Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sloane
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We woke up in the daylight, which we had never once done.
That's a strange sentence to write about a person you'd been sleeping with for weeks, but it's true and it matters: in the whole secret span of us, I had never woken up next to Cade Lawson in actual daylight, with the curtains open and the morning coming in and nowhere either of us had to be by a certain time to keep anyone from knowing.
Every night we'd had ended in a careful departure—him taking the stairs so the elevator wouldn't ding, me memorizing the time so I could account for it later.
We'd built a whole love in the dark, like something that would die if you exposed it to light.
And then he'd stood on a set of steps and exposed all of it to light on purpose, in the rain, in front of every camera in the state, and the light hadn't killed it. The light had been the thing it needed the whole time.
So, the morning after the steps, I lay there a long time just watching it happen—the ordinary miracle of a man asleep in the morning with nothing to hide from, his face slack and young, the wall nowhere, the gray light on the scar of him.
He'd soaked us both to the skin the day before and we'd come home and I'd peeled the wet hoodie off him and we'd fallen into bed and, for the first time, just slept—less out of heat than sheer survival, two people who'd been holding their breath for two months finally allowed to exhale—eleven hours of it, and now it was morning, and he was here, and nobody was going to make either of us leave.
"You're staring," he said, not opening his eyes.
"I've never gotten to," I said. "Watch you in the morning. You always left before light. I'm making up for lost surveillance."
He cracked one eye. "That's a deeply unromantic way to say you like my face."
"I'm a journalist. We don't say I like your face.
We say the subject's face was observed at length and found compelling.
" I propped up on an elbow. "The subject's face is found extremely compelling, for the record.
Off the record. On every record. That's the whole point now, isn't it.
We don't have an off-the-record anymore. "
He pulled me down against his chest, into the warm, his arm coming around me, and we lay there in the daylight not doing anything, which we'd also never gotten to do—the ordinary lazy nothing other couples take for granted, the unremarkable togetherness, the part I'd told him weeks ago we'd never have because we only had stolen hours.
We had a whole morning now. The strangeness of it kept catching me, a wealth so sudden I didn't know how to hold it.
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The smear was dead by noon, the way a fire dies when you take its oxygen.
I'd braced for a fight. I'd spent two days watching them build the girl who slept with a player brick by brick, and I'd assumed I'd have to spend two months unbuilding it.
I didn't. Cade had pulled the foundation out from under it on the steps, in one sentence, on video, with his own draft as collateral: I'm the personal tie.
She knew everything that could end me and used none of it.
You cannot run she compromised herself for access against a man cheerfully torching his own future to say she protected me when I didn't deserve it.
The math doesn't work. The anonymous accounts went quiet.
The Hawks Insider blog took the post down.
The story stopped being about a girl's body and went back to being about a broken leg and a buried report, where it belonged, where I'd worked so hard to keep it.
Mara called at noon, and I could hear her almost-smiling through the phone.
"Well," she said. "Your defensive back gave the single most effective on-the-record statement I've seen in thirty years of doing this, and he did it for free, and he did it by setting himself on fire.
I've decided I like him. Tell him I said that.
Tell him if he ever needs a reference for the rest of his life, I'm it.
" A pause. "And Sloane. The thing I couldn't fix—the empty chair.
It's not empty anymore. I'm glad. You earned the chair and the person in it.
Don't let anybody, including your own guilty conscience, tell you that you had to choose.
You didn't choose between the story and the man.
You just refused to let either one make you small.
That's the whole job. That was always the whole job. "
I hung up and cried a little, the good kind, again, the second time that week, which for me is a personal record.
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Brielle came home that afternoon and found us on the couch—him with an ice pack under his back, me with my legs across his lap, both of us reading, the most domestic thing imaginable—and she stopped dead in the doorway with her keys still in her hand.
"So," she said. "The big story has a jawline, and the jawline is on my couch, eating my hummus, watching my reality shows with my best friend like it lives here."
"Hi," Cade said. "I'm Cade. I've heard a lot about you. You alphabetized her spice rack story is my favorite thing anyone has ever told me about her."
Brielle pointed at him, delighted, betrayed.
"She told you about the spice rack? That's our thing.
That's classified. Sloane, you gave him the spice rack?
" She dropped her keys in the bowl and flopped into the armchair, grinning, already adopting him, because that's what Brielle does, she decides you're family and then you simply are.
"Okay. Okay, I have so many questions and zero of them are appropriate, so let's start with: is it true you picked up a grown man by his shirt at Carter's party, because if so I need you to know I would have paid actual money to see that. "
And just like that he was in—folded into my real life, the daylight life, Brielle interrogating him about football and him answering with the dry deadpan that made her shriek, the two of them ganging up on me about the spice rack within twenty minutes, and I sat there on my own couch watching the man I'd loved in secret become a person my best friend loved in the open, and I felt the last of something I'd been carrying for two months—the loneliness of a hidden thing, the weight of a love nobody got to celebrate—just lift off and float away.
"I like him," Brielle said later, in the kitchen, while Cade did the dishes he'd insisted on doing, because of course he did, the man who'd never been allowed to need anything had no idea how to be taken care of and overcompensated by trying to take care of everything.
"I like him a stupid amount, actually. He looks at you like—" She stopped, and her loud went soft.
"Like you're the daylight. I've never seen anybody look at you like that.
You usually date guys who like you because you're sharp.
He likes you because you let him stop being so sharp himself.
That's different. That's the good kind. Don't screw it up, and if he screws it up, I'll handle it, I know people, I have a cousin. "
"He already screwed it up once," I said. "Pretty badly."
"Did he fix it?"
I thought about a man on a set of steps in the rain, setting his whole future on fire to read my love back to me out loud.
"He set himself on fire to fix it," I said.
Brielle nodded, satisfied, final. "Then we keep him. Tell your cousin to stand down," she called toward the kitchen. "You're staying. You alphabetize a spice rack once and you're family forever. Those are the rules."
"I don't know what that means," Cade called back, "but okay."
"It means you're family," I said, quietly enough that only he could hear it, and I watched the words land on a man who'd spent his whole life being told the family was a thing you earned by staying useful and silent, and I watched him understand that this one was just given, with hummus and reality TV and a spice rack and no exchange rate at all, and I watched the kid she-keeps-telling-him-is-in-there come all the way out into the daylight and decide, finally, to stay.
We had all the mornings now.
I was still getting used to being that rich.
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