Nito had fallen right asleep once we finished, and I carried her to bed on my back. Charolles helped me lay her down, then took her shoes off, and I covered her with the quilt. We made sure she was still sleeping soundly and then left.
“She’s out cold.”
“Well, she put so much effort into those invitations, it would tire her out, right?”
I’d been surprised to learn that she’d walked all the way out to the theater to paint the pictures. Considering that, it was hardly a surprise that she’d gotten back late. As we’d finished adding the addressees and start time to the invitations, she’d been nodding off a bit, and just as I’d noticed that, she’d finally fallen asleep, her head dropping down onto the table.
Charolles and I went back to the library and looked at Nito’s invitations, spread out on the table. There were only a few, but they were all done just right.
“She’s a good kid,” Charolles said after a moment.
“She really is. Shockingly so.”
I didn’t know anyone else that could sympathize so well with other people, worry about them so earnestly, and rejoice or mourn with them the way she could.
“Make sure you keep her safe.”
“Of course I will.”
“Otherwise, I’ll take her with me,” she returned with a chuckle.
“I could do without the bold declarations of kidnapping,” I said with a chuckle of my own. I didn’t even see my next words coming; they just fell out of my mouth. “Why don’t you come with us?”
Charolles looked blankly at me.
“I mean, Nito’d be over the moon,” I rushed to add, “and you don’t exactly have any particular destination.”
Even to me, the reasons I gave sounded like excuses.
“Well, traveling with you might be fun in its own way,” she replied, but there was no way I could miss the implicit meaning in her words; this wasn’t an agreement, it was an indirect refusal. “I’ve always been jealous of relationships like yours.”
She smiled gently, propping her chin on a hand and letting her gaze fall back to the table. Running a finger along the edge of one of the paintings, she continued.
“I’m a touch tired, though, so I’ll go it alone.”
We were both quiet for a moment, her words hanging between us.
“Is it because you couldn’t find the end of your story?” I asked eventually.
“Well, that’s part of it, but not the entirety,” Charolles began, then seemed to remember herself and shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Forget about it. Sorry.”
I wanted to know what she’d been about to say. I wanted to know the things she worried about. Excessive meddling though it might have been, I wanted even the barest contact with the feelings she held inside her. She’d marshaled her self-control and stopped herself, though. She didn’t continue any further, just went back to her usual placid expression.
“We should get some sleep as well. We’ll have to be up early preparing for the festival.”
As I was searching for some way to hold her back, one particular scene came to mind.
“Want to go space out before we turn in?” I asked.
Charolles had stood, but now she cocked her head at me.
“Do you always come out of nowhere with these things?”
“Is that praise?”
“You’d be better off using different phrasing if you’re going to proposition someone.”
“You say that, but aren’t you interested?”
“I am. I’ve got a bit of a weakness for silly things like that.”
“Let’s go, then.”
I stood and led the way out of the room. We passed through the corridor, then out of the temple hall, finally stepping outside where there was no illumination but the moon.
“Right, get your trike out of that 4D Bag of yours.”
“Where are we going, anyway?”
“The best place to space out is atop a lake, haven’t you heard?”
“No...I haven’t,” she said, letting out an exasperated sigh.
She took out her trike and immediately mounted it. Time was stopped inside her magic bag, so just as I’d predicted, the trike was already warmed up and ready to go. While “trike” might sound like “bike,” the tires and chassis were closer in size to a car’s. Bare pipes entwined the body of it, and I wasn’t quite sure how to get on. Moving carefully, I managed to get myself into the seat, but that brought me very close to Charolles all of a sudden, which left me instantly nervous.
“Um, what do I do here?” I asked.
Obviously, not having anywhere to grab as a handhold would have made me nervous, but it was worse than that. The only thing in sight that I could grab hold of was the girl sitting in front of me.
“There’s a handle behind the seat,” she told me. “Grab hold of that.”
I fumbled around for it.
“Ah, this?”
“I don’t mind if you’d rather hold on to my waist, though.”
“Yeah, no, I’m good with the handle.”
