Chapter 30
thirty
ROWAN
It’s an hour or so before I get out of the locker room.
Showered and dressed, I head for the pool, which is on the far side of the athletic complex. I’ve walked this hallway a hundred times and never once turned left at the end of it, because swimming isn’t hockey and I’ve never had a reason.
Tonight I turn left.
The door is propped open with a doorstop, and when I head inside, the chlorine hits me first, sharp and thick enough to taste at the back of my throat. Every light is on, too, the surface of the pool blazing electric blue and throwing ripples across the tiled walls.
Sloane is sitting at the shallow end with her feet in the water. “You found it,” she says.
“You said the pool.” I stop short of her and dump my bag. “There’s one pool.”
“Please tell me you showered.”
I nod.
She pulls her feet out and stands, water dripping off her ankles. “I’m going to try something,” she says, unzipping her jacket and placing it on a bench.
“Okay,” I say, unsure.
“But I don’t want you to do anything. Don’t help me. Don’t say anything kind. I just want you to watch.”
So I watch, and I keep my mouth shut, because somewhere in the last week I finally learned the value of silence, of sometimes letting myself be carried along by circumstances, and of not adjusting or fixing everything right away.
The sweater goes first. She crosses her arms, takes the hem, and draws it slowly over her head — and every instinct I own stands up at once: go to her, help, take over. Because I know how hard it is for her to trust me and to show herself in the light and in public.
I’d close the space, say the easy thing, make a joke.
Take some of the weight off her.
But that’s the whole problem with me in a single reflex, and tonight I don’t get any of it. So I keep my hands at my sides and my mouth shut and let her be exactly as big as she wants to be. Because I know it’s not just the sweater coming off.
It’s the year.
The careful Halden Girl, the neutral smile, the armor she has worn so tight for so long. She’s stripping all of it off in a blaze of pool light with nowhere to step out of the glare, and I have never wanted to say something so badly or known so completely that I can’t.
So I watch.
Underneath the sweater is a pink bralette, and I almost recognize the set before the jeans come down — after one graceless hop to free her second foot — and the black lace panties underneath finish the thought.
I know that set, because I held it once.
The day we met, when her bag burst open across the Sterling courtyard, I crouched on the brick and set the pink bralette on her duffel like it was something I respected, and I folded the black lace without letting myself look.
That day, she couldn’t hide that underwear — and herself — faster.
Tonight, she wore them, on purpose.
The girl who’s spent a year managing every inch of what people are allowed to see went home between the corridor and now and put on that set, and I’m standing here under strict orders to stay quiet while she reaches back, unhooks the bralette, and lets it fall.
It slides off her arms to the tile, and I can’t breathe. Her breasts are bare in the full light, her nipples tightening in the cool air, and the want hits so hard and so fast I have to lock my knees.
I’ve been hard since she set that jacket down and I understood where this was going, and now my cock aches against the front of my sweats, even as she hooks her thumbs in the black lace panties and slides them down her hips.
There’s nothing left between her and the light.
It’s all of her.
The flare of her hips, the softness of her stomach — and the birthmark.
She isn’t performing a second of it. She’s just letting me look, in a blazing-bright room, at the most stripped-back, bravest thing anyone has ever trusted me to see. And I want her so badly and I love her so much it’s hard to stand here and not say it.
She watches me do it. Watches me come apart without moving an inch. And whatever she finds in my face steadies something in hers, because she takes a few steps toward me with a smile on her face.
“Okay,” she says, barely a breath. “You can talk now.”
“Oh, God. Thank you.” It tears out of me all at once, like a dam breaking. “You’re so beautiful I can’t think straight, and so fucking sexy I can barely stand here.” I find her eyes and hold them. “I love you, Sloane, and you never have to hide a single thing from me. Not ever. Not one inch.”
A breath shudders out of her, but she’s smiling. “Your turn. Get in.”
“I’m still dressed.”
“I know. Get in the water, Rowan.”
So I do. I sit on the edge, swing my legs over, and drop in. The sweats go heavy immediately, dragging at my thighs, the water coming to my chest and soaking my T-shirt. The water is warmer than I expected, and I’m drenched.
She slides in after me, the water closing over her shoulders, her hair fanning dark across the surface. She comes all the way in and wraps her arms around my back, and finally — finally — I get to hold her.
