Chapter 5
five
SLOANE
Mason orders for both of us before I’ve even opened the menu.
“You’ll love the burrata,” he says.
The waiter writes it down, and I set my unopened menu on the edge of the table, smiling like burrata would have been at the top of my list if I’d had the chance to look.
The Lantern is not the sort of place I’d have expected for a college first date, but it fits the girl Mason wants and the girl I’m trying to be. It’s all dark wood and amber light and leather booths that creak when you shift.
My dress is a cute navy one my mom bought me, all taste and very little suggestion. Opposite me, Mason looks exactly as polished as he always seems to, and he’s smiling at me like I’m a good decision he’s already made.
Then he makes another decision.
“We’ll do the Barolo,” he tells the waiter, who nods and departs, and that’s apparently that.
I have approximately zero opinions about Barolo, but I have many opinions about being asked. But I push it down and reach for my water, because making a fuss isn’t what I’m about this year.
Especially not when I’m on a date with a member of Halden Hockey royalty.
“So.” Mason settles back, one arm draped along the top of the booth. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” I say. “Surprised you didn’t get carded…”
“Nobody cards a Cross anywhere near Halden.” He laughs. “You’re studying communications?”
“Right.”
“What track?”
“Maybe PR,” I offer. “Or crisis management.”
He nods, satisfied, though he’d have nodded if I’d said taxidermy. “What else is there to know?”
He says it like he thinks he’s already guessed every answer, but I run through it anyway. He already has Rye and the country club, so: father who does corporate law, mother who does… stuff, plus an older brother in politics.
“High school?” he asks.
I’d hoped to avoid that. “Hotchkiss,” I say.
“Hotchkiss,” Mason parrots. “Solid.”
The candle flickers between us. He smiles, and I smile back, and I have the small queasy thought that I have just successfully completed a job interview. An awkward silence stretches between us, but then the wine arrives.
He tastes it, doing the full swirl-and-sniff performance. “Yep, this will do,” he tells the waiter.
More silence, and it’s clear he’s waiting for me to talk. “What about you?” I say. “What are you studying?”
“Business,” he says, like I’ve pressed go on the next obvious topic. “My internship’s locked for next summer. Goldman. The guy who runs the trading desk knows my old man.”
“That’s amazing,” I say, as expected.
“It’s fine,” he says, in a way that makes clear he thinks it’s amazing too, then sips his wine.
I nod, and the burrata arrives, a pile of cheese and torn bread on a wide plate. He cuts it in half and slides the better-looking side onto my plate without asking, which I think is meant to be romantic or chivalrous, and then he keeps talking.
And talking.
And talking.
His semester abroad in Lausanne. The boat his family doesn’t really use. The line he’s on this season. His father — a longtime NHL scout, which Mason drops with a shrug like that explains everything — and how the hockey thing is the family business.
He tells the story of Mason Cross like he’s told it a million times. He pauses where the laughs are supposed to go, and I deliver them, careful and soft, the laugh I’ve been practicing for months. He doesn’t stop, right through a second glass and the remains of the burrata.
The only thing that stops him is the door opening.
A brief gust of cold and street noise hits me from behind, and I hear them: a low cluster of male voices and a laugh that carries across the room. I don’t turn my head, but I watch Mason as he raises a hand in greeting.
“There’s my boys,” he says, mildly, like it’s a coincidence they’ve walked in here tonight.
Without asking myself why he’d set up a date at the same place the rest of the team was planning to go, I let my eyes drift over. There are six of them by the host stand, and I see Luca shaking out his coat at the front, and behind him is Rowan.
He hasn’t seen me yet. He’s mid-sentence with Luca, and when Luca says something that makes him laugh, his whole face gives way to it. It’s like the composure I saw at Maple & Main breaks out of hiding and lets something younger loose.
And that undoes me.
It goes straight through me and settles low, a warm ache between my thighs that has nothing to do with the man across the table. I shift against the leather and press my knees together, but it doesn’t do anything to help.
Then he turns, and our eyes meet. It isn’t long, but it lasts longer than is probably fair to Mason. Rowan’s eyes snag on me, and I hold his gaze, because I can’t seem to do anything else right now.
He lifts his chin a quarter inch. Hello.
I lift mine back. Hi.
The moment is broken when Mason’s hand lands on my thigh under the table, high on my leg, wide-fingered and easy. My dress has ridden up and his palm is on bare skin. His thumb makes one slow stroke against the inside of my leg.
I freeze.
“You good?” Mason says, mild.
“Mm,” I say, recovering.
His smile barely moves. “Sure.”
He lifts his hand off long enough to take a sip of his wine, then sets it back higher, reaching places I haven’t given him permission to go. But I don’t want to make a scene, because I know exactly what a scene costs and exactly who pays for it, so I take a sip of the Barolo.
