Chapter 20
twenty
SLOANE
I don’t want to move.
Rowan’s thumb is tracing a line along my collarbone, slow enough that I don’t think he knows he’s doing it. As I lean into him, breathing in the warm cotton smell of his shirt and letting the noise from the rest of the house settle around us, it feels like home.
The crowd has thinned — some of the guys have headed home or to a bar, some have drifted to the living room, and it’s just Rowan and me left at the table. But even in here, we can hear Luca and Ivy going at it.
They’re arguing about whether a grilled cheese counts as a sandwich or a category of its own. Luca’s voice gets louder every time Ivy points out that by his logic, a quesadilla is also a grilled cheese, and he is taking her refusal to accept his categorization personally.
Our fingers are laced in Rowan’s lap. He’s warm and solid, and his shoulders are down, which is still new enough that I notice it. I like how easy he’s been tonight — laughing, leaning back, and not scanning the room for the next thing that needs him.
The kitchen light is on. From where I’m sitting, I can see the mess we’ve left — the stack of glasses, the tray Luca’s apple pies fused themselves to, and a balled-up napkin near a cluster of beer bottles that nobody’s dealt with.
Rowan’s eyes drift toward it. I feel the shift in his body before he moves — that automatic inventory of what needs doing — and I press my mouth to the hinge of his jaw before he can stand.
“I’ve got it,” I say.
“You don’t have to—”
“I want to.” I unlace my fingers from his and stand. “Sit. Relax for five.”
He smiles, and I start collecting the plates, and when I reach the kitchen Seb is already at the sink, rinsing a glass under the tap. He doesn’t look up when I enter, so I take a second to admire the production line he has going.
I set my stack down on the counter beside him. “You always wash up?”
“Habit.” He shrugs. “We never had a dishwasher.”
We stand there for maybe thirty seconds, him rinsing, me sorting, and the quiet between us easy. His phone buzzes in his back pocket. He pulls it out, reads something, and something crosses his face — anger or maybe grief — before he smooths it away.
“You okay?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer, just dries his hands. “I’ll be right back.”
And then he’s gone.
I go back out to grab the serving dish, smiling at Rowan on my way past, and I’m reaching for it when Mason stands from the armchair by the window. His hands are already out, beating me to the dish, his lazy grin doing its work.
“I’ve got it,” he says. “Captain’s girl doesn’t clear plates alone.”
Rowan laughs, settled like a man who has decided the world is fine and has stopped bracing for it. So I shrug at Mason and walk toward the kitchen with the plates I’m already carrying, and Mason follows a few seconds behind, glasses chiming softly in his hands.
I set the plates down on the counter and start running hot water into the sink. The pan is going to need to soak, but I can take care of the rest before Rowan and I head out. Mason puts the glasses down next to me.
“You don’t have to do this,” I say, reaching for the dish soap.
“I want to.”
I turn the water hotter. Steam rises from the sink. I squeeze soap into it.
“So,” he says.
The ease has gone out of his voice, and I tense but say nothing.
“Harrison Tisdale,” he says.
My hand stays on the tap.
“Who?” I say.
“He went to school with a Pi Sigma brother of mine.” Mason picks up a glass from the counter, turns it in his hand, sets it back down. “Boys like that talk, you know?”
My hands are in the water, and the water is too hot, but it’s nowhere near as painful as the words he’s speaking. “Okay,” I say.
“I heard about you a long time before I met you, but I didn’t put it together at first. Avery is a common enough name, right?” He’s speaking as if we’re talking about the weather. “But, you know, the whole—” He waves a hand, vague, like the word isn’t worth finding. “—story that got around.”
The hot water is burning my fingers, so I finally take my hands out of the sink. Soap suds slide down my wrist. Then I make myself laugh — low, bored, the sound of someone whose evening is being wasted.
“A story.” I dry my hand on the towel like he’s the least interesting thing in the room. “Somebody at a party said a name, and you built a whole thing on it. That’s hearsay, Mason.”
For half a second, it works. The grin slips.
Then he picks the glass back up.
“I mean, who knew you had a birthmark?” he says.
The room narrows.
“Inside of the thigh.” He’s not looking at me. “It’s a cute shape, actually.”
And there it is — proof.
My parents, my doctor, Rowan, and Harrison know about that birthmark, plus whoever saw the photos. And that means Mason has them, and the thing I crossed three states to outrun is sitting on his phone.
I grab the edge of the sink.
He holds his hands up. “Hey, I’m not threatening you. I’m just saying I heard things.”
