Chapter 13
thirteen
ROWAN
It’s the kind of Saturday that empties the dorms.
As we step out of Ridgeview, Sloane tips her face up to the sun. She’s in the same clothes as yesterday — the sweater and jeans she wore to my place — plus a jacket she stole from the hook by my door.
“You don’t need that.” I nod at the jacket.
She bumps her shoulder against mine, falling into step. “If someone sees me leaving your building without a coat, they’ll know I stayed the night because it was cold yesterday. But a coat means I could be coming from a meeting or a study group…”
“A study group,” I echo. “At ten on a Saturday morning.”
“Ambitious students exist, Rowan.”
“In my apartment.”
“I don’t know your life.”
We keep walking toward the lawn, where Luca has invited the whole team and various hangers-on. He sent a message — something about the weather being wasted if we stayed inside — and half the team replied before I even got out of bed.
Halfway there, she elbows me. “Are we…”
I let it hang a second too long. “Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes whatever you want.”
She slows until I notice, and we end up standing in the middle of the path with a guy on a longboard slaloming around us. A few early risers are out — someone on a bench, a few joggers, and a couple sprawled on the grass, blinking like they’ve never seen the sun before.
“Nope.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “Say it.”
“Say what?”
“Whatever you decided ‘yes’ was.”
I look at her. The light’s catching her hair, her cheeks pink in a way that has nothing to do with the cold, and I think how easy it would be to head back to my apartment and spend the whole damn day getting to know every inch of her again.
“We’re together,” I say. “If you want that.”
She takes that in, and the smile gets away from her. “Yeah,” she says. “I want that.”
After looking around to make sure no one’s watching, she leans in to steal a quick kiss, then starts walking again. I follow, falling in beside her, and her pinky hooks mine for three steps and then she lets go.
“Are we telling people?” she says, her voice light, but the question is loaded.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Are we?”
“I don’t want to be a secret.” She says it fast, like she’s been holding it all morning. “I’m done with that. I’m done with hiding.”
“Okay,” I say, with a shrug, because she told me last night she didn’t want to get hurt, which means she sets the pace.
She told me other things in the dark after we’d slept together, too — that whatever she and Mason had been, it never got far — and it makes how far we got and this conversation feel very, very special.
“But I also don’t want today to be about everyone else.” She finally looks up at me. “One day, before the hockey thing and the Halden thing and the inevitable moment Ivy finds out.”
“Reasonable.” I grin, then stop and turn to face her. I take her hands, squeeze once, then let go. “You can be selfish about it for longer if you want, as long as I get to sleep with you.”
“Don’t be crude.” She slaps my chest. “I’m trying to construct a plan.”
“Right. Sorry. What’s the plan?”
She considers, then resumes walking. “We are two people who happen to be in the same social circle. We are familiar in the way you’re familiar with anyone you’ve met a few times.”
“I’ve seen you naked, Sloane…” My voice trails off.
She gives me an impish grin. “Whereas I barely know you at all.”
“Harsh, but got it.”
We reach the lip of the slope where the path opens onto the green, and we can see the whole thing below — including the soccer pitch Luca has already set up with cones, and his portable speaker doing a tinny version of a song I half-recognize.
She slows at the edge. “We split here.”
“Strangers don’t walk down the hill together.”
“They do not.”
She looks at me for another second, then turns left along the upper path toward where Ivy and a couple of girls from Sterling have already spread a blanket. I go right, down toward the pitch and the guys, telling myself not to look back.
I look back.
She’s already looking. She mouths something that might be strangers, and I laugh as I jog down to the pitch, where Luca is running the show at the cone line with a clipboard nobody needs.
“What’s funny?” Luca asks.
“Nothing,” I say.
He sizes me up for a second, then shrugs. “You’re skins.”
“Why are you the commissioner?” I say.
“Because nobody else is up to the job.” He flips an imaginary page. “Seb is angry about the team selection, so ignore him. Theo is over-caffeinated, so also ignore him.”
I pull my shirt off and toss it onto the pile at the corner cone, then join the guys — some hockey dudes and some randoms — on the pitch. The sun hits my bare skin, and suddenly I’m hoping last night’s scratches didn’t leave marks. I glance over at her, and she turns away.
