Chapter 17
seventeen
SLOANE
Professor Moreno keeps me after class.
Not in a bad way. She just stands at the front of the seminar room while the others file out, then says something that reorganizes my week. Today it has nothing to do with class; it’s about the research we’re doing together.
“I want a proposal on my desk by the twentieth,” she says. “Media narratives and institutional reputation. You’ve been doing the reading for it, and now it’s time to put some ideas and arguments on a page.”
I think I’m ready.
The article she gave me after that first seminar — the one about narrative framing in public shaming cases — I’ve read countless times now, and each time I find another layer that makes me want to argue with it, which Moreno says is the whole point.
And that was just the start. I’ve been her research assistant for weeks now, pulling sources, annotating drafts, sitting in her office on Thursday afternoons with coffee that goes cold because I’m too engrossed and I forget to drink it.
It’s one of the things at Halden that feels like mine, along with Rowan and the pool.
“You’ll have it before then,” I tell her.
“Good,” she says, smiling like I passed a test. “Go home, Sloane.”
I walk out into the cold with my bag over one shoulder and the proposal already half-outlined in my head. Class was good, but the aftermath was better, and it’s like my veins are spreading the fire of excitement through my body.
I fire off a text to Ivy — too many exclamation marks, grinning at the screen like an idiot — and then somewhere between the science building and the turn toward Sterling House, my pace changes and the excitement dims, because I’m thinking about Rowan.
Or, specifically, how he looked at me from the ice, and how he’s avoided me since.
My feet have already made the decision before my brain catches up, and tonight I’m not taking no for an answer. I walk to Ridgeview instead and knock on his door. It takes a second, but when he opens it, I know I was right to come.
He’s in sweats and a Halden Hockey T-shirt, and he looks tired in a way sleep won’t fix. His hair is pushed back, his jaw is set, and his eyes have that glazed-over quality I’ve been watching creep in over the past couple of weeks.
“Hey.” He pulls the door wider, stepping back to let me in.
His body doesn’t soften when he sees me — not like it usually does — but I go up on my tiptoes and kiss him anyway. He doesn’t respond immediately, and it’s like his brain has to switch tracks from whatever he’s been grinding on.
Then his hand finds the small of my back, his mouth warms against mine, and he lets out a breath he’s been holding. For one breath, he’s the boy who laughs at my texts, so I step inside and close the door behind me with my heel.
As usual, his apartment is neat enough to impress my mother. No dishes out, no clothes on the floor, textbooks squared at the edge of the kitchen counter. The only sign anyone lives here at all is a single mug of cold coffee on the table.
“You okay?” I say.
“Yeah.” He runs a hand over the back of his neck. “Just a lot on my plate.”
He’s been saying that for weeks, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I sat in the stands and watched him play a few nights ago, and when the final horn went and Rowan looked up at me from the ice, he smiled. But it was wrong, and I’ve been thinking about it since.
I cross my arms. “You’ve been saying that for weeks,” I say.
“Because it’s true.”
He looks at me, and I recognize the expression — patient, a little distant, the face he makes when he’s absorbing a problem. I’ve seen him do it with Theo, and with Ivy, and now he’s doing it with me.
“I appreciate you coming by,” he says. “But I don’t really want to do this right now.”
Something in me flinches — the old instinct firing, telling me I should soften, apologize and tell him I’ll come back tomorrow, not be the girl who makes a scene — and my shoulders start to round before I catch them and hold.
“I’m not letting you brush me aside,” I say. “I’m not a problem to be checked off.”
His head tips slightly. “Sloane, come on.”
“You can be busy and adjusting and tired. I’m still not leaving.”
“This isn’t helping.” His voice is firmer now. The captain’s voice. “I—”
“And you can use the captain voice, but it doesn’t work on me.”
Something cracks across his face, so fast I almost miss it. Then a laugh gets away from him, just once. And it’s like the boy I kissed on the lawn in front of everyone is suddenly back in my life.
“That was rude,” he says.
I smile. “It was a little rude.”
His hands go into his pockets and then back out, and he reaches behind him and straightens the textbook stack on the counter without looking at it, a gesture so automatic I don’t think he knows he’s doing it.
He looks away, and I’m sure he’s going to try the wall one more time — the breath he takes is the front edge of another it’s fine. I wait for it, prepared to fight him on this some more, but then something gives.
