Lust Meter System: Conquering Beauties

He sat down across from her and she was already looking at him with that smile still on her face, the real one, sitting there like it had been waiting for a reason to come out and had finally found one.

Liam looked at her.

"Am I in another universe right now," he said, "or are you actually smiling at me."

Thud.

Her foot connected with his shin under the table, sharp and direct, and he pulled his leg back immediately.

"Ouch," he said, loud enough that the woman at the table beside them glanced over.

Tasha adjusted herself in her chair and straightened her top and looked across the street with the expression of someone who had not done anything and had no idea what he was referring to.

"Ummph," she said.

Liam reached down and rubbed his shin with one hand, looking at her. "Good to see you haven’t changed much," he said.

She turned and looked at him. "I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"Sure," he said.

A car passed on the street beside them, slow and unhurried, the driver looking for a parking spot. Behind it a woman came down the pavement with a small boy beside her, his hand in hers, his other hand holding something that was either a toy or a very important stick he had found somewhere. He was explaining something to his mother with great seriousness and she was listening with the patient expression of someone who had been listening to serious explanations all morning.

They passed and the street settled back into its own quiet rhythm.

Liam looked at Tasha.

"I’m glad you’re alright," he said. The joking had left his voice entirely. Just his voice, even and direct and meaning it.

She looked at him. Something in her expression shifted, the performance of being unbothered giving way to something more honest underneath it.

"I’m glad you’re okay too," she said.

They both smiled, small and genuine, at the same time.

"How’s your dad," Liam said. "Did he get his position back."

Tasha’s face changed.

It happened in stages. The smile left first, then the openness of the expression, and what was left was something quieter and considerably heavier. She looked at the cup in front of her and wrapped her hands around it again.

"Yeah," she said. "He did."

Liam watched her face. "What’s wrong."

She was quiet for a moment. A couple walked past on the pavement behind her, talking about something between themselves.

"He’s still the same person," she said. She paused, the word sitting there, and then she said it. "The same person I hate."

The table was quiet.

Liam reached across it and put his hand over hers where they were wrapped around the cup.

She looked at his hand on hers.

"I missed your touch," she said, quietly, not making it a big thing, just saying it the way you said something true when you had decided to stop not saying it.

Liam looked at their hands. "I missed touching you too," he said.

She looked up at him. Then she shook her head slightly. "You’re still a pervert."

"Coming from someone who once made me beg her," he said.

"You got your revenge though, didn’t you," she said, the corner of her mouth moving.

They both laughed. Short and real, the kind that arrived at the same time without being coordinated, and then settled back into the comfortable quiet of the table and the morning and the street around them.

Tasha looked at him across the table. "The day is still young," she said. "Let’s go do something. And you can tell me how many girls you have in your life right now."

"It’s not that many," he said.

She stared at him.

"I’m joking," she said. "I can’t believe it’s more now."

He scratched the back of his head. "I’m not exactly in a relationship," he said. "It’s complicated."

She looked at him for a moment. Then she looked down at the table and her fingers started moving against the cup, fidgeting with the handle, her hair falling slightly forward.

"What if," she said, her voice dropping a register, "you were in one. With me."

She said it into the table rather than at him, her head down, her finger tracing the rim of the cup.

"What?" he said.

Her head came up fast. "Nothing," she said. "Forget it. Let’s just go."

She was already pushing her chair back.

Liam looked at her for a second.

"Okay," he said. "Let’s go."

He stood and turned toward where he had parked. Tasha was already moving in the opposite direction.

"Where are you going," she said, stopping and looking at him.

"The car," he said.

"My car is this way," she said, tilting her head in the direction she had been heading.

"Kelvin lent me his," Liam said. "I drove here in his."

She looked at the direction he had been heading. Then at him. "We can just take Kelvin’s then."

"You’re not worried about something happening to it?"

She considered this for approximately one second. "I’ve been meaning to get a new one anyway," she said. "If something happens to it, it’s honestly a win for me." She started walking toward where he had come from. "Come on."

The drive was quiet in the easy way, not the uncomfortable kind, just two people in a car with the city moving past the windows and nowhere to rush to.

She had the radio on low, something neither of them was particularly listening to, just sound to fill the background.

At some point she asked him if he had eaten properly since he got back and he said mostly and she looked at him sideways and said that meant no.