My reply might have ended up sounding kind of blunt, but I couldn’t really do anything about that. I was a healthy teenager, after all; holding on to her waist was too risky. So, yeah, I couldn’t do anything about her chuckling at me either. Damn it.
“Off we go, then.”
She started off slow, but even then, the instability of my seat made me nervous. It felt like I might fall off at any moment and hurt myself. I couldn’t relax as much as I could in a car. As we left the courtyard and got onto the road, I swallowed a yelp. I’d never paid it any mind when driving in the Kettle, but now every bump in the road’s surface made me bounce in the seat. Each time I felt that alarming weightlessness, I gripped tighter around the handle.
“You okay?” Charolles asked, louder than usual.
She’d raised her voice to make sure I heard her over the deafening noise of the trike. The pistons in the engine underneath us, coupled with the tires biting into the road below us and the wind whipping past our ears, swallowed up every other sound but still didn’t manage to drown her out.
“This is nothing!” I yelled back.
It was a bluff, of course. I’ve yet to meet any guy that doesn’t bluff that way—doesn’t say he’s fine even if he’s in pain, or that he’s not afraid even if he is. My “it’s nothing” was much the same.
“I don’t need to hold back, then.”
“Eek!”
The trike sped up, making me feel like I was being pulled backward. The high-pitched noise I made was just some escaping air that’d been caught in my throat. It wasn’t a scream at all. Definitely not.
Luckily, the acceleration only lasted for a moment, and then she immediately returned to a smoother speed. I let out the breath I’d been holding and sucked in a fresh lungful of air. I could feel my heart racing as well, as Charolles’s irrepressible laughter made its way to my ears.
“I see now that you’re a bully,” I told her.
“Oh, wasn’t this ‘nothing’?”
“Of course it is.”
“Want to give it another go, then?”
“No, thank you. This is fine, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Her laughter fluttered back to me on the wind again. I pouted slightly, wishing I could come up with a retort or make some kind of counterattack, but it would hardly have mattered even if I had. The conclusion was obvious: there was nothing I could do while she still had the handlebars. I could only wait it out, my heart frozen with fear at the death-defying journey we were on...
Despite that little joke I told myself about it being scary, though, her driving through the trees and shrubbery with no actual lighting to speak of turned out to be completely safe. It was quicker than the car as well, and we soon arrived in front of Monty’s house. His lights were on, as it happened. Considering he’d mentioned nights being boring, I figured he’d definitely be up even at this hour. His boat was at the jetty below, so he’d be inside as well.
I knocked on the door and Monty opened it, a glass of something in his hand. He looked at me, then at Charolles standing slightly behind me.
“Eloping, are you?”
“Are you drunk?” I returned.
“A little. What brings you two here at this time of night?”
He turned to invite us in, but I shook my head.
“I was actually hoping to borrow your boat.”
Monty just replied, “Do what you like,” before heading back inside. The process had gone more quickly than I’d expected, so I was honestly a bit taken aback. Either way, though, we now had permission, so we headed down to the lake.
The moonlight shone down on the wide-open lake and reflected off its surface, making at least the area directly around it bright enough to see. The boat was smaller than I’d expected when I saw it from the pier, and I estimated that the two of us would be about the limit of its capacity. We stood there for a moment, just looking at it.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever been on a boat,” Charolles said eventually.
“That’s all right. First time for me too.”
“Thank you for your not-at-all-assuring reassurance.”
I pulled in the boat by its rope and then held it still. Unusually unsure of herself, Charolles boarded with extreme care. The boat shifted as she transferred her weight to it, but she kept her balance without panicking or flailing. She had insane reflexes, it seemed. Once she was settled, I untied the rope and got ready for my turn. Charolles gripped the jetty with her hand to steady the boat as I carefully made my own way on. The boat was shifting and bobbing, and I immediately sat myself down.
“Let’s go, then,” I said.
“I can’t calm down being on the water like this,” she complained, and yet her expression was still set in its usual placidity.
An oar rested on each side of the boat, and I knew I could use them to get us moving. I splashed just the one through the water, getting us away from the jetty. Charolles and I were facing each other, and we were moving backward from my perspective, so I could see the shore gradually growing farther away behind her.