Chapter 14 Bohdan #2
She finally turns to look at me, slowly, entirely controlled, and she blinks those blue eyes, frozen now and all of her looking cold. “Well maybe something broke when you left, Bohdan.”
It’s not silent in the dining room, but it is at our table. Tia, Talon, and Jay staring at the broken pieces of a girl who deserved to be whole, and I can hear the phantom crack of my chest and spurt of blood across the white tablecloth.
I left because I didn’t want to hurt her anymore—I couldn’t do it for another second of another minute of another day.
I couldn’t let her watch me drown, couldn’t let her try to keep me above water while she sank, too.
I pinch my eyes closed and shake my head. “Tia has my number.”
“We don’t talk much.” Sloan shrugs.
“We talk every day.” Tia drums her fingers across her cheek.
Sloan exhales, lips tugging into a taut line. “Not helping.”
It’s silent again, but not for long because Talon can’t keep his mouth shut.
He knocks a fist against the table, grinning, like the carnage I created doesn’t sit across from him. “You ready for your big move, Sloany? Back to the old Great White North.”
The idea that she’s going to leave the place we made a life together makes me feel like tossing myself overboard. “You’re moving?”
“Yes. Back home.” Sloan whispers the last word, barely audible, and I think it’s more for her than it is for anyone else. “Finally.”
“What are you going to do with the ring?” Talon asks, nodding as he considers. “Seattle’s only cup run. Never been close since Bohdan. Might be worth something.”
“Pawn it for gas money.” Jay leans back in his chair, and I know they’re trying to deflect, to carry some of the weight for me.
But she looks at me and I can see her a bit like I did all those years ago—little gold, under those arena lights.
The way she looked after I got the stupid ring—back in the hotel with me, tangled up in sheets and the stars painting her skin under the moonlight.
I think she sees it, too, can hear it the way I can.
Our favourite three words whispered over and over again. I love you. I love you. I love you. The only count of three that mattered.
Tears pool along her lash line, one slips down her cheek, and I wish they’d drown me. It’s what I’d deserve.
So I whisper something, just for her, and I hope she knows I’m talking about more than just the ring. “Keep it.”
Even though there are twelve bars on this ship, Sloan finds me right away.
You could write it off as coincidence, and if it were Talon, Jay, or Tia pulling out the chair across from me, I’d say you might be right.
But it’s Sloan, still in that fucking yellow dress, who carefully climbs up, the breeze from the ocean lifting her hair, heels sitting neatly on the rung of the chair.
She doesn’t say anything, but she tilts her head, studying me, and there’s a tiny scrunch of her nose that looks something like confirmation, and I wonder if she’s thinking what I’m thinking.
That she found me right away because she still knows me. She knows I don’t like crowded rooms, and that being on this ship would already be suffocating—that I’d pick the one bar stretching out across the deck, and I’d pick the table furthest away, closest to the open air and the ocean.
That we’d never be able to carve the other out of our own bodies because we met when we were too young and fell too in love and even though we aren’t together, I’ll always be hers and she’ll always be mine because when my twenty-year-old hands were busy sculpting her, her eighteen-year-old hands were busy sculpting me.
“You trying to kill me?” I jerk my chin towards her and the yellow silk dress wrapping around her, clavicle and collarbone dusted with something that shimmers, on display under the setting sun.
“Maybe,” she says simply. “It’s what you’d deserve.”
I exhale a laugh, raise a brow, and take a sip of scotch. “You look beautiful, Sloan.”
She says nothing, but her eyes find my hairline, her features soften, and she closes her eyes for a bit too long before she speaks. “Should you be drinking?”
My fingers tense on the glass. “I’m okay. My head feels okay. I’ve got my meds, everything I need back in the room. Besides, someone made sure I kept out of the sun today.”
She doesn’t bite.
I drop the glass to the table with a shake of my head. “Sloan . . . if you’re not going to speak to me . . . if you’re uncomfortable around me . . . I can’t be here, this close to you, without being able to . . .”
My words fall into nothing because I’m not even sure what I’d say.
I gave up my right to anything with Sloan when I walked out.
I might have done it for her, but it doesn’t make it any less true.
“Without being able to what?” She reaches across the table, and I let myself imagine, for one stupid second, that she’s going to wrap one of those perfect hands around my forearm, but she grabs the glass of scotch instead.
She sits taller in her chair, swirls the scotch, and sends the ice cube knocking against the sides of the crystal.
“It’s a special kind of hell, being this close to you and not even being able to talk to you.”
“Not to beat a dead horse, but . . .” She quirks a brow with her shoulder lifted, taking a small sip.
I almost laugh, even though there’s nothing funny.