“Franklin pulled me aside after practice today,” he says quietly. “He said the alumni are watching the transition in leadership, and not everyone is happy with how it’s going.”
“Okay,” I say.
He laughs, but there’s nothing in it. “He said the C isn’t a position; it’s a brand, and the rest of this semester is critical to my career.”
“That’s a lot to put on a twenty-year-old.”
“It’s the job.”
I don’t argue about that yet. I uncross my arms, walk past him into the kitchen, and open his fridge. As I lean down and survey the contents, I see him in it — the whole week, everything that was supposed to be handled, and some of it starting to slip.
There’s a row of meal-prep containers that were clearly full a few weeks ago, but whatever’s inside has given up. There’s some chicken a day past its expiration date, eggs, a bag of spinach going dark at the edges, half a red pepper, a tomato, and some cheddar.
“What are you doing?” he says, hovering.
“Making you dinner.” I turn around, a rough plan of attack forming. “You’re going to sit on that stool, you’re not going to help me, and you’re not going to argue with me.”
He’s already opening his mouth. “Sloane—”
I dig the vegetables out and set them on the counter, then find a spatula and point it at him. “Hale. On the stool. Now.”
He stares at me, then at the spatula, then back at me. His body is frozen, like his mind knows what he should do but his limbs have locked up because he can’t do it — relax, sit, settle. Then he lowers himself onto the stool like a kid who’s been told off.
The laugh that comes out of me is loud and unmistakable, the kind Harrison used to wince at across the senior dining hall and my mother taught me to soften in restaurants. When I look up, his face has changed, the ghost of a smile there.
“What?” I say, defensively.
“Nothing,” he says, quiet.
Something goes warm and off-balance in me, and I don’t have anywhere to put it. The loud is the thing that cost me everything, and he’s looking at it like it’s the thing he wanted most.
“Don’t get cute.”
“No, ma’am.”
I find his cutting board in the cabinet to the left of the sink, and the other tools I need in the most logical places. But it’s the garlic that stumps me, because it’s not in the pantry or on the counter or… anywhere, really.
“Need help?” he says, fighting a grin.
Then I find it. “Your garlic is in a drawer, Rowan.”
“Keeps it fresh,” he says.
“You’re insane.”
As he grins, I start chopping — pepper first, then the tomato, carefully, because it’s one squeeze away from becoming a crime scene, and then the garlic — and put a pot of water on the stove and a pan on the heat next to it.
“Do you have butter?” I say.
“Sure.” He shrugs. “But I have olive oil, too.”
“This is comfort food.” I go to the fridge and get the butter. “Butter.”
“I’m an elite athlete, Sloane,” he protests. “I can’t cook with butter…”
“You’re not cooking, I am.” I hold his gaze. “Now stop backseat cooking.”
The butter melts, and when the garlic hits the pan, the kitchen starts to smell like something a grandmother would approve of. Rowan reaches across the counter for the pepper strips I’ve set aside, and I smack his hand with the spatula without looking up.
“I said no helping.”
“That wasn’t helping,” he protests. “That was eating.”
“No anything,” I say. “Your job is to sit and be looked after, exactly how I say.”
He pulls his hand back, but not fast enough to hide the confusion — like he doesn’t quite know what to do with someone telling him to sit down and be taken care of — and it’s so honest that it hits me right in the feels.
I keep cooking and start talking instead. Nothing heavy, nothing about the team, nothing that needs fixing. “You’re not going to believe what Ivy did yesterday,” I say.
“Oh no.”
“She borrowed a car from a girl on our floor. I don’t know the girl, and I don’t think Ivy knows the girl, but Ivy somehow got her to agree…”
He’s smiling already.
“So she runs her errands, and then she tries to parallel park it back on our block.” I pause. “And there was a fire hydrant.”
“She hit it,” he says, voice laden with a lifetime of experience with his sister.
“She didn’t hit it.” I pause for dramatic effect. “She grazed it. There’s a difference, and Ivy was extremely clear with me about the difference.”
He’s properly laughing now, and I keep going, stirring the peppers and tomatoes into the garlic and butter. With my other hand, I drop some penne I found in his pantry into the now-boiling water, and glance at the clock so I can track eleven minutes.