I know this move. I know it from a boy back in Rye who had just been told what he’d done and was already reframing it as something I’d misunderstood. Sloane, slow down. I’m just saying. Same hands up. Same little laugh.
“What do you want?” It comes out steady, but my hands are shaking, and I hope like hell he doesn’t notice.
“I don’t want anything.” He picks up a dish towel from the counter and folds it in his hands. “I just thought you should know what I know. Seems fair.”
I look at him then. He’s leaning against the counter with the dish towel in his hands, his shoulders loose, his face almost kind. It’s the same Mason who’s been cool for weeks now, slowly getting the rest of us to lower our guard.
“You know what’s funny, though?” he says.
I say nothing.
“Rowan took the captaincy from me.” His voice is conversational. “And then you.”
He sets the towel down on the counter and smooths it flat with his palm. Then he picks up a glass, runs it under the tap, and sets it upside down on the drying rack like he’s helping. Then he walks out of the kitchen and says something to Rowan that has him laughing.
The faucet is still running, and when I turn it off, the silence is worse.
I press my hands flat on the counter to keep them from shaking, breathing through my nose, slow and controlled, the way I taught myself when my father sat me down in his study and told me the damage was manageable if I stopped making it worse.
Through the doorway there’s a slice of the living room. I can see the back of Rowan’s head, his hair needing a cut, as it always does by week three. Luca is showing him something on his phone, and Rowan is laughing.
He looks like the guy from his kitchen at two in the morning, the one who put his forehead against my chest and let me hold him — the guy just starting to breathe again — and the sight of it has my mind talking loud and clear.
Don’t become evidence again. Don’t become a burden.
It’s the verdict that picks the gray coat over the red, that tells me to laugh quiet and sit straight, that tells me to edit texts before I send them. It’s the impulse in everything I do that has only just started to recede, thanks to Rowan and Professor Moreno and Ivy and the guys.
I feel the urge coming back stronger with every second.
I could tell him.
I could walk into the living room right now, take his hand, and tell him what just happened in the kitchen. He’d choose me. I know that. But he’d choose me the way he chooses everything — by putting himself last and going straight to solving the problem.
And that means Mason.
He’d do it right here, tonight, in front of everyone, with Luca’s playlist still going. He’d make it physical, too, because he told me what he’d like to do to Harrison, and I doubt he’d spare Mason the same treatment.
Then the others would pick sides, and it would become a thing that grinds down the team he now leads, and he’d be the one it costs most. Then the grapevine would work the way it always works — sideways looks, whispers I’d half-hear — and I’d become a topic of gossip.
No.
I refuse to be the story again.
I’d rather carry the thing myself than hand it over to be solved by others again.
So I’m not going to tell him.
The irony isn’t lost on me. A few days ago, I stood in his kitchen and told him he didn’t have to carry everything alone. Now I’m in this one doing exactly what he does, but as I push my hands back into the water until they’re red and do the dishes it doesn’t make the decision wrong.
The whole time I’m washing the dishes, it feels like I’m scrubbing away the girl I’d only recently dared to become again. What’s left in her place is the cleaner, more polished Halden Girl.
When I’m done, my eyes are burning as much as my hands, and a few tears come, hot and angry, a sort of grief for the version of myself I’d barely started getting back. I turn the cold tap on and splash my face until it looks like nothing’s been taken from me.
Then I walk back into the living room.
It’s quieter now. Theo is on the floor leaning against the couch, Ivy is sitting cross-legged on the rug with a beer, Luca has put on something slow, and Niko is reading something on his phone with the half-attention of a man who is leaving soon.
Mason is in the armchair by the window, beer balanced on his knee.
When he sees me he smirks.
And then Rowan sees me. His whole face changes, and the warmth is so immediate that my mouth opens to tell him — about Mason, about all of it — but then the muscle memory holds, and I close it.
I cross to him and reclaim the space under his arm that’s been mine all night. His arm comes around me, his hand settling on my thigh, his thumb resting over the denim where he knows the birthmark hides.
His thumb traces the same circle it always does, and I hold still because the alternative is turning into him completely, pressing my whole body against his chest and making this room disappear. If I do that, I will say something I just can’t.
He doesn’t know.
He can’t.
“Everything okay?” he says.
“Yeah.” I press my face into the curve of his neck and close my eyes. “Just tired.”
He kisses the top of my head and pulls me closer.
For the rest of the night, I laugh at the right moments, and almost nobody notices. The only time someone does, it’s Ivy — one look, a beat too long — and I give her the smile that ends questions.
Rowan’s thumb keeps moving on my thigh.
I cannot feel it.