by Lilly Pink
“Just so long as you don’t make a habit of this kind of thing. I know you aren’t in love with the circles our families run in, but I am. I like the kind of lives we lead. I don’t want excitement every day, at least not the same kind that you’re looking for.”
“Right, of course. Point taken. But tonight, though. Tonight, you’re coming with me?”
“Tonight, I’m going with you.”
Eloise hopped up onto her feet, bouncing up and down on the bed and crowing loudly in victory. It was only the insistent tugging of Penelope that got her to sit down again, and that was only to keep her from taking it all back. She slung her arms around her, hugging her fiercely. Against the odds, everything was working out beautifully. Everything was working out exactly as she had hoped.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Will you look at this? I’ve never seen anything like it! Have you? Can you believe this?”
“No,” Penelope answered in a voice that sounded very far away, “I can’t say that I have. Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Are you kidding me? I want it now more than ever!”
Penelope nodded in defeat. Surely, she had known that would be the answer. She knew just as well as anyone, probably better than anyone, that Eloise rarely just changed her mind and went home. She didn’t even have to ask to know that the moment Eloise had left her home, she’d returned to get herself ready.
She knew her, knew that she’d spent the whole rest of the day dreaming about what the carnival would be like. Now that she was actually there, there was no way she was going to go back home again.
“Do I look alright?”
Eloise looked at her friend and felt a pang of sadness, a pang of her burgeoning protective nature. It was such an innocent question to ask, and she could hear all of Penelope’s insecurities coming out in the slight tremor of her voice. It was always in social situations that she felt the most unsure of herself.
It wasn’t even that she looked bad. She didn’t. Her pink dress was loose and flattering, hiding a multitude of sins. It was the way she carried herself. Even now, she stood at the entrance to the carnival with her arms crossed over her stomach, drawing every eye to exactly that spot. Eloise wanted to tell her to stand up straight and put her arms by her side, but she kept her mouth shut.
She’d tried to address that kind of thing before, and it hadn’t gone well. Any mention of Penelope’s demeanor would immediately put her on the defensive, automatically leading to a fight.
Fighting was the last thing Eloise was in the mood for that evening. She wanted everything to go perfectly, just as she had imagined it in her head. Because make no mistake, she had imagined it. She had expected that her thoughts would calm down some once she got everyone on board with the carnival thing, but it hadn’t worked that way.
Instead, her thoughts had continued to narrow to a fine point until her picture of the carnival and what it would look like was all she could see. By the time she actually arrived, it seemed impossible that anything could ever live up to what she’d built inside of her head. Things almost never did, and she was smart enough to know that.
Except that, this time, that’s exactly what they did. That was what she wanted to spend the night doing, marveling over how wonderful everything was, not fighting with her friend.
“Penelope, I can honestly say you look lovely. Absolutely ready for a rare night out.”
“Rare?” Penelope laughed with a failed attempt at indifference, her face still flushed with the lavishness of Eloise’s compliment. “I wouldn’t say that. It seems like we’ve got a new set of parties to go to every other week.”
“Sure, there’s those, but those aren’t nights out.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because, Penelope, those are always at one of our houses. And if not one of ours, one of our parents’ friends. They’re all very pretty and the people are fine, but there’s nothing new. This is new! This is really, truly, out!”
“Alright, fine, I guess I see your point. But lower your voice, would you? People are starting to stare. Although they’re just as likely to be staring at you as they are to be trying to find the source of the noise. You look gorgeous. Green always was your color.”
Eloise did a pretty little twirl, showing off one of her favorite day dresses. It was a halter dress, a little more revealing than her parents usually let her get away with, and it really did look extraordinary on her. When she spun, both the skirt of the dress and her golden hair spun around her until she looked like a whirling dervish of color.
“Okay, now you’re just showing off.”
“Maybe a little. But this is going to be fun, right?”
“If you say so.”
“That’s the spirit. Sort of.”
Linking her arm through Penelope’s, Eloise led the two of them straight up to the first ticket booth they came to, where she purchased two tickets that were good for the carnival’s entire week run. Penelope protested loudly, saying there was no need for that kind of ticket because they would only be going to the carnival the one time, but Eloise chose not to hear her.
She was exceptionally good at the art of selective hearing and went on with the purchase she intended on making. That was when it felt really real, and as she walked beneath the awning of the ticket booth, she looked up at its underside and marveled at what she saw there. It was made of old wood, wood that was full of initials carved by who the hell knew.
She was positively dizzy with the idea of it, the idea of all of the people who had been there before her and would walk under that same arch after she was long gone. It made her feel completely inconsequential, and somehow that made her happy. It made her happy to be a part of something bigger than herself, to be a participant in a wheel that would turn with or without her on it.
