Page 132 of Boardroom Mask

Kir’s lips quirk in a half-smile. “Keenly.”

“I’m going to freeze my tits off.”

“And what a loss that would be,” he says. “I’m a big fan of them.”

I scowl over at him. He’s watching the road, but there’s a looseness in his jaw and shoulders that I’ve never seen before. The permanent tension is gone. He looks like a guy driving his girlfriend to the beach on a whim. Nothing more, nothing less.

We park and get out. The boardwalk stretches out in front of us, gray and deserted, the wooden planks dark with salt spray. Everything is shuttered. The rides are still, the game booths areboarded up, and the only sound is the wind off the Atlantic and the distant cry of a gull circling over nothing.

It’s bleak, cold, and utterly perfect.

Kir gets out first and comes around to open my door, which makes me snort. “Oh, so you’re a gentleman now?”

“Not even a little bit.”

We walk side by side down the boardwalk. There’s not a mask in sight, but I’ve never felt safer or more at ease. I have Kir with me. That’s enough.

He takes my hand. His fingers are cold and his knuckles are still scabbed and swollen from last night. I hold on tight enough that he glances down at me.

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I mumble. “Sometimes, I just like to make sure you’re real.”

He leans over and kisses the top of my head, then pulls me in close to his side. I burrow into the warmth and sigh gratefully.

The wind is brutal. It comes off the ocean in sharp, salty gusts that turn my nose red and make my eyes water. The sky is the color of wet concrete and the ocean is dark, choppy, and angry beneath it.

“This is the ugliest beach I’ve ever seen,” I inform him.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Isn’t it great?”

We walk until the wind gets so bad I can’t feel my fingers anymore. My teeth are chattering and I’ve got Kir’s T-shirt pulled up over my nose like a highway bandit, which is doingabsolutely nothing to keep me from looking like Rudolph the Reindeer.

“Okay,” I manage through the fabric. “I’m dying. I’m literally dying. You can use my frozen body as a statue.”

Kir looks around, scanning the shuttered rides and empty stalls, and then nods toward the Ferris wheel looming at the end of the boardwalk. It’s enormous and still, the gondolas swaying just barely in the wind, creaking on their hinges.

“Come on,” he says. Before I can ask what he means, he’s hopping the chain-link fence around the base. He lands on the other side and turns around, holding his hands out to me.

“You’re kidding,” I say.

“I don’t kid. Get over here.”

I look left, then right. Not a soul in sight. “If I get arrested and I have a drippy nose in my mugshot, I want you to know I will never forgive you.”

“Noted. Up you go.”

I climb. Gracelessly, but upward nonetheless. My boot snags on the top and Kir has to catch me on the other side, which he does with zero effort and a smirk that I want to slap off his face. Sometimes, I forget just how much stronger than me he is. It would be annoying if it wasn’t so hot to be manhandled.

He sets me down, grabs the door of the nearest gondola, and pries it open. The hinges scream in protest.

“After you,” he says, bowing like a Victorian footservant.

I duck inside. It’s not warm, per se, but the second the door closes behind us, the wind drops to almost nothing. The gondolarocks gently under our weight. There’s a bench on each side, the paint peeling, the safety bar rusted in the up position. I drop onto one bench and Kir drops onto the one across from me. For a second, we just sit there, knees touching, catching our breath.

“Better?” he asks.

“Marginally.” I tuck my hands between my thighs. “My fingers might be permanently done for.”