“I know. It’s my fault.” I press my fingers to my temple, out of habit more than anything, and I catch the way her eyes widen, almost imperceptibly, like maybe she’s worried.
“I’ll get off at the next port, if you don’t want me here, Sloan. Talon’ll get over it.”
I watch her set the glass down, careful, measured movements, before she slides her clutch off her arm, where it was resting in the crook of her elbow.
She unzips it, hand fishing around for a minute before she drops something on the table beside the glass.
My cup ring.
The giant turquoise S inlaid with diamonds, and the words spelled in gold.
“Why’d you bring that?” My words lift, buoyed with hope—and it’s stupid, because it’s not like she brought it to make some grand gesture with it. She didn’t even know I was going to be here.
Sloan taps her finger against the edge of the ring.
Six times.
I press my eyes closed, feeling a bit like each tap was a cut.
“It didn’t feel right . . .” she starts, shaking her head before she turns and stares out at the ocean, watching the last rays of the sun disappear beyond the horizon.
Sloan tips her chin up towards the sky before she turns back to me, lips tugging to the side in a sad, rueful line.
“I wasn’t going to leave it in a box, sitting in a storage unit until I got around to unpacking it.
It felt sort of like it . . . wouldn’t be safe there or something.
I just wanted to make sure . . . it was the most important thing in the world to you. ”
“It wasn’t the most important thing.”
Her nostrils flare with a dry laugh, and she closes her eyes.
“Sloan—” I start, but she cuts me off with the flash of her palm.
“I’ll make you a deal.” She puts her finger into the centre of the ring, lifting it and twirling it around before dropping it back into her open clutch.
“When I walk away from this table, we call a truce. For the rest of the cruise. We can speak, but we don’t fight.
You don’t get to touch me, not even a helping hand on my back when I’m going up the stairs, and you certainly don’t get to talk to me like you have a right to know what’s going on in my brain anymore.
No counting for me. No telling me to take up space.
And certainly nothing like what you said at dinner. ”
Her cheeks pink, and I know she’s talking about what I said—how I knew everything about her body. I scrub my jaw. I hate myself more than I ever have right now. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“You didn’t. What you said wasn’t a lie. We were . . . good together.”
A colossal understatement.
I don’t think a man has ever been lit on fire the way I was with her in the entire history of our sorry civilization.
“You do know me, in all the ways you can know a person.” She looks down, picking at the leather strap hanging around her wrist, and when she flicks her gaze back up, tears pool in her eyes. “And I know you, but I won’t survive knowing you twice.”
Confused, I jerk my chin. “So you want to pretend we don’t know each other? That we’re fucking strangers?”
“However you need to make sense of it. If you can follow the rules, you can have the ring back at the end of the week.” Sloan shrugs, tapping her clutch, before she looks up at me, full lips parting and her words dropping into a whisper. “But I want something in exchange.”
I’d scale the side of the ship and try to jump to the fucking moon if she asked. I swallow. “Whatever you want, Sloan.”
But she asks for the one thing I can’t, won’t, don’t want to give her.
The two things, actually.
“I want the Polaroid back.” Her voice splinters, and she shrinks, in real life, in real time, right in front of me.
Small again, the way I made her.
“And I want to know why.”
My eyes close, my scar throbs, and I feel like I’m going to be fucking sick.
But she mistakes my silence for something else—not the confrontation of the worst thing I’ve ever done that I’ll never be able to justify.
“Unless . . . unless you don’t have it?”
Her voice rises, and I can hear the sob caught there.
She thinks I threw it away.
I open my eyes, and there they are—escaped tears, streaming down her cheeks. Beautiful under the empty sky.
I shake my head. “Of course I still have it.”
Sloan blinks away her tears, nodding once before she pushes to stand. “Great. It’s decided then. I look forward to seeing you for the first time this week tomorrow morning at breakfast. The itinerary says we’re getting off in Mallorca for a cooking class.”
She gives me what she might think is a bright smile—but she’s forgotten already, no matter how much she might want to pretend otherwise, I know her the exact way she knows me.
I can see her brain whirring to life, and I can almost hear it, whispering cruel things in her ear when she turns on her heel and leaves me with one last view of that stupid yellow dress.
Fishing my wallet out of my pocket, I raise a hand to the bartender and tip my chin towards my empty glass. I’d ask for the bottle if that wouldn’t fuck up my brain even more than usual.
I lay the picture flat against the table, eyes roving over eighteen-year-old Sloan—trapped in time before she meets me and the ruination of her life immortalized with her, a decade in the making.
The only thing I have left of her and the only thing I really care about.
The one thing I would never willingly offer up for anything.
But if she wants it back, I’ll hand it over, because it’s the only thing she asked for that I can give her.