Chapter 20 Sloan
Sloan
Ropes of brown vine, weighed down by impossibly purple grapes weaving through stark green leaves in stepped rows, stretch across the shoreline, angling down towards the glittering ocean; the boats dotting the harbour look tiny from all the way up here.
I blink, watching the birds in the distance swoop low, close to the ocean and what might be fishing nets floating aimlessly behind all the boats, brightly coloured with peeling paint.
The sun warms my cheeks, down the sides of my neck, over my exposed shoulders, and a breeze lifts my hair, loose in an attempt to cover up the B, ink too stark now from the sun. I don’t think I packed a single T-shirt for this entire trip, and it feels a bit like an open wound on display.
“What are you staring at?” Tia drops her chin to my shoulder, arms wrapping around me, squeezing briefly.
I don’t tell her that I’m trying to take in as much of the view as I can. I stared at the headrest the entire drive from the port to the winery because I got stuck in the middle, and turning to look out the window would have meant looking at Bohdan.
I point towards the winery. To Talon doing push-ups off the edge of a wine barrel. “I think your brother’s already drunk.”
Tia cuts me a sideways look, adjusting the wide brim of her sun hat before she turns around to walk backward in front of me down the cobblestone path to the vineyard, the skirt of her floral-print dress dancing around her legs. “Well, four mimosas at breakfast will do that to a person.”
“He’s taking this retirement thing very seriously.” I nod.
He pushes up a final time, clapping his hands before they make contact with the iron rung around the edge of the barrel again.
She smiles again, fondly. She pretends she doesn’t, but she loves her brother more than anything. “He’s having fun. He deserves it. It looks, sort of, like they all are. And that’s hard to achieve. Bohdan takes everything too seriously to crack many smiles.”
She points, but she doesn’t need to.
I could feel his smile all the way from here, even if I couldn’t see it.
The way the left corner of his mouth lifts higher, almost an infinitesimal amount, the slight crinkle at the corner of his grey eyes, lighter than usual and like the ocean under the early-morning sun, the angle of his head.
“You’re sure about this?” Tia peers up at me from under the brim of her hat.
“Sure about what?”
“This . . . truce.” She gestures towards them again, Talon now crouched down, hands firmly on his knees, seemingly coaching Bohdan and Jay through the same push-up routine against the barrel.
I look away. I don’t need to see the muscles of Bohdan’s arms contract like that—the swell of his bicep against the cuffed sleeve of another loose, linen button-up. The flex of his shoulders as it stretches across his back.
I certainly don’t need to remember what it felt like for those arms to cage me in alongside his legs: one on either side of my waist, him impossibly hard inside me, sweat-slicked ridges of abdominal muscle pressing against my chest, a wave of hair curling over his head, voice rough and every second word in Czech because he could never keep his head straight when we were together like that.
“I think you should fuck.”
Whirling towards Tia, my palms find my cheeks, like I can cover up the flush. “Who?”
“You and my brother.” She rolls her eyes, hand motioning back and forth between me and Bohdan. “You two, obviously.”
“And why would we do that?” I straighten my shoulders and lift my chin, like I think the whole thing is improper, and I wasn’t just fantasizing about him inside me.
Tia tips her head back with a bark of laughter. “Because you used to do it all the time. When was the last time you got laid?”
“None of your business.”
“Since Bohdan?” She flips her hand over, studying her nails under the sun, like she wants to make sure her manicure stayed intact.
I narrow my eyes. “Of course not.”
Tia nods, all sympathetic like she expected as much. “Him either, I bet.”
“What?” I blink.
She gestures towards him again. I think Talon has them all doing tricep dips now. “Bohdan. I bet it’s just been him and his hand for the last year and a half. With the memories of you to keep him company, of course.”
“Don’t.” I widen my eyes, shifting on my feet.
I know what that looks like, too.
I’ve watched him. He’s watched me. We’ve watched each other.
His palm gripping against the wet tile of the shower, hair plastered to his face, curling around his ears and at the nape of his neck, droplets of water running across his shoulders, down the planes of his chest while all his muscles contract—
“You’re thinking about it right now, aren’t you?” Tia’s mouth curls into a catlike grin.
I feel a bit like shoving her, but I cross my arms instead. “No. I’m thinking about wine fortification. I hope they tell us about the process today.”
She laughs again, linking our arms and tugging me down the path towards the winery. “Liar.”
I try to concentrate on my sandals hitting the uneven cobblestones so I don’t trip, fall, and have to explain to a French paramedic that I was too busy thinking about my ex touching himself while he watched me in the shower to notice where I was going.
But Tia’s words, quiet and careful, interrupt all my other thoughts because they remind me of the thing I can’t forget.
“You’re sure?” she asks again, and I can feel her eyes on me.
“Yes. I need the Polaroid back. He can have his ring. And I’m finally going to know why.”
I keep my eyes on the cobblestones now, one at a time, and I try to ignore the sounds I hear with each step.
“What kind of rock is that?”
Bohdan looks over his shoulder, fingers stilling where they trail across the carved walls of the cellar.