I pull her in and feel the bare length of her against me, her breasts pressing soft into my chest through the soaked cotton as my cock presses hard against her. But that can wait, because after the last few weeks, all I want is to pull her close and breathe her in.
She lets it last for almost a minute, and then she leans back enough to get her hands between us, and grips the hem of my T-shirt. I reach to help her take it off — pure reflex, do-it-faster, do-it-myself — and she swats my hand away and does it herself.
So I keep my hands to myself and let her take her time — and as she works the sweats down my hips, she lets the backs of her knuckles trail slowly up the length of my cock. The air leaves me, my hands fist at my sides, and it takes everything I have not to reach for her.
She smiles, pleased with exactly what that did, and peels the last of it off — sweats and boxers in one sodden lump onto the deck — until there’s nothing left on either of us, and we’re both just here, bare and lit and even.
“There,” she says, looking at all of me and not pretending she isn’t. “My favorite version.”
Before I can say anything, she takes me by the wrist and the shoulder and turns me, slow and certain, and walks me backward a couple of steps with steady pressure, like she’s rehearsed this part too. With her breasts pressed into my back, she guides my torso.
“What are you doing?” I say.
“Helping you float.”
“Sloane, I’m two hundred pounds.”
“Water doesn’t care.” She puts both hands flat against my spine. “Lie back.”
I don’t lie back. I stand there with her palms on my spine, bracing, every part of me hunting for the solid bottom right there under my feet. Because nothing we’ve done so far tonight feels the same as this — letting go, and trusting her.
“Rowan.”
“Yeah.”
“You are not going to drown in four feet of water with your girlfriend.”
I cough. “Girlfriend?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Girlfriend.”
I still hesitate.
“What’s wrong?” she says, suddenly tense. “Rowan, I—”
“I can’t swim, Sloane,” I say softly. “I never learned how.”
She looks at me, putting it together: the captain of the hockey team, the guy who carries the load for everyone, can’t do the thing every kid learns at six. But she doesn’t laugh or make it small. She tightens her arms around me and brings her face close to mine.
“Then I’ve really got you,” she says. “Do you trust me?”
And that’s the thing that undoes me, because I do.
“Yeah,” I say. “I trust you.”
“Good.” Her voice gentles. “Lie back and let me have the weight.”
I lean back. My feet want the floor, my hips drop, my core clenches, and my mind is screaming at me to get my legs under me. And as her arm slides under my shoulders, her other hand at the small of my back, I’m staring up at the lights and breathing too fast.
“You’re very tense,” she says.
“I’m aware.”
“Big breath in, then let everything else go soft.” She smiles at me. “You’re safe.”
I fill my lungs and let the rest of me go, and that’s the thing that does it. My breath slows, my shoulders drop the rest of the way, and then the water takes me. My legs come up, and there’s this weightless quiet where my ears go under and all I can hear is my own pulse.
Her arms are under me, steady.
Nobody’s held my weight in a long time.
Actually, I’m not sure anybody ever has.
“There he is,” she says. “You want to know who I actually am, since I just showed you everything else? I talk through entire movies. I cry at the dog commercials, the old-dog ones, every single time.”
“Every time?”
She nods. “I’m also so competitive at board games that my brother won’t play me. I got asked to leave a yoga class once for laughing. And I’m loud, and I take up space, and I am not getting smaller — for you or anyone — ever again.”
I’m grinning at the ceiling. “I love you.”
Her arms tighten, just slightly. “Say it again.”
“I love you.”
“Once more, a whole sentence, with my name.”
“I love you, Sloane Avery.”
“Okay,” she says, and presses her lips to my temple. “Good.”
We leave it at that for a while, and I float with her. My mind starts to drift, thinking about how my dad’s had a finish line picked out for me since I was six — pro hockey — but now, floating here, with her, I don’t know if I want it.
I want this. I want her.
I want the slow version of a life, with a girl I love, without having to solve the problems of a whole world and a whole hockey team. But I’m not sure I can choose that, because it would be the first thing I ever chose because I wanted it, and not because somebody needed me to.
I don’t say it.
Not yet.
It’s mine to sit with for now, and this time I do.
But there’s another thing, and it isn’t only mine to sit with. It’s older than the corridor, and uglier, and I’ve been carrying it around like something I could get away with never handing over. Floating here, with her holding every pound of me, I can’t.