Then the game starts.
The game is unstructured chaos. Seb plays the way he plays hockey: full body, zero concern for other people’s joints. Theo flashes enough genuine skill to make you forget he’s a freshman, right until he celebrates like one. Luca is everywhere, talking nonstop.
As the game goes on, water breaks happen whenever someone gets winded or turns an ankle, players sub in and out, and nobody really manages to keep an accurate score while simultaneously arguing like there’s a trophy.
Around us, the green keeps filling: blankets multiplying, towels across the grass, coolers appearing out of nowhere. When two guys keep lobbing a Frisbee onto the pitch, Seb sails it back as far as he can.
“Assholes,” he mutters.
Mason turns up late at the edge of it all, the last hockey guy to arrive, and somehow looking settled by the time you notice him. He plays for a while, then drifts off to sit under a tree with a water bottle and his phone.
The whole time, Sloane and I are very convincing strangers who happen to glance at each other constantly. But then the agreement starts eroding in pieces I can almost catalog, because we can’t seem to stop smiling at each other.
When I score — ugly, off my knee, barely a goal — my head goes up before my brain does. She’s already watching, chin propped on her hand, fighting a smile. I hold the look past the point of safe before Seb slaps the back of my head as he jogs by.
“Put your tongue away, Hale,” Seb says.
At the next water break, I peel away toward the cooler. Sloane’s already there when I arrive. As per the agreement, we stand six inches apart, and I feign casual as I pop open a can of soda and take a long gulp.
“Pretending is agony,” she says. “And that’s from someone who’s used to it.”
“You literally suggested this,” I say.
“You agreed to it.”
“That makes me complicit, not the architect,” I say. “Hey, Sloane?”
“Mmm.”
“Strangers don’t talk to each other this much.”
“Shit.” She takes a sip of her soda. “We’re going to get caught.”
“Caught doing what?”
“Discussing the unbearable agony of standing three feet from a stranger.”
“That’s where the cover story falls apart, actually.”
She lets out a small laugh and finally turns her head a fraction, just enough for me to catch the corner of her smile. Then my eyes drop and take their time looking, because she’s right there in the sun, and I’m only so strong, and suddenly being strangers doesn’t sound so hot.
“My place is close,” I say, when I get my brain back. “Just putting that out there.”
She elbows me in the ribs — light, deniable — and walks back toward her blanket without another word, although she does give me a little shimmy that I know is just for me, and not deniable this time.
I stand at the cooler longer than I need to, drinking orange soda. And when I look up again, she’s lying on her back with my Ravens jacket bunched under her head. That makes me think of her beneath me in bed.
So much for strangers.
I let my eyes linger, then turn back toward the pitch. The tree Mason was sitting under is empty, and he’s standing near me now. There’s no telling how long he’s been watching, but his eyes are on Sloane.
“So,” he says, still not looking at me. “That’s happening.”
It isn’t a question, so I don’t answer it like one. “Yeah,” I say.
“How long?” he asks.
“Not long.”
“How long is not long?” He tilts his head, like it’s casual.
“Not long.”
The speech starts assembling itself. Look, man. It wasn’t a plan. I wasn’t trying to step on you. You and her weren’t really together anymore. But then I stop, because what Sloane and I are isn’t something I need to explain, and his busted ego isn’t something I need to fix.
“She chose me,” I say. “And I chose her.”
It sits between us, and Mason’s expression doesn’t change, still staring at Sloane. It’s like his brain is still working through a problem, or maybe he genuinely doesn’t care enough to make a moment out of it.
“Yeah,” he says, eventually. “Okay.”
I set the can down. “We cool?”
“We’re great.” He claps a hand on my shoulder. “Happy for you.”
“Sure,” I say.
“You’ll need to tell me if it tastes as sweet as I imagined…”
My hand tightens around the soda can before the rest of me processes what he just said. But he’s already moving, unhurried, hands in his pockets, the performance of a guy who tossed it off and walked away.
Then there’s movement at the edge of my vision. Sloane is on her feet and off the blanket, crossing the green straight at me. Not casually, not on her way to anywhere else. The sun at her back.
And she’s got a look of defiance and determination on her face.