He didn’t think he could make that any clearer.
She pressed her lips together. Then touched her fingers to them.
She turned and wobbled just a bit when she left, and he thought it was only right that a woman who had altered his own center of gravity to experience a little axis-tilt of her own.
It wasn’t easy to drive from the school parking lot back to Eden’s Garden while the dirtiest, hottest, sweetest kiss she’d ever participated in reverberated in her cells like a million dramatic little cymbal clashes, especially since she hadn’t scheduled “Get a grip” into her calendar that day. She didn’t even know how she’d draw that on her whiteboard.
Gabe Caldera should be a controlled substance. There was no way on earth anyone could kiss him and not want to do that again.
And again.
And again and again and again.
Such that logic and reason, when they finally ventured back into her awareness at around the third stop sign from home, felt like intrusions into reality, not a restoration of it.
But ultimately they infiltrated her giddiness (“Dear Diary—Gabe Caldera kissed me!”) and a rather aggressive, almost punitive, sobriety set in.
Making out with the principal in the middle of the day when Mrs. Maker could unexpectedly pop in to ask, “Was that tuna or turkey?” wasn’t something any responsible mother should be doing.
But where did shethinkthis was headed all along?
She’d been following a fascinating bread-crumb trail of questions right into the gingerbread house of sex. That’s what she’d been doing.
Maybe Jan Pennington had seen something in her all along. Some feral quality she’d managed to keep metaphorically trapped like a spider under a coffee cup, something she’d once done at the Misty Cat Tavern when she worked there as a teenager and completely forgot about, until it made a break for it the minute an unsuspecting customer lifted it. Whereupon said customer released a scream so blood-curdling another diner fainted face-first into her scrambled eggs. Boy, was her mom pissed at her.
So maybe this was who she was: tightly wound Eden unwound with a violent suddenness, usually with someone slightly scandalous, at least once a decade or so, the way a Corpse flower is said to bloom.
The last time she’d ended up with a pink plus sign on a stick.
And it felt like dangerous sacrilege that for the seconds she was kissing him... nothing else existed. There had been only her, only him, only need.
She had never felt that way before with any man.
And surely it was a perilous way for a mother of a ten-year-old to feel.
The carnival was clearly a roaring success, in part because it’s what happened in a town where the highlight of a given week was bingo at St. Ann’s, and in part because it was a chance for adults to mingle and have adult conversations with other adults while their kids ran happily amuck. There was a sort of tacit agreement that they had free rein to keep each other’s kids in line.
The grounds of the school field were studded with rented popcorn and cotton candy machines and carefully built game booths painted in blindingly cheerful primary colors, striped and polka-dotted and scrolled and labeled with suitably festive fonts, shiny, heavily glittered. Gabe paused to admire the “Fortunes Told Here!” sign and admired the “E” he’d painted.
Slightly distorted calliope music echoed from the loudspeakers, just to maximize that fever-dream effect.
Most of the games involved shooting or hurling things at other things—balloon, bottles, hoops, clown mouths—for the kinds of prizes one or two degrees superior to the ones usually found in Cracker Jacks. But the spirit of competition reigned in Hellcat Canyon. A prize was a prize.
Gabe’s buddy Bud Wallace strolled by. A fluffy pink unicorn tucked under his arm.
“That’s right, I shot that clown in the mouth with the water gun,” he said to Gabe, with great dignity, in passing. “I shot it real good.”
And all at once there was Eden, flanked by Annelise and her friend Emily, both of whom were rocking near horizontal ponytails.
He paused.
And as usual, it took a moment for the adults to say anything, such was the impact upon their hormones of each other’s presence.
“Hi, Mr. Caldera!” the girls said.
“Hi, girls. Having fun?”
They nodded so vigorously their ponytails whipped about.