“Like you need a bigger fan club.” But Alden didn’t sound particularly put out as he watched me feed tokens to the machine that delivered a row of small basketballs to the well in front of me.
“You’re not going to try?”
“Like I said, me and balls… Oh, never mind.” He seemed to realize at the last second how he’d sounded, going from mildly pink to beet red as he looked away. “You have at it.”
I easily made my first couple of baskets, earning bonus balls as the clock ticked down, increasing my score. I played a couple of fast rounds, earning an impressive stripe of tickets and a round of mock applause from Alden.
“Now, you need some tickets toward our quest to make the goat less lonely. I worry about him, as an only kid.” I laughed, expecting Alden to join in, but only got a quizzical look in response. “Get it? Only kid?”
“I get it now.” Alden shook his head, but a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “You enjoy being ridiculous, don’t you?”
“Sometimes.” I shrugged. “Life’s too short and unpredictable to take seriously. Might as well have fun.”
“Well, you’re good at it.” He walked over to the Whac-a-Mole. “I never saw the point of this one.”
“Stress relief.” I handed him one of the mallets. “Come on, Mr. Reflexes, show me what you’ve got.”
I took the spot next to him, and we both got way too invested in smacking the mechanical creatures, whooping and hollering until we both got more tickets for our efforts.
“My score is higher,” Alden pointed out.
“So it is.” I playfully shoved him, the sort of move I’d done with friends hundreds of times, but with him it felt…charged somehow. “Want to do the photo booth?”
“Haven’t we been squashed together enough?”
Not nearly enough. I tried to push that thought away. “Come on. Have you ever tried it?”
He shook his head so seriously I wasn’t sure we were still talking about photo booths, but I didn’t need any further encouragement to drag him over and shove enough tokens into the machine to get us a strip of four pictures. We squeezed in, him in front of me again. With the curtain drawn, the temptation to touch him, to pull him close became almost unbearable. My hands didn’t seem to know where to go, hovering over his torso and thighs, refusing to listen to my command to mind their own business. Finally, the urge won as I gave into the impulse to rest my hand on his flat stomach, pulling him more against me. His scent filled all my senses, making my body hum like a space heater, warmth zooming everywhere.
The bare skin of his neck seemed to beckon me, made it too easy to lean in and—
“Do we make goofy faces or what?”
I pushed the start button hard enough to make the booth shake. “Yeah. Get silly.”
Silly was good. Silly would allow me to regain a grip on my sanity, remember all my very good reasons for not doing something truly ridiculous like kissing Alden’s neck. But man, how I wanted to.
Chapter Eighteen
Alden
We could have been squished into a file drawer and possibly had more available space than in the microscopic photo booth. Conrad’s hand on my abdomen seemed to burn a path straight to my brain, wiping out essential neurons. He said to be silly, but all I could focus on was his big hand, right there, pressing me tighter against him. I made myself smile as the camera flashed, hoping like heck that my inner turmoil wouldn’t be apparent in the pictures. This was probably how Conrad acted with all his friends. No way could I let him know how this was affecting me.
His breath was hot on my neck, warm prickles, more sparks of heat. I shifted and he inhaled sharply right before the final picture. He was so solid behind me, and the temptation to relax into him was almost overwhelming.
Almost.
I could still hear voices outside, kids laughing, parents calling after them. Despite how it felt, this wasn’t actually a private cocoon. And even with the curtain drawn, my muscles were tense with worries about misstepping—what would happen if I did sink into him? Let my head tip back the way it seemed to want to? What would happen next? That was where my brain kept short-circuiting. I prided myself on my ability to use probabilities and statistics to make predictions, and right then it seemed about fifty-fifty whether he would laugh and push me away or hold me tighter, inhale like that again, maybe…
No. I couldn’t let myself even daydream about it. This was Conrad being nice. Friendly. I couldn’t risk messing that up, risk a terminal case of awkward derailing our trip and distracting me from my reasons for being here.