“What do you think, Penelope, glad we came?”
“It’s nice.”
“Nice? Is that really all you have to say?”
“Okay, it’s more than nice. If you want the honest truth, I can’t believe this is the old Garner field! It looks nothing like it.”
“Of course, it doesn’t! That would spoil the magic of the whole thing!”
And it was magical, it really was. The location of the carnival was a field that had once been part of a man named Garner’s property. Although Garner, once a big-time business man in New Orleans, was long gone, his property had never been sold again and now existed as a sort of a public land.
The house was gone, but the field remained. It was only a forty-five-minute walk to the field from Eloise and Penelope’s houses, which felt like nothing at all. Never mind that she could easily have cut that time in more than half if she hadn’t had to hide what she really was.
Although she couldn’t wait to be part of whatever the carnival had to offer, she wasn’t in a hurry to get there. She wanted to take it all in. It was a walk she had taken many times before, but never with the eyes she saw it with that night. Everything about the forest smelled fresher, newer. Everything felt like it was alive. When they finally arrived at the field, she saw that it had been totally transformed.
In the middle of the almost knee-deep wildflowers, a series of booths and tents had been erected with a makeshift fence running all along its borders. Over the entirety of it, someone had strung multiple strings of cafe lights, making it look like even the stars had come down from the heavens to play. It made her heart sing with the feeling of imminent possibility.
And it was even better inside. It took an impressive amount of willpower for her to refrain from asking Penelope if she could smell just how heavenly everything was. She didn’t want to garner any suspicion, and she honestly wasn’t sure what of her experience was shared and what was due to the heightened senses her shifter status gave her.
What she did know was that every step she took introduced her to a new smell, the combination of which made up the living odor of the carnival itself. There was the scent of salt and oil and butter, the scent of f
ried food and sugar. She could smell the vinegar of pickles and the unmistakable scent of peanuts being cracked open and the shells dropped down on the ground.
She could also smell the sweat of the workers themselves, the musk of the animals and the funk of their droppings. She could smell it all rolled into one and she believed it smelled just like heaven. Everywhere around her were the noises of happy people doing happy things. Children ran through the crowds, snaking in and out of the legs of the adults around them like they were a maze instead of people. Their laughter was infectious and it easily bled into everyone else until the whole crowd was bubbly and full of happy energy.
“What should we do first?” Eloise asked excitedly, practically dragging Penelope through the crowd like a pet on a leash. “There’s so much to look at!”
“Don’t ask me,” Penelope responded quickly, looking around nervously as if she was worried someone might see her here. “This whole thing was your idea. Why don’t you tell me?”
Eloise was about to tell Penelope that she didn’t have the faintest idea when she saw it. She had no idea how she could have missed it because from the moment it came into her line of sight, it seemed like the only thing that mattered in the world. It was one of the older looking booths in the carnival and was positioned all the way in the back of the place, right up against one of the makeshift fences.
“There! What is that, do you think?”
“Where? I have no idea what you’re talking about, Eloise. You know I can’t read your mind.”
“Back in the back. The one with all of the scarves.”
Penelope strained to see what Eloise was looking at, pulling her arm down in embarrassment when she reached out to point. Pointing wasn’t polite. That was one of thousands of lessons both girls had been taught growing up, and one of many Penelope had learned well and Eloise often chose to ignore.
The gesture had proved her point, though, as Penelope clearly saw what she wanted her to see. She squinted a little, having been unwilling to wear her glasses on their evening out, and then made a face. It was the kind of face a person made when she smelled something unsavory. It was definitely not the expression of a person who was excited about a thing.
“Oh. That.”
“What’s the matter with you?! Look at it. It’s beautiful.”
“It’s a fortune teller’s tent, Eloise. There’s nothing beautiful about that.”
“But why not? It’ll be fun.”
“No, it won’t be. Do you know what kind of people work those things?”
“No, but it sounds like you do.”
“Of course, I do. Trash. They’re not the kind of people who belong in polite society. Why else would they be working jobs like this?”
“Well, at least they have jobs. What about us, Penelope? We don’t even have them.”
“We don’t need them,” Penelope answered matter-of-factly, as if an answer like that closed the door on the matter completely, “you know that.”
“No thanks to anything we’ve done. That’s all our parents.”
“But what those people are doing is a lie. They’re criminals, Eloise. They’re nomadic people.”
“I don’t care. I want my fortune told.”
“You won’t get it from them! That kind of thing isn’t even possible, okay? It’s all a ruse, all meant to take advantage of gullible people looking for something that doesn’t exist. Magic like that doesn’t exist. You’re old enough to know that now, just the same as I am. Now come on, let’s get some popcorn or something.”
