Chapter 18 Bohdan
Bohdan
“Thank you all for joining me.” Talon waves his arm with an unnecessary flourish, gesturing to the balcony of our suite where we’re all spread out, a beer bottled angling from his fingertips a bit too precariously.
“We had no choice.” Tia smiles tightly at the same time Jay nods, one hand tugging on the chain around his neck.
“I was already here when you came out.”
Talon waves his hands again, but I’m looking past him to Sloan, where she sits on one of the lounge chairs.
Her legs folded under her, arms wrapped around her chest, and her hooded sweater falling down over her knees.
With her hair tied back into a ponytail, it gives me a clearer view of her mouth, lips just parted, the freckles on her cheek under her left eye that seemingly glow under the moon.
Fuck the endless, stretching ocean.
She’s the most beautiful thing out here.
I think she might feel my eyes on her, because hers flick to mine, and she swallows, blinking, before she looks away again.
She hardly spoke to me all afternoon, other than a quiet thank-you and soft smile when I made her pasta dough for her.
Tia folded her ravioli. I would have offered the second I saw her try—hands extended, prodding the dough, covered in white flour before she stretched out her fingers with a rough shake of her head.
But her best friend beat me to it.
I should probably be grateful for that—but the only thing it did was make me hate my useless fucking brain more.
It should have been me—standing beside her, close enough to bend down, brush my mouth across her temple, down to her ear where I could whisper to her about things that might make her smile.
Like why Talon picked an Italian cooking class on a Spanish island, the rock formations we stood on, and the historical and cultural uses of flour.
She’d know more about those last ones than me, but I’d make something up, spin an entire story if it would make her smile.
But that’s for one of the Bohdans living out there in another universe. In this one, I was just the guy she hardly looked at all day.
“Why are we here, Talon?” Tia gestures to the stretching balcony. “I’m tired.”
“Seeing as no one bothered to read it, I’d like to discuss the itinerary.” Talon tips his bottle of beer towards his sister before he jerks his chin to the table closest to Sloan. “I had the suite concierge print off some physical copies. Sloany, if you’d be so kind as to distribute them.”
One brow arches, and she almost looks amused. But she grabs the stack of paper, and when she does, her sweater falls down her shoulder, and I can see it there under the thin strap of her tank top.
The B from all those years ago when we were young and dumb and thought we were invincible.
It disappears again when the sweater shifts as she takes one sheet from the top and sets it beside her on the chair.
She stands, and I can’t help it, but I watch her. Every little movement. Her fingers tugging the hem of her sweater down, smoothing it out before she brushes her palm down her thigh. The way those same hands clutch either side of the stack of papers.
Ordinary movements I’ve missed out on over the last year and a half, and maybe longer because my brain was broken. Things I took for granted because I thought they were mine to catalogue forever.
She looks up at me through her lashes when she hands me my paper, careful our fingers don’t accidentally brush.
It doesn’t matter that our skin didn’t meet.
Sloan Joseph looked at me, my heart still stopped in my chest, and I might as well be dead.
The look lingers.
But this time, she breaks away first.
It feels a bit like a string pulled too taut in my heart and snapped. I roll my shoulders back, rub my hand across my chest and the phantom ache that lives there now because she doesn’t.
Jay’s eyes track the page before he looks up at Talon. “This feels like school.”
“Well, you weren’t very good at that, were you?” Talon leans back against the glass railing.
“Hey!” Jay throws his hands in the air, gold rings glinting under the starlight.
Talon shrugs, angling the bottle towards me and Sloan. “Not everyone can be Rock Boy and Mrs. Worldwide.”
It’s one of those things that happens when you’ve known someone the way we knew each other. When you’ve known so many different versions of each other, grown together and intertwined a bit like the roots of two trees that were planted too close together.
There’s this certain language you share. It can be words, it can be laughter, it can be just a look.
In this case, it’s just a look.
Sloan’s eyes rise, meeting mine, lighter and happier than they’ve looked the entire time, her nose wrinkles, and her teeth come down on her bottom lip.
I grin, the muscles in my cheeks aching because I don’t think I’ve smiled like this since long before I left her.
