Chapter 7
seven
ROWAN
The same beer has been in my hand for ninety minutes, and it’s warm now.
I don’t care. I’m not here to drink. I’m here because Luca asked, because showing up is what I do, and because I told myself two hours ago that being in the same room as Sloane doesn’t mean anything.
People are in rooms together all the time.
But my eyes keep finding her, and each time it’s harder to pull them back.
She’s in Mason’s circle, laughing at something Whit is saying. It’s the polished laugh, because the real one is louder and less contained. I’ve seen it a few times now, and Mason has yet to draw that laugh out of her.
Her toga is long ivory linen, both shoulders covered, hem to the calf, and the care she put into not being looked at is the part I can’t stop looking at. It’s meant to be modest, but it’s cinched at the waist, and the linen skims every curve she’s trying to play down.
The swell of her chest.
The dip of her waist.
The soft line of her hip.
My mouth goes dry, because modest is somehow hotter, feeding my imagination and the desire to know what’s underneath. And right now I’m thinking, very specifically, about the side of her neck, and what it would be like dragging my mouth down from there.
“Hale,” Seb says.
“What?” I take my eyes off her.
“You’re staring.”
“I’m not,” I say, trying not to look at Sloane.
Seb starts into a story about something Theo did at practice, and Niko is doing the face he does when he’s not listening. But I struggle to find purchase in any of it, because I keep looking back at her.
Seb clamps a hand on my shoulder. “She’s got you good.”
Niko’s eyes flick over, suddenly interested.
“I’m watching the room,” I say.
Seb drinks from his cup of party punch. “She’s a hell of a room.”
“Who’s a hell of a room?” Luca arrives, as subtle as ever. He follows my eyeline before I can correct it, finds Sloane, and makes a small, wounded sound. “Oh, no. Hale. No.”
“Ivy’s roommate,” Seb says, as if that’s reason enough not to fool around with her, and he’s not entirely wrong.
“And Cross’s project,” Luca adds, cheerful. “And the kind of girl who irons her opinions before she lets them leave the house.”
“I know,” I say.
It comes out too fast and too flat, and the grin slips off Luca’s face.
“Oh,” he says. “I was joking, but you actually like her—”
“I don’t have room for it.” I drink the warm beer. “My father texts me a to-do list for my life, and there’s no line on it for her. And she’s with Mason, so just drop it, okay?”
Nobody says anything for a second.
Even Luca.
Then Niko, who hasn’t appeared to be listening to a word, says, “You’ve looked at her forty times.”
“Forty-one,” Seb says.
He’s right, because I’m looking right at Sloane yet again.
And, this time, her eyes find mine.
It happens the way it happened at the Lantern — a held beat, neither of us pulling away, the smallest possible exchange — but I feel it in my stomach and in my groin, and then Mason notices.
She’s already tense, holding her wine, smiling that fake smile, and not moving. But when Mason catches her looking, it gets worse. He gestures at Ivy on the coffee table and says something, which causes the Pi Sigma circle to start laughing.
Then his hand slides from the linen at her hip to her ass, squeezing.
She flinches.
It’s small enough that anyone not watching her would miss it, but I’m watching, and a second after the flinch, the smile falters just a little. Her face composes itself over the damage, and I feel my whole body go cold.
I move.
I set the beer down and cross the room in just a handful of strides. Other students part for me, and for once I’m glad I look like the kind of guy people move for. I reach her at the same moment her smile goes back into place, and my hand lands on her arm.
She’s warm.
I knew she would be warm, but I did not know it would feel like this, her pulse fast where my thumb landed by accident. Her whole body goes stiff, but then she seems to register that it is me, and something in her loosens.
“You good, Hale?” Mason’s eyes track up my arm to my face.
“Walk it off,” I say.
His smile arrives a beat late. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re drunk,” I say, voice firmer. “Take your hand off her and walk it off.”
The Pi Sigma circle stops laughing in stages. Whit first, then the rest when they realize the situation has changed shape. And through it all, Sloane has not moved, her arm still in my hand and her eyes staring at the floor.
Mason doesn’t move his hand. Instead, he looks at me like he is deciding something, and my body is making the small adjustments it makes when somebody on the ice is about to drop the gloves: weight back, hands loose. I am ready for him to swing and part of me wants him to.
Then Seb is at my elbow.
He’s just there — he’s always just there — broad and unbothered, looking at Mason the way he looks at a winger he’s about to put through the boards. He’s the enforcer on the ice, and there’s not a single guy on the team who wouldn’t listen when he speaks, or move when he says.
“Outside, Cross,” Seb says.
Mason laughs once, not a real laugh. He lets go of Sloane’s ass with a small theatrical lift of his fingers, stepping back and holding both hands up in surrender to the room. And it’s hard not to notice him inching away from anyone on the team and toward his Pi Sigma grunts.
