They’d played the ring toss and water-balloon gun shoot, and had picked up hot dogs and funnel cakes for dinner. Evan snuck up and squirted the last of his ketchup onto Lia’s hot dog. She squealed and squirmed away. He laughed and resisted the urge to tackle her in the grass—she was getting sexier and cuter by the second, and was lifting the weight of the world off his shoulders. She was reminding him what it felt like to laugh again; and just act stupid; and, quite frankly, to live. He watched her hair swing around, and his memory shot him back to just hours ago, when she’d leaned against the fiberglass, breasts and belly and thighs all bared to him, hands behind her back, waiting for him to ravish her. And he wanted to be back there right now, doing it all over again. But damn, he needed to talk to her. “So Drew was concerned about why you came back here?” she prompted, balancing her red-checked paper hot dog boat to point to a picnic table on top of a grassy knoll beneath a lantern that had just popped on.