“So the campus security officer pulled up, and Ivy told him, with complete confidence, that the parking lines were painted crooked. Then she got out of the car to show him.”
“No.”
“Yes,” I say. “And the security officer, who I genuinely think was just trying to go home, looked at the lines, looked at her, and said, ‘Ma’am, I’ll make sure this gets fixed.’”
“He was just brushing her off,” Rowan says.
“Obviously,” I say.
Then I let it sit, not even looking at Rowan. I just finish grating the cheddar, stir the sauce, and check the time. The pasta is done, so I drain it, keeping a bit of the starchy water in the pot. Then I put the pasta back in and mix in the sauce.
All through it, I feel him needing to know how it turned out. But I don’t give it to him, because the whole point is to get him to think about something else for a few minutes, and it’s working. So I plate the pasta and push his bowl across the counter.
“The lines were repainted on Monday,” I say. “Ivy sent me a photo an hour ago. Fresh paint, new lines, the whole block.”
His fork stops halfway to his mouth. “She actually—”
“She changed the infrastructure of Halden, Rowan.” I put a forkful of pasta in my mouth. “With confidence and pointing.”
He’s gone. Head back, eyes closed, laughing in a way that uses his whole chest. The sound fills his kitchen, and I let myself stand there and watch it happen, because the lines around his eyes are back and I’d forgotten what they looked like.
When it settles, the old Rowan is back, for just a few moments. The guy who, while still always alert and reserved and looking for burdens to carry, at least looks a little more relaxed doing it.
He takes a bite, then another, and keeps eating the pasta while I lean against the counter across from him and barely touch mine. I wasn’t that hungry, but that wasn’t the point of me cooking for him.
He clears the bowl and pushes it toward me. “That was good.”
“When did you last have an actual meal?” I say.
“Define actual meal.”
“Something that required a cooktop or an oven.”
He thinks about it for long enough that the silence is the answer.
“That’s what I thought,” I say, then switch topic. “How bad is it really, Rowan?”
His shoulders come back up. “Fi—”
“Don’t say fine,” I say. “Not when I still have the spatula.”
He takes a second. “It’s just — a lot. It’s the all-the-time part that’s—”
He stops, but I keep pushing.
“Rowan…”
He restarts. “Every conversation in my life right now starts with ‘Captain.’”
I lean against the counter and wait for the rest, because I know there’s more.
He sighs. “And there’s the scout.”
“Okay,” I say.
His thumb presses into the countertop, whitening at the nail. “Mercer was the first scout, and there’ll be others.” He rotates the empty bowl on the counter a quarter turn. “And my dad texts me before every game, putting extra pressure on me: make it count, don’t crack, your stats are suffering…”
“And are they?”
“Yes.” He shrugs. “And it’s killing my pro chances.”
“Tell me about it,” I say, slow and careful, just to make sure. “The NHL.”
“I went undrafted, so now any team can sign me.” He says it like he’s reading a scouting report. “Being passed over gutted my dad, because it was always what he wanted for me.”
I nod for him to continue.
“But as Dad got busier and Mom got headaches and Ivy… well—” He laughs bitterly. “I guess at some point I just started taking care of everyone else, and now—”
He doesn’t finish it, so I push again. “And now?”
“Now I just feel overwhelmed.”
His jaw works once — there’s one more thing under all of it, and I watch him decide I don’t need it, the way he decides what everyone needs — and then he swallows it back down. I feel the edge of it, and I let it go, because tonight is enough.
Then he exhales, slow. “I feel like I’m fucking everything up — the team, everything — and I’m trying to keep everything above water, and I’m just tired and feel like I’m drowning.”
I walk around the counter, stand in front of him, and step between his knees. I’m taller than him like this, so I put my hands on either side of his face and tilt his face up so he has to look at me.
“You don’t have to be all that in this room.” I hold his gaze. “Not with me.”
His eyes close, and his hands come up — slow, uncertain — and find my hips. They settle there, heavy, and his forehead drops against my sternum. The weight of him presses into my chest, and his breathing is slow and unsteady.
It’s the first time he’s stopped holding himself rigid in weeks.
I slide my fingers into his hair and hold him there. His shoulders tremble once, barely. His arms come up the rest of the way, finally, and wrap around my waist. He holds on.
I keep my hand on the back of his head, and neither of us moves.