“Frigid bitch is all yours,” he says to me without looking at Sloane. Then he turns to Seb and looks him up and down. “Must be nice partying on someone else’s dime.”
Seb’s face does not change. It never changes. But I am close enough to see the hit about being a scholarship kid show in his eyes. It’s the smallest flinch, there and gone, before his face closes over it.
“Outside,” Seb says again. “Last time I’m asking.”
Mason laughs, turns, and walks through the circle toward the porch with his hands still up, performing it for the room. Seb follows at a pace that makes the point without making a scene.
The rest of the room watches them leave, then the attention shifts to me and my hand on Sloane’s arm. A girl near the stairs has her phone half-raised, convinced nobody else has noticed her.
I should let go, but I don’t, because for two or three seconds after Mason walks out, Sloane doesn’t move. Her breath goes fast and she leans toward me, barely, transferring the smallest amount of weight into my palm.
I feel it everywhere.
She looks up at me and the mask is gone. Her hazel eyes are wide, I can smell her hair, her lips are parted, and I’m thinking about nothing except the distance between her mouth and mine. It makes my chest ache so badly that I forget that half the room is watching.
She remembers first.
I see her register it — the fact that she just leaned, barely, toward a boy who is not her boyfriend in front of everyone who will be talking about it tomorrow — and the mask goes back on, hard and instant. Her eyes change and she steps back, my hand falling away.
“Sloane—” I say.
“Don’t.”
Her chin is up. Her eyes are bright. There is a flush high on her cheekbones and her chest is rising fast, and I hate myself because even now — even with her looking at me like that — my body will not stop aching for her.
“I’m sorry,” I say, even as my mind is doing its own loud, stupid arithmetic on the curve of her mouth and the rise of her chest when she breathes. “He was—”
“I know what he was doing.” Her voice is low and even, but it is not the polished voice, and it is not the real voice I’ve heard a couple of times. It is a third one, for me, and it is cold.
“He had his hand on you,” I say. “You flinched.”
“And now everyone in this room saw a boy save me from another boy.” Her voice goes even lower, so nobody except me can hear her. “Tomorrow the story is Mason got handsy at Luca’s party, and Rowan stepped in. I become Sister Sloane and you become the hero. Do you know how that feels?”
“I just—”
“I do.” Her voice cracks. “You don’t get to decide for me, Rowan.”
I open my mouth and shut it. “But you’re clearly fak—”
“You don’t get to choose who I am because you don’t like what I’m doing.
” Her voice is so quiet I almost lose it under the music, but it lands like a hit to the ribs.
“He put his hand on me without asking. You put your hand on me without asking, too. I’m not pretending I don’t know the distance, but I didn’t ask you to do that and I didn’t give you permission to. ”
“Sloane—”
“Don’t,” she says. “Excuse me.”
She walks toward the door, through the crowd, not looking back.
Every instinct screams at me to follow, but I don’t.
The party is loud again before the door has shut behind her, and Luca is already moving toward the center of the room, doing what Luca does — drawing attention back to himself, sparking the energy until it is a roaring bonfire again.
Through the front window, I can see Mason already laughing on the porch with two of his Pi Sigma brothers, no doubt retelling his version of what just happened, untouched as always. I watch as Seb watches him a moment longer, jaw set, then comes back inside.
“He’s a piece of shit,” Seb says behind me.
“Confirmed,” Niko says, handing me my beer.
“That scholarship shit.” Seb takes a long pull from his cup.
“He’s going to open his mouth to the wrong person one day,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “You good?”
“No.”
He nods like that’s the answer he expected.
“I’m out,” I say.
Nobody stops me, but even as I leave the party behind — the togas, the music, the chaos — her voice follows me into the cold. Not the words, but the crack in it, right at the end: the sound of someone barely holding something together.
It’s like she wanted me to understand what she was saying but doubted I would.
She told me I didn’t get to decide for her, but for a moment it felt like her body had made the decision for her. My hand can still feel her pulse and the way it sped up when I touched her, and now I can’t square the fact that those two things are both true.
Because before tonight, I told myself this wasn’t happening. I’ve got enough on my plate without it — the team, my sister, and a father who runs my life like a checklist — and no room for a girl I’ve met a handful of times.
Staying away was the easy call, but not after what I felt at the Lantern and tonight.
But I made my move — the only one I know, crossing a room to fix a problem — and she threw it right back in my face. Just as she said I don’t get to decide for her, it turns out I don’t get to decide this, either.
Nina’s line surfaces on the walk: everybody’s safe place and nobody’s actual partner.
I can be Sloane’s safe place, at least until the mask slips back on.
But I can’t be her partner.
Or so it seems.