He said it meant mostly. She said those were the same thing.

He disagreed.

She let him.

They talked about small things after that. She mentioned a film she had watched recently and couldn’t decide whether she liked or not.

He asked which one and she described the plot and he said it sounded like something he would have walked out of and she said that was because he had no patience for anything that required thinking and he said that was not what he had said.

She smiled and looked back at the road.

About thirty minutes in, the city started changing around them, the buildings spacing out, the streets widening, the general compactness of everything loosening into something more open. Trees appeared at the sides of the road and the sky got bigger above the car.

Then it appeared.

A wide complex set back from the road, colourful signage visible from the road, a large car park in front of it filling steadily with vehicles, and above everything else a structure of some kind rising against the sky, tall and mechanical, catching the morning light on its metal frame.

Liam leaned forward slightly and looked through the windshield.

"An amusement park," he said.

Tasha pulled into the car park and found a spot and cut the engine. She turned and looked at him with the smile she had been keeping to herself for most of the drive.

"An amusement park," he said again, looking at her.

She got out of the car.

He got out too.

Standing in the car park he looked at the full picture of the place, the entrance visible ahead of them, the sounds already reaching them from inside, the layered mix of music and mechanical noise and crowd that was specific to this kind of place and nothing else.

She came around to his side of the car and stood beside him looking at the entrance. "Well," she said. "Come on then."

They joined the queue at the entrance, a line of maybe twenty people moving steadily through a wide turnstile beneath a painted arch that stretched above the entrance, bright colours and large bold lettering spelling out the park’s name.

On either side of the arch, two staff members in full character costumes stood managing the flow, large mascot heads, one shaped like a grinning sun and one like a cartoon rocket ship, both of them moving with the practiced energy of people who had been doing this since opening time.

As Liam and Tasha reached the front the sun mascot stepped forward with both arms wide open and said, in a voice slightly muffled by the costume head, "Welcome to Sunridge Park, where every day is a great day."

Tasha smiled.

Liam looked at the mascot.

"That’s nice," he said.

"Every day," the mascot repeated, the conviction of someone who fully believed it.

They paid at the booth to the side of the turnstile, Tasha already reaching for her card before Liam had registered that they had arrived at the payment point, and went through.

The park opened up on the other side of the turnstile into a wide main path that stretched ahead of them and branched off in several directions, the different sections of the park visible from the entrance if you stood still long enough to look.

To the left a carousel turning slowly with maybe a third of its horses carrying passengers. Straight ahead the main path continued past food carts and game stalls and people moving in both directions.

To the right a cluster of larger rides, their structures visible above the rooflines of the lower attractions, one of them moving against the sky with a carriage of people at the top making the sounds people made at the top of things like that.

The smell of the place reached them properly now that they were inside. Fried food from the carts, something sweet from a stall selling churros, the general warm sugary smell that seemed to exist in places like this independent of any specific source.

Tasha stood beside him and looked at it all with an expression that was different from anything she had worn at the coffee place. More open. Less managed.

Liam looked at her.

"I didn’t expect this," he said.

She turned and looked at him. "Didn’t expect what."

"You," he said. "Here. Liking this."

She looked back at the park. "I like a lot of things," she said. "This is one of them." She said it simply, like it was obvious, like she didn’t understand why it would require explanation.

They started walking, moving with the natural flow of people along the main path, stopping occasionally when something caught their attention.

A game stall where you threw rings at bottles and received a prize if three landed, which nobody appeared to be achieving. A photo booth with props piled on a table beside it.

A food cart selling something on a stick that smelled better than it had any right to.

Tasha stopped at the churros stall and bought one without asking him if he wanted any and then held half of it out toward him without looking at him and he took it.

They kept walking and eating and looking at everything the park had arranged itself into and Liam thought that he had not done anything like this in a long time, something with no particular outcome attached to it, just walking through a place with someone and seeing what was there.

Then Tasha stopped.

She was looking ahead of them at a building set slightly apart from the main path, its exterior painted dark, artificial cobwebs strung along the roofline, a sign above its entrance in jagged letters.

Haunted House.

A short queue outside, moving steadily toward the entrance where a staff member in a long dark coat was admitting people in small groups, delivering a brief speech to each one before sending them through the door.

Liam looked at it.

Then at her.

She was already looking at him.

"No," he said.

"Yes," she said.

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