“Tell me about your internship again,” I say, desperate to move on.
He does. He tells me about it for what feels like a full quarter of an hour, though the clock on the wall behind him says nine minutes. I track every one of them because I’m counting how long until I can excuse myself to the bathroom without it looking like an exit.
He talks. I nod. I ask the follow-up questions any reasonable person would ask, and he answers them expansively, and I realize he’s enjoying himself immensely and hasn’t noticed I’ve stopped contributing.
His hand never leaves my thigh.
When he finally pauses to refill his glass, I lay my napkin down. “I’ll be right back,” I say.
“Where are you going?” His voice is light, but his eyes aren’t.
“Bathroom.”
“Hurry back.”
I laugh because that is what the moment asks of me.
I walk to the back of the restaurant on legs that aren’t entirely stable, careful not to look at the table with the hockey boys. The bathroom is down a hallway just wide enough that two people can’t pass without acknowledging each other, and I enter and shut the door.
In the mirror, I look fine. That’s the alarming thing. My face looks exactly like the girl Mason brought to the Lantern, but then I look down at the warm, hand-shaped patch on my thigh and suddenly I want to scrub off in the shower.
I lean both palms on the sink and drop my head between them, trying to compose myself, because I want to be here. This is the date I said yes to — this boy, this place — because that’s what an up-and-coming Halden Girl from a good family does.
Right?
I take a few minutes, then leave the bathroom.
Rowan is in the hallway.
He’s leaning against the wall, phone in hand, like he stopped on his way to the men’s room and forgot to keep going. His hair curls slightly at his temples where it’s grown out too long, and he looks tired.
When he looks up, he pauses. “Oh,” he says.
“Oh,” I say.
Neither of us does anything.
Then his mouth does the thing from the café, one corner lifting a little higher this time. “How’s the Barolo?”
“What?” I blink, because it’s the first easy moment we’ve shared since the courtyard. “It’s… wine.”
“It’s a fifty-dollar bottle at the store,” he says. “Which, in a restaurant, means it’s a hundred-and-eighty-dollar bottle.”
The lid doesn’t hold, and I laugh, loud and startled. Then he matches the laugh, and for one second the seriousness goes out of his face, his mouth doing that small private smirk that seems rarer than it should be.
Then I catch myself.
My laugh trails off. I rearrange my face and pull the polished smile back into place. He watches me do it — the whole small, graceless process — and his own smirk vanishes, but he doesn’t once look away.
“Sorry,” I say. “That was… sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.”
“I should get back.”
I say the words, but I do not start walking.
He’s also not walking, nor is he doing the things men usually do in narrow corridors with girls they’ve just made laugh. He isn’t leaning in or finding a reason to touch my arm. His hands are in his pockets, and he’s giving me space.
“Take care of yourself out there,” he says, quiet.
Something pulls tight in a way I can’t afford to look at too closely — and lower, there’s more of that heat I have no business feeling talking to a guy outside a bathroom while my date is waiting for me twenty feet away.
“I will,” I say.
He nods once and steps around me, his shoulder not quite brushing mine, and walks toward the men’s room. Then I’m alone in the hallway with my own breathing, so I count to five with my palms flat against the cool wall.
“Get it together, Sloane,” I say.
I walk back to the booth and find Mason has ordered another bottle of the same Barolo he likes and hasn’t bothered to ask if I do. He watches me come across the room, and he has the face of a man doing calculations.
“Took a while,” he says, when I slide back in.
“There was a line.”
“Mm.” He smiles. “Didn’t think there were that many girls in here…”
I don’t have an answer, so I reach for my wine glass, already refilled, and take too long a sip. His hand finds my thigh again under the table. It’s even higher than before, just enough to tell me that he’s chosen to keep the effort going with me.
“So where were we?” Mason says, his thumb doing the slow stroke again, creeping higher with each pass, now almost touching my panties.
He breaks into his monologue again, and I nod in the right places and take small sips of the Barolo I still do not like. The whole time, I can’t help thinking about that boy in that hallway, but I keep my face still.
Once we’re done, Mason pays and helps me into my coat. His hand finds the small of my back as he walks me out, and it doesn’t move the entire length of the dining room, right past the long table and half the hockey team.
I pointedly don’t look at Rowan, because I can’t.
Outside, under the amber glow of the Lantern’s sign, Mason pulls me in and kisses me. He is warm and practiced and confident, and I wait for the feeling — the thing that happened when I saw Rowan smile or when we talked in the hallway.
It doesn’t come.
I kiss him back anyway, because this is the choice I’m making.
He pulls away smiling, already certain this is leading to more.
I smile back, already planning to order an Uber.
And when I look through the window, I see Rowan looking at me.