“Provence is mostly limestone. The accumulation of marine sediments.” He knocks a fist against an outcropping of rock, edges worn down by time.
I nod, folding my arms across my chest, covering my exposed shoulder with one hand so he can’t see the tattoo, on display in this wine cellar we’re supposed to be touring, because he looks so much like the boy I fell in love with, eyes rapt with fascination while he looks at the different lines, colours, and mineral deposits of rocks.
We’re the only ones here. I went to the washroom when Tia, Talon, and Jay walked ahead to see the different types of barrels—mostly to tell myself I needed to stop thinking about Bohdan without clothes on—and when I came back, it was just him standing here: one hand in the pocket of his shorts, the other trailing across the walls, features lit by the swinging bulbs above him.
“Do you—” I start, a laugh catching in my throat. Tia was right. I don’t know how to pretend not to know him. “Do you . . . study rocks for a living?”
His hand, wide with veins traipsing over the back, lies flat against the rock, and he gives me a sideways look. “No.”
“What do you do?” The words sound so stupid, even to me, that I clap my hand over my mouth.
That makes him smile, and he pushes off the wall, shoving his hand in the pocket of his linen shorts. “I used to chase a rubber puck. Now I watch people chase that same rubber puck and talk about it on TV.”
I blink. It’s not really funny anymore.
“Maybe you could integrate your love of rocks,” I say quietly, trying again.
“Yeah, well, rock facts don’t play well on television.” He gives me a wry shrug. “People are more interested in who’s making plays, not the fact that the studio in Secaucus sits on sedimentary rocks. Shale, sandstone, siltstone. All part of the Newark Basin.”
“I wouldn’t know.” I shrug.
A grin stretches across his face. “About the bedrock formation, or the kinds of things people like to hear during televised hockey broadcasts?”
“Either-or.”
“You don’t watch me on TV?” He angles his head.
“Sorry, no.” I snort. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less than watch a pixelated version of a Bohdan I’d never get to have on my TV screen.
He cocks his head back, like he’s affronted.
“You’d watch me?” I ask flatly.
Bohdan stops, the bulbs hanging from the wires mounted across the stone ceiling swaying above him, shadows dancing across his face. He nods. “Probably until my eyes bled.”
I swallow, whispering, “That doesn’t seem safe.”
He shrugs, lips tugging to the side. “Can’t imagine it would be. Not for the faint of heart, having you and losing you.”
You didn’t lose me, I think. You gave me up.
You had me and you let me go.
I close my eyes—I can’t look at him anymore. Not when I still love him, even though I wish with my whole heart I didn’t, not when he looks like that: impossibly stunning, impossibly out of reach, and more lovely than anything in the world, even here in a dank, centuries-old wine cellar.
He might’ve read my mind because his voice drops, a low, rough whisper just for me and him here in the dark. “Would be a fitting punishment, to have to watch you every day.”
“Is that what it’s supposed to be for me?” I blink, and he’s just a silhouette while my eyes adjust. “Punishment?”
A fitting one, my brain whispers. It’s what we deserved, at the end of the day.
To be left alone with our love. Not enough, never enough.
Bohdan surveys me, a muscle in his neck lengthens before tightening, and he lifts his brows before jerking his head. “No, Sloan. It was a last resort.”
They’re right on the tip of my tongue, so many questions I’d die to ask him, weighing it down enough that I can’t really speak, and I wonder if they’re the same things that sit heavy on his shoulders.
Why was it a last resort? Can he still not skate? Does his head still hurt him that much? Is it the noise? The lights? The glare from the ice?
Maybe it’s my ghost chasing him the way his chases me.
He looks the way he did when he was still playing—all taut ridges of muscle. He’s not old yet, and pre-concussion, he’d been planning to play until he was at least thirty-five, if his body let him.
I don’t ask, and I wouldn’t even if I could, because I’m not sure I can stomach the answer. I think, even after all these years, even after what he did, the idea of Bohdan carrying around baggage in the shape of that scar might be the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
Instead, I murmur, “This is violating the rules.”
“You’re right,” he says simply.
“Strike one.”
He smiles, soft and sad. “You want to implement a strike system?”
“It only seems fair. We each have something to gain, so . . . whoever has the least amount of strikes at the end of the week wins.” My arms tighten across my chest, and I don’t tell him that I can’t pretend not to know him—I’ll fail and lose, and I need the Polaroid.
I need to know why.
“Amended rules then?” He steps forward, one hand coming out of his pocket, extending towards me in the low light. “Just . . . whoever fucks up the least gets to win? Think I’ve already lost, but sure, I’ll play.”
I start to shake my head because I can hear it there—he didn’t lose, I was the loser. He left me and I can only think of one reason why.
But Talon shouts for us, hands cupped around his mouth like we aren’t in a contained cellar and the noise won’t reverberate anyway. “Wine tasting time!”
Bohdan tips his chin towards the end of the cellar, and I don’t need to look to know Tia smiles at me, vindicated, like she’s won something. But I think Bohdan and I both might be losers no matter what, and he grips his jaw before holding up a finger. “Strike one for me, then.”