An Optimist's Guide to Heartbreak (Heartsong #1)(54)

And then, somehow, we find ourselves in line for the Ferris wheel.

Of course we do.

The line isn’t too long, and we get stopped right at the gate, waiting for the next ride. Cal is still holding my hand like it’s completely natural, entirely instinctive, leaning back against a rail and staring up at the starlit wheel.

I’m only staring at him.

Of course I am.

“Excuse me.”

Somebody tugs at my jacket, and I turn around.

I blink, nearly fainting. The school-aged girl looks so much like Emma that my esophagus withers up like a dying orchid, and I can’t breathe.

Maybe I’m hallucinating. It could be the cider, possibly the gum. Maybe my brain is so mixed-up, caught between then and now, that I’m imagining her.

“Do you have any extra tickets? I dropped mine,” she says, wrinkling her freckle-smattered nose.

I wonder if Cal notices the resemblance. He releases my hand to dig through his pocket, fishing out a fistful of red tickets. “Yeah, here. We only need two.”

Her eyes brighten like copper pennies, and she snatches the tickets with a toothy grin.

I almost expect her to say, “Toodles!” as she spins on her heel, ponytail whipping around her, but all she says is, “Thanks, mister!”

My chest is tight, a noose around my neck. Tears burn behind my eyes, and I’m forced to circle away from Cal, my back to him, while I rein in my confusion and erratic heart.

“You okay?”

He’s so close that his words warm the back of my head, his chest inches from my spine. One hand curls around my hip, a gentle reminder that he’s there.

All I can do is nod.

Cal lowers his lips to my ear and whispers, “Breathe, Lucy.”

His words seize me from the reverie, anchoring me. My eyes close. He’s telling me he knows, he understands, but it’s okay. I’m okay.

I’m okay.

I nod again, leaning backward until both of his arms envelop my waist. That’s when my resolve wavers and my fears beg to be expunged. I try to focus on Jessica and all the reasons I’ve committed myself to a lifetime of solitude, but it’s hard when his arms are around me and his heartbeats heat my back, tempting me with a different path. I want to love him from afar so I can’t break him, but he’s too close. He’s already tucked inside my unsafe hands, and I’m going to drop him.

God, I’ll drop him, and he’ll shatter.

“Tickets.” The ride attendant opens the gate, extending a palm toward us.

Cal pulls away to give him our tickets, releasing me before I can let him slip. Pulling in a deep breath, I follow him onto the ride, and we slide into one of the empty buckets, thighs smashing together as the bar comes down.

“Been a long time since I’ve been on this thing,” he mutters, face aimed straight ahead. “Didn’t think I’d ever be here again, to be honest.”

I allow a smile. “Getting stuck on a ride doesn’t exactly entice someone to do it again.”

“Yeah. But sometimes I wish…” Cal’s eyes narrow, squinting at nothing in particular. “Sometimes I wish we never got unstuck, you know?”

The ride comes to life before I can even process his words. Those words rise up inside of me as we rise, lifting off the ground and into the sky.

For a moment, I pretend that his wish did come true. We never unstuck, never unglued. Time stopped at the top of the Ferris wheel when Cal looked down at me, his hair pitch dark but his eyes moonlit. Flirtation sparked. Adventure crackled.

Emma giggled and chanted from one bucket beneath us: “Kiss her, you chicken!”

He did.

He did.

An inky, midnight sky stretches out before us, equally suffocating and cathartic. Suffocating because I’m choking on stars and unanswered wishes—suffocating, because how can a sky look so vast and endless, and yet she’s not here?

Cathartic because I feel her anyway.

I grip the safety bar with one white-knuckled hand while my other holds onto Pinky the panda. We rise and rise and rise, just like this feeling swimming between us, but the trouble with rising is there is always a fall. Sometimes it’s with grace, and sometimes it’s devastating.

You just never know.

Nothing makes a person crazier than emotion trapped with nowhere to go, so I turn to Cal as we tip over the top and descend back down. “I missed you so much,” I confess, squeezing the toy in my hand to avoid reaching for him. “Why did you leave me? Why didn’t you try to find me?”

Pain skates across his face. Real, awful pain, like my words are little blades stabbing at his chest. He closes his eyes for a brief moment before turning to look at me. “I didn’t have a choice. We moved, Lucy. I was just a kid.”

“But…after,” I probe. “After you grew up. I made a Facebook and an Instagram account, just so you could reach out to me, but you never did.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

He says it again, just as certain, just as tortured. I hate his answer because he did have a choice. Cal didn’t choose me. “That’s not true,” I whisper, turning away. I focus on the sea of people below me instead of the lie in his eyes.

I hear him exhale a long sigh, his knee bumping against mine, but he doesn’t say anything.

Maybe I should be grateful that he never tried to track me down. It’s not like anything can happen between us, and it’s so painfully evident how easily it could.