Chapter 21
twenty-one
ROWAN
Sloane is on the couch with her laptop open, and I have no idea what’s wrong.
I’m at the kitchen counter on a stool, my own laptop in front of me, and the apartment is quiet in a way that feels new and wrong. Her feet are tucked under her, her hair is up, she’s reading something on the screen, and she looks beautiful.
But she’s eight feet away and I cannot reach her.
I tell myself it’s nothing. She’s tired; she said so at Ironwood, three nights ago now. But since then, the whole mood has shifted, and I know it’s more than that. Because I know her study face — I discovered it in the library and have seen it every day since — and this isn’t it.
It’s one of my favorite things about her, and it’s gone.
I drag my eyes back to my own screen.
There’s an email from Coach Franklin saying he wants a sit-down about a third-line tweak, which is Franklin’s polite way of saying my read had better match his. Below that, an email from a sophomore I barely know asks for a reference letter for a scholarship.
I look at Sloane and want to say something about it, but the words don’t come. Three days ago, she would have asked questions, and I would have felt less alone afterward. Now I’m not sure, so I leave it and tell myself I’ll try tomorrow.
“Row,” she says.
I look up.
She’s watching me. Her face is soft, but her eyes are not. “You okay?” she says.
There it is. The opening. The one I would have walked through a week ago without thinking, because a week ago, I had figured out how to do that with her. I would have said the apartment feels wrong tonight and asked her to sit closer to me.
“Tired,” I say instead, because something changed three days ago. “Long day.”
She nods.
She used to ask the second question. She used to lean across the kitchen island and say tired how, then wait, and the waiting was the gift, because nobody waits for me. But this time, she nods and goes back to her work.
I should put the laptop down, walk over there, sit on the floor in front of her, and say I don’t know what happened, but it happened, so talk to me. But I open my mouth and then close it, because whatever opened in me has shut again.
So I do the thing I’ve done for twenty years.
Go back to problem-solving for everyone else.
But when I look up again, she’s standing.
She crosses the rug in three steps and closes the lid of my laptop. Then she slides between my knees, puts her palms on my chest and her mouth at the hinge of my jaw, and I think — okay, here she is, and this is how it comes back.
“Bed,” she says, quiet.
“Yeah.”
I follow her down the hall.
She turns the lamp off when she enters the room, which is a first, because she’s always wanted the lamp on. And as I stand in the doorway, she pulls her sweater over her head, and I want her more than anything.
I cross the room.
I lift her chin with two fingers and kiss her. She kisses me back, her hand coming up into my hair. I release the catch of her bra with my thumb and I’m already pulling her against me.
She breaks the kiss and kneels, sliding down between me and the bed, her hands moving to the waistband of my sweatpants, and then her mouth is on me. And the second she takes me in, I groan.
She knows exactly what I like, and she’s doing all of it — my hand in her hair, her hands on my thighs, her mouth wet and warm, taking me deep. But I’m still thinking, that’s the problem, and she isn’t looking up at me.
But I don’t get to why. My hand tightens in her hair and she takes me through all of it, and when I come, she swallows. She breathes out evenly through her nose, sits back on her heels, and wipes the corner of her mouth with her thumb.
“Hey, come here,” I say, reaching for her hand and pulling her up onto the bed. “Your turn.”
I want to touch her, feel her react, and then hear that catch in her breath when her thighs part. I want to feel anything back from her, because she’s felt distant for days now, but I don’t know how to say it without sounding like a guy who’s complaining about a blowjob.
But when I put my hands on her thighs, she moves them away. “I’m okay, Rowan,” she says quietly.
“Hey.” I reach for her again, sliding my hand across her stomach, but she catches my wrist. “Look at me.”
“I’m tired, Row, that’s all,” she says with a tight smile. “I just wanted to do that for you, okay?”
She kisses me on the cheek, then shifts out from under me and rolls onto her side, facing away. As she pulls the duvet up over her shoulder, I lie there in the dark, struggling to understand what happened.
It has never been like that before. The other times she’s gone down on me, there’s been a conversation in it — her teasing me, grinning, the easy and filthy back-and-forth of two people who have figured each other out.
But tonight was different, and I roll onto my back and think it before I can stop myself.
Mason at dinner, smiling at her when he handed her the bread. Mason in the kitchen later, helping to clear plates. And then, when Sloane had come back into the living room, his eyes lingering on her a half-second too long.
If the easy warmth and the lights-on intimacy and all those smiles were the before, and tonight’s distance in the living room and the lights off in the bedroom are the after, then the in-between is Mason and that moment in the kitchen.
