Chapter 14
fourteen
SLOANE
I’m halfway across the green and walking before I remember standing up.
Every person on every blanket can see me: the girl walking straight across open grass toward a shirtless boy. But I’m fine with that, because I decided a minute ago that I don’t want to deny it.
Deny us.
At the far cone, the pickup game has gone scrappy, with someone yelling about a handball. Rowan still has his back to me, by the coolers. Twenty yards off, Mason has pulled up short of leaving. He started to drift away after their conversation, then stopped when he saw me.
Whatever they said to each other, I saw Rowan tense up, and I saw Mason smirk, and that told me all I needed to know. Somewhere while watching it, I decided I wanted to stand by Rowan the way he stood by me at the party.
The Halden Girl is screaming. She’s loud and articulate, and she has very specific opinions about making a scene. She’s ranting about how I didn’t learn from the last time I was this visible and what it cost me.
Sit down, she says. You have not thought this through. Think about what anyone with a phone could be doing right now.
My mother’s voice is in there, too, somewhere underneath. Sloane, think about what you’re about to do.
I keep walking.
A few yards away now, Mason still hasn’t moved, and now Rowan has turned his head, too. He’s watching me approach with something resembling awe, because he’s spent his whole life being the one who crosses rooms.
I don’t look at Mason. I look at Rowan, take his hand, and don’t say anything, because anything I could say right now would be smaller than this. Then I go up on my toes and kiss his cheek.
It’s not fast. Not nervous. I kiss him the way you kiss someone when you don’t give a damn who sees, and I hold it longer than necessary because I want anyone watching to understand the order of operations.
“Hi,” Rowan says.
I look up at him and smile. “Hey.”
Then I turn my head and look at Mason.
He smirks, just a little. “Cute,” he says.
It’s the exact expression Harrison used to wear. The you’re-overreacting look, the same one he gives his friends when he tells them how crazy or loud or slutty you were. The look built to make sure he wins and you lose, no matter how you react to it.
Same trick, different boy.
“Fuck off, Mason,” I say.
He lets out a soft laugh and starts to go, then half-turns. “You picked him over me.”
“I did,” I say.
He scoffs and walks away, hands in his pockets, easy as anything.
“Hey.” Rowan’s voice at my ear, low. “Forget him, okay?”
I look at his face. “Sure.”
He watches me, checking whether I’m bothered. But I press my forehead against his shoulder, and his bare skin is hot from the sun and smells like grass and sweat. His free hand comes up to rest against the back of my head. Then somebody wolf-whistles.
“About time,” Seb yells nearby, raising a can of soda he just pulled from the cooler. “Pay up, Moretti. I had September.”
“Fucking hell,” Luca calls back, feigning outrage. “Rowan couldn’t wait until October, could he?”
“I was the first to guess it.” Theo stamps his foot once, as if he’s marking the spot. “But this marks the occasion. Right here. Hallowed ground.”
“Theo was not the first to know,” I say, drawing a laugh from Rowan. “I believe that was the security guard in the library.”
Across the green, a different head has turned and stayed turned.
Ivy is on her knees on the blanket, and I can read her like a headline. Her hair is a mess, her hands are limp in her lap, and she looks like she just received a diagnosis or a bad grade and she’s processing it.
“Oh no,” I say.
“Mm,” Rowan mumbles.
“Hold my hand harder.”
“Copy.”
Ivy stands up. She brushes grass off her jeans slowly, buying herself five seconds, and then she starts walking with her fists balled at her sides, almost daring anybody to get in her way. The whole time, I smile at her, because her acceptance matters more than anyone else’s here.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, half to Rowan, half to my own conscience.
“For what?”
“For what’s about to happen to you, specifically.”
She stops in front of us and looks up at her brother — she is small, he is not — and points at him with one finger. Then she shoves him in the chest, two-handed, more for the principle than the impact, and his hand slips from mine as he rocks back.