Eloise stared at Penelope and felt like she was looking at a stranger. Was this really the girl she had played make-believe with on the long, muggy Louisiana days back when they were children? She knew it was, but the person beside her didn’t resemble that girl in her memory in any way. This girl, no, this woman, no girl would have such stuffy opinions as Penelope did, was someone Eloise was finding it very difficult to like.
It stung her to see how close-minded and judgmental she had become. It also made her want to prove Penelope wrong, to fly in the face of the convention being thrown at her. She also couldn’t help but wonder what her friend would do if she ever learned about the other part of her, the part of her that was lion.
She’d fantasized from time to time about revealing everything, but hearing her thoughts now took that idea right out of her head. Raising her chin in defiance and unlooping her arm from Penelope’s, Eloise began to back away from her.
“I don’t want popcorn.”
“Fine, cotton candy then. Or maybe we can go and look at the animals or something.”
“I don’t want either of those things. I’m going to see the fortune teller, Penelope. That’s what I want to do. It’s the only thing I want to do.”
Despite Penelope’s hisses of protest, Eloise turned to do exactly that. She would never have admitted that she was afraid, not to anyone, not even to herself. The thing was, not admitting a thing didn’t make it go away. She’d heard all of the things that Penelope had to say, and if the part about fortune telling being nothing more than a con, she might not have been so nervous, but she wasn’t sure about that at all.
Eloise knew that the world was not a black and white place. She knew it because there was nothing black and white, nothing normal about her. Even now, as she picked her way through the crowd with Penelope somewhere behind her, Eloise could feel the lion inside of her pacing back and forth. Her father had been right to warn her about the dangers of crowds.
She had been around large groups of people before, in the lavish parties her parents were forever throwing, but this wasn’t the same thing. Those were social situations in which things were carefully controlled.
This? There was an element of unpredictability to this that she’d never experienced before. It was sort of terrifying, but it was also extremely liberating and what she now knew was the reason she’d wanted to come here to begin with.
“Eloise, wait! You know I can’t keep up with you when you move so fast.”
“I thought you said you didn’t want to come?”
“I don’t!”
Eloise looked over her shoulder to have the brief exchange with Penelope for only a second, but when she turned to look at her target again she let out a gasp. In that tiniest of moments, something about her destination had changed. Whereas before there had only been the enchanting tent with the exotic scarves and an ornately lettered sign announcing what it was, now there were two individuals. They were standing in front of the place, having a casual conversation.
In truth, they both looked more than a little bit bored, like they had seen all this a million times before and felt a lot lacking. It wasn’t their expressions Eloise noticed, though, not really. It was him. There were two men, but one of them might as well not have been there at all for all of the attention she was paying him. She paid him no mind because his companion took up every ounce of her attention.
She had never seen anything like him, whoever this mysterious man was. It wasn’t like she’d had the good fortune to spend heaps of time with a wide variety of different men, but that didn’t matter to her one minute. She didn’t need to. She didn’t need to see any other man to know that this one had to be the most perfect specimen ever created.
He was massive, big enough so that she was sure he would have been able to lift her over his head without thinking twice. He was also equipped with a mop of wild looking hair that looked like it hadn’t seen a brush in at least a week. She could just make out a pair of striking blue-gray eyes beneath that hair, unlike any color she’d seen on a human being.
For all of these reasons and more, she was stunned by her first sighting of Archer Grant, but the greatest pull of all was something she could not put her finger on. She hardly even knew what it was, hardly even recognized that there was a new rhythm to the beat of her heart from the first second of her seeing him.
Eloise did not understand that this strange man had attracted her on a primal level she didn�
��t yet fully know how to access. All she knew was that she had to talk to him. She had to say hello, and nothing in the world would keep her from doing so.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Hello. I’m...hello.”
As soon as she spoke, Eloise wished that she hadn’t. She had covered the last few steps of her journey from the front of the carnival to the back with startling speed, enough that she knew her mother would have thoroughly chastised her for it had she been present.
With each step, she had been sure that she was doing the right thing, that she absolutely had to talk to this man. She wasn’t worried about it, not really. She’d talked to men at her parents’ parties and in school without any kind of issues at all. In her experience, it was always the man who acted awkward and didn’t know how to handle himself, not her.
She was as naturally flirtatious as she was stubborn and it made talking to the opposite sex a breeze. The fact that she was so stunning that she was better looking than every man she’d met up to that point didn’t hurt, either. Not that she was vain about her looks. She didn’t actually realize that her beauty made conversation so easy for her, instead taking it for granted the way young people so often did with that sort of thing.