I jerk the bar backward again, this time throwing my body weight into it and hoping the metal pin goes in place before the car has a chance to pitch forward again.
“This is so fucking stupid,” Jace says, and I’m about ready to elbow him in the nose again.
With the palm of my hand now, because my fingers keep sliding against the smooth metal, I force the top of the pin through the bottom hole just as we start to pitch forward harder than before.
There’s no reason to believe it’ll hold, but both Jace and I instinctively grab for it as we tilt so much it feels like we’re already falling out.
The restraint holds.
Jace is finally out of his panic just enough to realize that he was acting like an idiot before. He doesn’t say anything, but he does his best to make amends by staying perfectly still in a backward lean.
It feels like it takes a long time even though it can’t be more than a few seconds, but the car slowly stops rocking and finds its equilibrium.
“You know,” I tell Jace, “I was thinking of fucking your brains out up here, but after that, I think you might just toss me out of the car for moving it too much.”
“We can’t,” he says. “It won’t hold.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about — everything’s going to hold,” I start, though as the words are leaving me, they strike my ear as being extremely naïve. That’s not helping. “To tell you the truth, though, I’m really not in much of a mood to give you anything that might be construed as a rew
ard for your behavior.”
“That’s fine,” he says quickly. “Let’s just be as still as possible.”
As I sit here, about 50 feet off the ground in the car of a broken-down Ferris wheel, which, by the way, can’t be any older than 30 years, despite what Jace may think, it starts to sink in why the front restraint was open when we got here.
It comes over the knees.
For us to get back out of here, we’re going to have to take the pin back out and open the front a few inches like it was before.
I’m trying not to think about how we’re going to get down from there.
Chapter Sixteen
Solid Ground, Meet Quicksand
Jace
It’s been about a week since the Ferris wheel, and I think Grace is slowly starting to forgive me for slightly losing my cool when we were at the top of the thing.
I know that because I’m sitting on the couch in her living room. Yeah, she’s barred me from jumping in the shower with her, but at least I’m still in the apartment.
From the other room, I can hear the shower turn off, and a second later, there’s the clatter of the shower rings as the curtain opens.
I get up from the couch and make my way to the bathroom door, but it’s locked.
“Occupied!” she calls out.
“How long are you going to be mad at me? We got back down safe enough, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, with absolutely no help from you,” she says through the door.
Okay, I might have thrown a bit of a fit when she took the pin out of the front of the car, but in my defense, she hadn’t given me a proper amount of time to digest what she was telling me.
The door to the bathroom opens, and Grace has one towel wrapped around her upper body and another wrapped around her head.
“I’ve got a surprise for you,” she says, “but you’ve got to promise that you’re not going to start flailing your arms again. That really wasn’t you at your most attractive.”
I groan, but say, “I promise.”