She’d come back from that kitchen a little too quiet, laughing at the right beats but too careful, like she’d found the Halden Girl all over again. And since then, that’s the only version of Sloane I’ve seen, no matter how much I try to find the other one.
I don’t know what happened, but I don’t think I’m inventing it. I know I could ask her. She’s right here, a foot away on the other side of the mattress, breathing slow like she’s asleep when she isn’t. I’d just have to ask seven words.
What happened with Mason in the kitchen?
I know exactly why I don’t.
They dated, and she ended it, and I let myself believe ending it meant choosing me. But if I ask about that kitchen, she’ll answer, and the answer I’m afraid of isn’t he did something. It’s I felt something or we did something.
There are kinder explanations, and I’ve run them all — her mother, midterms, something I did to upset her without noticing.
None of them survive that kitchen. Or maybe they all do, and I just can’t see it, because it’s late and I’m wrung out and my brain keeps reaching past every kind explanation for the one that hurts the most.
For the first time ever, I don’t want to solve the problem in front of me, so I don’t ask.
My phone buzzes and I reach for it.
It’s the team chat. Niko has flagged something on the third-line tape, and wants me to point it out in my chat with Franklin tomorrow. So I type back one word, then open the file he linked and watch ten seconds of a play.
The whole time, Sloane is watching me. She rolled over at some point, and now her cheek is on her hand. Her eyes are open and very calm and very far away. I look back down at the phone so she can’t see my face.
“Work,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
She holds my eyes, then smiles at me the way she smiled at people in the first week. It feels like this moment, more than any other, is when I lose her or get her back. So I try what has always worked between us.
“You realize,” I say, propping myself up on one elbow, “you’re in my bed and not completely naked. That’s a hostile act.”
She laughs. It’s short, polite, and doesn’t reach her eyes.
“I need to go,” she says. “I’ve got an early class tomorrow, and I don’t want to wake you up in the morning.”
“Fair.”
That’s what I say.
She blinks once, a little shocked at my response, then climbs out of bed and picks up her sweater. She pulls it over her head, and when her face comes back through the collar, she’s wearing that small, polite smile again.
She sits on the edge of the bed to pull her shoes on, and she glances at my hands where they rest on the mattress, not reaching for her. I know she’s expecting me to, but I can’t right now, so she just gets ready and picks up her phone.
It lights up in her hand, and something I haven’t seen in three days breaks through. A small startle, then a real grin, then a snort of laughter — loud and ugly and real, the laugh from the kitchen at two in the morning and from the courtyard.
Then she catches herself and puts the phone away. The grin softens into a smaller one, the snort folds itself away, and she clears her throat and looks at the screen. Just like that, her face is composed again.
I miss that laugh. I want those moments back — the ones where I pulled reactions like that out of her a few times a day. I want to be the guy who makes her feel safe and comfortable and warm.
But I can’t right now, not without asking that question.
“Ivy,” she says.
I nod. “Text me when you’re home,” I say.
“I will.”
She leans across the bed and kisses me on the cheek, and then she’s gone.
I stay in bed a long time. Then I hear a noise from the kitchen, and I get up and find Luca at the counter. I stop mid-stride because, although the guys have keys to my place, I didn’t expect him here right now.
He’s wrapping a plate in foil with a second plate already finished beside him. He’s humming something under his breath, and when he sees me he freezes with the look of a man who has been caught doing something he absolutely intended to get away with.
“Okay,” he says. “So this isn’t what it looks like.”
“It is exactly what it looks like,” I say. “You’re stealing my food.”
“In my defense, Seb made pasta last night and I’m pretty sure he used ketchup for the sauce,” he says, already gesturing with the plate. “And Theo microwaved a steak…”
“So?”
“A steak. In the microwave. I just can’t live like this, okay?” He scoffs. “I’m not apologizing. Sloane’s cooking should be a shared resource.”
I just raise an eyebrow.
He picks up the plates. “I’m taking it.”
But the humor dies when I don’t respond, and he seems to sense something is wrong, because he gets two forks out of a drawer, peels the foil back off one of the plates, and slides it across the counter to me. It’s leftover meatballs Sloane made the other night.
“Eat,” he says. “You look like you’ve skipped the last three meals, so I’m not leaving until you do.”
So I eat, and as I do, he leans on the counter and tells me the full Theo steak story. It’s long-winded and almost certainly embellished, but he doesn’t ask me what’s wrong, and for ninety seconds I enjoy the distraction from the questions and the lists in my head.
“You look like shit, by the way. But, like—” He waves his fork at my face. “Well-structured shit.” A pause. “I’m leaving before this gets worse.”
Then he’s gone, and I sit on the stool, open my laptop, and go back to the emails.