “And when did you figure that out?”

“The night I saw that asshole break into your house and ran to save you. And then again the night you came to save me. Truth is, I’ve been thinking it ever since.”

He straightened up, took my hand, and kept walking like he hadn’t just said the most romantic thing possible here in a crowded carnival where anyone might have seen this man leaning over me like he owned me.

Like he hadn’t just melted my heart in my chest with his words.

And I stumbled after him, trying to remember how my legs were supposed to work and that I didn’t really know this man and couldn’t afford to fall head over heels for him.

Yet.

***

WE GOT THROUGH WARREN’S planning sequence more quickly than I expected, partially because I was having so much fun watching his process. We walked the rides first, making a list of what we wanted to get on, and then did the games, where Warren stopped for long enough to watch each game and try to decide what our chances of winning actually were. Then we went past the food booths.

“Because we won’t want to eat until after we’ve done everything else,” he said, like this was some sort of given.

I told him that I might want to eat before we played any games, and he looked so shocked that it sent me into spasms of laughter.

Still, I liked that he had a plan—or at least knew how to put one together. It was another aspect of that safety thing, where he made me feel settled and secure, and like he knew exactly what he was doing all the time. He told me that he’d started planning like this when he was overseas with the Marines and that it had saved his life more than once, when things went wrong and he had to think quickly.

“It’s a lot easier to think quickly when you already had it all laid out in your mind,” he said.

I’d never thought of it that way—I’d been too busy living life depending on what came my way—but now that he said it, I started to see what he meant. If you knew what you were expecting five steps in advance and step three went sideways on you, it mattered less. Because you already knew where steps four and five should go. Sure, step three might go so badly that you had to reroute everything, but even if that was true, you still knew where you’d wanted to end up.

It was the sort of thing that made sense to people who’d spent their entire childhood not knowing where they were going or how they were going to get there and had then spent their adult life trying to fix that problem.

I slipped my hand into his as we walked toward the first ride, wishing I could make him feel as safe as he made me feel, and sent a silent thought up into the sky thanking whoever had been in charge that they’d brought him into my life.

And then I saw Tony and one of his friends coming to a stop right in front of us.