Chapter Thirteen #2
"You're done talking." Quiet. The tunnel voice.
The one with the floor dropping out under it.
Cade didn't touch him. He didn't raise a hand.
He just moved, one slow step, until he was between the man and me, his back to me, his whole frame a wall I was now standing behind instead of arguing with, and I watched the man recalculate his entire night against the breadth of Cade's shoulders.
"You're going to walk out the front. You're not going to look at her again.
And you're going to tell whoever sent you that if anybody comes near her—a hallway, a parking lot, a phone, a no-name text at two in the morning, anything—they're going to deal with me, and I don't have a scholarship's worth of reasons to be careful about it anymore. "
A no-name text at two in the morning. He'd said it without thinking, and I filed it, the way I filed everything, the small confirmation that he'd seen the threat and known what it was and said nothing.
"Cade." It came out of me small. The rule.
People were starting to look. The kitchen had gone quiet.
Miles had appeared at the edge of it with a cup frozen halfway to his mouth and his eyes huge.
Jaxon Holt, behind him, very still, watching with a quarterback's read-the-whole-field attention, the somewhere-else gone out of his eyes for once. Everyone was looking. "Cade, don't—"
He didn't move. The man in the polo looked at his face for one more second, found nothing in it he could use, and left—fast, through the front, gone—and the bass kept going and the party tried to remember how to be a party, and I stood in a narrow hallway behind the broadest, dumbest, most beautiful violation of our entire agreement, with twenty people watching us not be a secret anymore.
Cade turned around. His eyes found mine and there was nothing careful in them, nothing walled, just a wild animal terror that had everything to do with a two a.m. text he'd read while I slept and nothing to do with the man.
"You okay," he said. Low. For me. The whole room could hear it and he didn't care, that was the thing, in that moment he genuinely did not care.
"You just broke the rule," I whispered. "In front of the entire team. Miles is— Cade, Jaxon Holt is looking at us like he's doing math."
"I know."
"You proposed that rule. Against my wall. Three weeks ago."
"I know." Something cracked in his voice.
"I heard him say past school. I heard him threaten to follow you past school, Sloane, and the rule—the rule stopped existing.
I'm sorry. It's a good rule. It was the right rule.
And I would burn it down again right now, tonight, in front of God and Miles Carter and Dale Mercer's entire khaki collection, every single time, if the alternative is standing in a kitchen pretending I don't know you while somebody backs you into a wall. "
I should have been furious. He'd just potentially detonated my credibility, the story, his future, all of it, in a hallway, in front of witnesses, because a man got too close to me.
Instead I felt the thing in my chest that I'd been refusing to file finally, fully, irreversibly file itself, stamp it, date it, no take-backs:
I was in love with him.
Hopeless, catastrophic, professionally suicidal, and absolutely beyond argument. In love with the wall that kept coming down for me when it mattered and going back up for everyone else.
"Get me out of here," I said.
He got me out of there. Front door, his hand at my back, public, deliberate, every head in that kitchen turning to follow us into the night, and I let them look, and so did he, and somewhere behind us I heard Miles say, to no one in particular, in the awed voice of a man watching a building come down in slow motion, "Okay. Okay, so that's happening."
In the truck he didn't start the engine right away. He sat with both hands on the wheel and his jaw doing the thing, and finally he said, "You saw it. The text. This morning. You know I saw it too."
"2:14 a.m.," I said. "You were awake. You left me a glass of water and didn't say a word."
"I was going to handle it. I am handling it. I just—" His knuckles were white on the wheel. "I didn't want you scared."
"That's not your call, Cade." I said it gently, because I loved him, and firmly, because I meant it.
"My fear is mine. You don't get to manage it for me by keeping things from me.
That's the exact move they make. Don't worry about it, we'll handle it, just stay quiet, just stay safe. Don't you start doing it too. Not you."
He looked at me for a long moment in the dark. "Okay," he said. But I heard the thing under it, the reflex he couldn't quite promise away, the wall's oldest instruction: protect by hiding. I heard it and I let it go, because it was late and I was in love and you can only fight one war at a time.
I should have made that reflex of his the war I fought that night—the instinct to protect me by keeping things from me, to decide on his own what I was allowed to carry. It was a small thing then, easy to let go of with his arm warm around me.
It was also the first hairline crack in everything. Weeks later, the whole disaster would pour through it.
But it was late, and I was in love, and you can only fight one war at a time. So I let it go, and I slept, and I didn't yet know what I'd let go of.
?