But it’s not just a look. Her eyes on mine opens this door we both sealed shut, and we watch the years go by through the glass surrounding that rink we first skated on.
Our lips touch for the first time under a singular, bright light and fallen snow.
The first time she let me inside her body, but more importantly, the first time she let me inside her mind.
One of the scariest places on planet Earth for her, but one of the most beautiful for me.
Nights with our friends and Talon giving us a rotating list of nicknames that got stupider and stupider, winning all these championships and trophies and setting all these records, but nothing really mattered as long as we got to keep each other.
Learning with her as she worked so hard against an unkind brain, her smile growing wider and wider as the years went on.
But then we get to the painful parts.
Her eyes shutter closed, and she gives a little shake of her head like she’s trying to get rid of a thought. But she takes a measured exhale, looks away, and closes the door.
“I don’t study every culture in the world, Talon,” Sloan offers dryly.
He waves a hand, like it’s all the same to him, and really, it probably is, before he taps his finger against his palm. “We’ve got a wine tasting tomorrow in Provence, followed by dinner and free time.”
“How gracious of you to extend us free time.” Tia smiles tightly.
Talon points at her. “You’re welcome, sis.
” He clears his throat, flourishing the paper unnecessarily, and keeps talking.
“Day four: Walking tour in Florence, followed by disco night.” He pauses, another dramatic point in Sloan’s direction.
“These next two are for you, Sloany. Day five: Rome, the Colosseum. We’re going to learn about gladiators and then we’re hitting the casino.
Day six: At sea, and I’m personally planning on taking in some of the water aerobics offerings. Day seven: We’re going to Pompeii.”
I chance another look at her. She lights up. Brighter than the moon.
“Pompeii will be followed by a five-course dinner, during which I expect you will all be shedding more than one tear that this is almost over. Day eight—heading back to the port in Barcelona.”
“And we can all go home?” Jay tosses his schedule onto the lounge chair beside him.
Talon frowns, a look of feigned hurt that might actually be real carving across his features. “It’s almost like you don’t want to be here.”
I clear my throat, giving Jay a flat look, before forcing a smile towards Talon. “Of course we want to be here.”
He points at me, but he’s grinning again. “Now I know you’re fucking lying.”
“Can I go to bed?” Sloan asks, standing up suddenly.
It’s nothing anyone else would notice—but I see her give another tiny shake of her head, and she looks at Talon with hard blinks.
Talon sketches a bow, smiling when he stands up straight again. “You’re dismissed, Sloany.”
I give her a tight smile, and I don’t bother saying good night. It’s not the kind she’d be interested in hearing from me anyway, but it might be the kind she needs—I can see her brain whirring from here.
We had a good-night ritual that worked for her.
It worked for me, too. But not for the same reasons.
I didn’t need anything in my mind to go quiet.
I just needed her. And I can’t imagine she’d be interested in me counting the three things I loved about her most that day before kissing her three times across her freckles, three times on her mouth, and letting her take whatever she needed from me.
Tia reaches up, hand wrapping around Sloan’s wrist when she goes to walk past. “Good night, I love you.”
Sloan blinks down at her, offering her nothing but a strained smile, and not even a real word, just a general noise of agreement. “Mm.”
I wait until long after the door to the balcony shuts, until I can see her retreating figure round the hallway of the suite, before turning to Tia. “She didn’t say I love you back.”
Tia looks away from the door, where she might have been watching her best friend, too. She angles her head, slicked back curls starting to escape from her ponytail. “Observant, Novotnak.”
“Since when?”
“You know when,” Tia answers simply. She pats Jay on the shoulder before she stands, offering her brother nothing more than a wave.
She stops beside me, her words just a whisper in the dark.
“How lonely that must be. For her—thinking only bad things happen when she loves someone because her brain was wired to be cruel, and for you, living without her. I opened the dictionary the other day. Flipped to the page with the word masochist, and wouldn’t you know? It was just your picture.”
Tia’s mouth lifts at the corner, all wry. She pats my shoulder, too, and she’s about to walk by, but I lay my hand on hers with a shake of my head. It’s the closest anyone’s ever come to guessing why I actually left.
“I didn’t want to cause her pain. I was trying to . . .” I can’t really bring myself to finish that sentence.