Page 138 of Just One Little Bargain

“I need you to not describe things that are below us.”

He straightens immediately and turns all his attention back to me. “Sorry.”

My fingertips have gone bloodless around the bar, the knuckles bleached and rigid, yet I can scarcely register the metal under my grip. Sensation has withdrawn from my hands and gathered everywhere else: the violent beat at the base of my throat, the pressure cinching my ribs, cold perspiration slicking my skin under my sweater.

Brindlewood has flattened beneath us. Tents compress into colored squares. The midway becomes a narrow seam threaded between them, crowded with people reduced to moving specks. Even the music has lost its shape, rising in warped fragments before the wind tears it apart. I make the mistake of following one of those tiny figures across the grass and become nauseatingly aware of the distance separating their feet from mine.

The wheel carries us higher.

The gondola pauses while passengers board near the platform. My grip convulses. The mechanism engages and hauls us through another short ascent.

It stops again. A mild roll beneath our bodies. Then upward again.

Each interruption becomes harder to endure because I can’t anticipate the next movement. My body braces for ascent during the stillness and for collapse when we begin to climb.

Then the wheel halts. One moment we’re rising; the next, the gondola jerks against its suspension and hangs near the crown. The sudden check drives the bar into my abdomen. Our carriage swings forward, reverses, then settles into a shallow oscillation that refuses to disappear.

A voice carries up from the platform, distorted by height and wind. I catch only fragments at first. Brief hold. Stay seated. Then one word arrives with perfect clarity.

Malfunction.

Heat floods my face while the rest of me turns glacial. The edges of my vision begin to recede, darkness pressing inward until the painted panel opposite me becomes the only stable object left in the world.

I try to inhale and manage only a thin scrape of air. Another attempt catches halfway down. Pins and needles spread across my mouth, then into my cheeks. My heartbeat comes so fast there’s barely space between one beat and the next.

I am trapped.

Milo’s been talking to me, but the words won’t reach. I catch the shape of my name on his mouth and the strain pulling at his jaw, yet everything dissolves under the blood thundering in my ears. His palm cups my cheek and turns me toward him until his face fills the little vision I have left: violet eyes, wind-mussed curls, worry drawn tight across his features. Before dread can haul me back to the drop, he kisses me.

Warmth breaks through first. Not thought or reason—only the startling heat of his lips against my cold, numb skin. He holds the kiss with a steadiness that gives me something immediate to inhabit: the plush give of his mouth, the taste of cinnamon, the faint scratch of stubble. The sensation seeps through the static until terror has to budge over and make room for him.

His lips ease, coaxing mine apart, and I manage a thread of air. He breathes into me, and my body answers before my mind catches up to the trick he’s pulling. The gondola sways. Panic sparks hot through every nerve, but he angles deeper, trading the sickening lurch for a headier dizziness. It gathers in the drag of his lower lip, the unhurried sweep of his tongue, the low hum snagged in his throat when my fingers finally quit the bar and fist his shirt instead.

By the time Milo eases back, only a sliver of space separates us. His glasses have shifted crooked across his nose, and his mouth has flushed from mine. He keeps me close while his thumb moves slowly beneath my ear. My lungs draw in one unsteady breath, then another, each one a little fuller than the last.

“Kissing me was your rescue plan?”

“It appeared more effective than trying to reason with you.” He looks faintly pleased with himself. “Look above the wheel for me.”

I lift my eyes past the black lattice of spokes and the gondolas suspended around us.

The cloud cover that has pressed over Brindlewood all afternoon has finally broken. Vast openings stretch across the western sky, flooded with copper, rose, and bruised violet. The setting sun burns along the ragged edges of the clouds and pours through the gaps, gilding the river where it winds through the valley. Fields extend beyond town in broad bands of amber and deep green, their distant boundaries dissolving into the darkening hills. At this height, the horizon seems to have drawn farther back, revealing miles of landscape concealed from the streets below.

For the first time since the gondola left the platform, the distance offers something other than danger.

“Most people only look down from a height,” Milo says quietly. “They measure the fall. Watch the world shrink beneath them and mistake that for the complete view. It never occurs to them to lift their heads.” His fingers tighten in my hair as the carriage shifts beneath us. “But there’s always something up here that only exists because you were willing to climb. The terror and the beauty keep the same altitude. You can’t reach one without the other.”

The wind cools the sweat at my temples, carrying the scent of fried sugar and woodsmoke up from the fairground.

“It’s beautiful,” I whisper.

“Yes.”

The certainty in his answer makes me turn. He isn’t looking at the sky. The last of the light lies gold along one side of his face, and all his attention is on me, as though he’s already decided he can miss the horizon behind him. His finger follows the corner of my mouth, lingering where his kiss has left my lips tender.

“I need to tell you something.” His smile is small and serious. “Milo isn’t the name I was born with.”

“I figured.” I study his face. “It doesn’t exactly scream ancient demon of the underworld.”