“You are disgusting,” she informs him. “You are a disgusting human, and I’m going to remember this day when you’re old and fragile and you need help and I say no.”
“Ivy—” Rowan says.
“You are dating my friend.” She sighs. “My delicate baby freshman friend, whom I have personally protected from the men of this campus—”
“Ivy—” he tries again.
“—and this is a violation of the Geneva Convention, so first thing Monday, I’m calling The Hague.”
“Which Hague?” he says.
“There’s only one Hague,” she says. “That’s the whole point of The Hague, you hockey dunce.”
“Cool.”
She wheels on me. Her face is bright and her eyes are bright and her mouth is going, but there’s a warmth underneath. “And you,” she says.
“And me,” I say.
“You have terrible taste in boys.” She scoffs, and then I watch it land behind her eyes — the hockey game, the toga party, and the boy I wouldn’t name. “Oh my God.”
Oh no.
Both hands fly to her face. “‘There’s a boy. It’s not happening.’ That was him the whole time, and I offered to help the magic happen, with my own brother.”
I’m laughing, my eyes watering. Ivy is laughing, still trying to feign outrage. Rowan is laughing, in the embarrassed, put-upon way he laughs when he’s the bit. The sun is in all our faces and it just feels like home.
And then Ivy stops and looks at me. “How long?”
I take a breath. “It’s new, Ives. It just happened.”
She searches my face. “Gross, I hope you washed your hands.”
Then she launches herself at me.
Both arms around me, body pressed into me — the whole assault — and she’s stronger than she looks for someone five foot three. We go staggering sideways into Rowan, who catches both of us with a grunt and the air of a man realizing this is now his life.
“I’m furious with both of you, but I’m also thrilled,” Ivy says into my shoulder.
“Noted,” Rowan and I both say.
“But I get veto rights,” Ivy says.
“Over what?” I say, one eyebrow raised.
“Dates. Locations. Anniversaries. Pet names.” She pulls away and puts her hands on her hips. “But if I hear him call you babe, I’m starting a fire, and I’m also not third-wheeling.”
“You’re going to third-wheel constantly,” I tell her.
“Constantly,” she agrees. “But for the record, if you hold hands in front of me, I’m physically inserting myself between you.”
“We would expect nothing less,” Rowan says.
We end up back on Ivy’s blanket, and Ivy puts herself in the middle. “And this is how it will be for the rest of our natural lives, because otherwise… ick,” she says.
“That seems sustainable,” Rowan says.
As we talk and watch the rest of the soccer game, which has degraded into a four-on-six and pulled in the Frisbee guys and somebody’s golden retriever in on it, I can’t help looking at Rowan.
He’s sitting at his corner of the blanket, one knee up, and the sun is doing something obscene to the lines of his shoulders. He’s still shirtless because nobody told him to put a shirt back on and I’m certainly not going to be the one.
His hair is messy from the game, and every time he laughs at something Ivy says, something stupid and warm turns over in me. He catches me looking once and doesn’t say anything, just smiles and then goes back to listening to Ivy.
Ivy shifts, lying on her back with her head on my stomach. “Stop it,” she says.
“What?” I say.
“I can feel you ogling my brother,” she says.
“I am not ogling.”
“Your stomach got tense.”
“That’s because your skull is on my diaphragm.”
“Mm.”
She doesn’t move. After a minute her hand finds my hand on the blanket and squeezes it. I squeeze back, and she hums once, satisfied, and that’s the whole conversation. It’s the quietest and most meaningful conversation I’ve had at Halden yet.
Rowan’s hand finds the edge of my knee — just his fingertips, light enough that Ivy doesn’t notice or pretends not to. I turn toward it, and we stay like that while the shadows get longer.
Only then does it sink in fully that I’m lying on a blanket in public in September with a boy I chose in front of everyone and my best friend’s head warm on my stomach, and the world didn’t end.
I’m here.
I’m visible.
I’m alright.
Then Ivy says, “If you guys break up I’m keeping her.”
“Fair,” Rowan says.