Chapter 10 Sloan
Sloan
My wish to be far, far away from Bohdan doesn’t come true.
“I hate it here,” I hiss, watching Tia file her nails in the reflection of the mirror that stretches the entire length of the bathroom, propped up on the edge of a freestanding clawfoot tub.
Brown eyes flick up, meeting mine in the mirror. She pauses, pointing the file around the bathroom. “Here?” She waves it in the air. “Or here, as in, this giant suite we’re all staying in together that my brother booked and didn’t tell anyone about on this ship that’s definitely not a riverboat?”
“No. Here. In the figurative sense. Where he is.” I widen my eyes towards the door, fingers gripping tighter on the porcelain of the sink. “Do you think we could get another room?”
She ignores me, before her features soften with an exhale. “Once upon a time, you loved being where he was.”
“That was . . . before.”
The truth is—I don’t know why he did it. I have no idea why he left.
Bohdan’s never been a particularly talkative person. It was one of the first things I learned about him.
He doesn’t say a lot, but he says what he means.
And he said he was leaving.
So he must have meant it.
The only conclusion I can find, after turning it over and over and over in my head, is that my brain must have been right all along, since I had my first conscious thought that there was something wrong, just .
. . off about me, and little four-year-old Sloan tottered off to preschool with worries in her backpack beside her crayons.
It wasn’t that the life he had wasn’t enough anymore.
It was me. I wasn’t enough, and I never was.
“Maybe this is a good thing.” Tia leans forward, nodding softly like she’s trying to be encouraging. “You could talk. You haven’t spoken to him since. I can’t imagine how hard that is.”
“It’s not hard,” I bite out, but the tears welling in my eyes say otherwise.
It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, becoming someone who doesn’t know him.
Tia taps the nail file against her fingers before she gently sets it down on the edge of the tub and comes to stand beside me. She drops her chin against my shoulder. “What do you want to do?”
“I’m going to ignore him,” I say, faking conviction and a smile that doesn’t meet my eyes.
She wrinkles her nose, looking half tempted to moan in exasperation. “For a whole week? I don’t think that’s the solution, Sloan.”
“What do you propose I do, Tia?” I wipe at my cheeks, watching in the mirror as I turn inward, all that fake confidence shrinking in real time. “I mean it,” I continue, words all small and sad. “What would you do?”
“What if we gave you two some space? You guys skip this private tour of the ship Talon arranged”—she rolls her eyes, and a tiny smile fights against my tears, peeking through like sunshine on an otherwise grey day—“we’ll go, and you talk?
Just . . . say what you need and put it to rest. I’ll catch you up.
God knows there’s nothing so important you can’t miss. ”
I blink and give a shake of my head. “I don’t want to talk to him.”
It’s a lie. I do.
I’ve wanted to talk to him every minute of every day since he left. It’s a visceral ache, really.
This empty spot in me that just rings endlessly because the person who used to occupy it packed up and moved out.
I could move on; I should move on eventually. But he carved out this home that I don’t think anyone could ever touch.
He built it from scratch. With rough hands that were soft with me, all the framing made of wood grown from his love and the foundation poured from understanding no one else could ever come close to offering.
The drywall and flooring and paint and decorations and all those lovely things were put there by those hands, too.
All the furniture the colour of his eyes and in the shape of his mouth, with lights dotting the ceilings like the freckles dotting my face.
Who’d ever want to try and live there?
“Why not?” Tia drums her fingertips along my arms, tapping at the tattoo still inked there.
I watch her finger touch the letter, and I wish she had a magic eraser. Bohdan lives in me, and I don’t need a reminder painted on my skin for the whole world to see.
It’s like wearing around my thoughts, a little sign strapped around my neck like a name tag:
Sloan Joseph
Once loved by Bohdan Novotnak
But not enough, as it would turn out
Just like her
I don’t know how to tell Tia that Bohdan leaving was all the proof my brain needed to launch a new campaign against me.
So, I try to shrug, and say something else. “He’s tricky. Manipulative. He’ll start speaking Czech halfway through the conversation, his voice will get all rough, and he’s just got an unfair advantage, walking around and looking like that, don’t you think?”
One hand leaves my shoulder, and she taps my nose. “Some might say the advantage is yours. All that dark hair, eyes that blue, and that cute little triangle of freckles he loved to trace with his thumb?”
“I’d prefer not to test the theory.”
Tia exhales, lips tumbling into a sad smile before she squeezes my shoulders and takes a step back.
She’s running out of things to try and say to me, I can see it in the way she angles her head back and forth, studying me in the mirror.
Bohdan always said I was stubborn, and maybe he was right.
But it doesn’t matter what else she’s going to say because there’s a pounding on the door that could only belong to Talon.
He organized this whole thing with much more structure and thought than any of us could have ever imagined he had in him.
The royal suite with the two stories of rooms, the sprawling, modern marble staircase in the middle, the monochrome cream furnishings set off with gold adornments, and the sweeping balcony with a view of the stretching ocean.
An excursion each day at each port, theme nights, and even designated downtime.
It all starts in fifteen minutes with a private tour of the ship.
All these small, minute details accounted for.
Tia throws open the door with a loud huff of breath. “We wouldn’t miss your little tour, Talon. I know how badly you want to see the captain’s quarters.”
What I don’t think he accounted for—he can be a bit obtuse like that—even though we were both on the invite list, was what it would mean for Bohdan and me to see each other again.
I see Bohdan now, one leg kicked up against the back of the giant sectional spanning the middle of the room.
All that does is draw attention to the carved muscles of his thighs, and it is unfair.
Arms crossed over his chest, face impassive and head angled in a way that makes him look like someone carved him from a marble statue, hair a shade of golden-brown in the sunlight shining through the floor-to-ceiling windows that I don’t think a painter could ever swirl the right colours to replicate, and grey eyes wholly on me.
His jaw flexes, and his hand tightens on his bicep when I walk by, and I think he might want to say something.
But it wouldn’t matter. I can’t hear him over my brain anyway.
Bad. Worthless. Insignificant.
Those words were always there. It’s funny how he spent the better part of a decade trying to get them to quiet down, to soften their edges, and to keep them from stabbing me from the inside out, but in the end, it was him who made them the loudest they’d ever been.