3. Beau
Beau
The Raven House throws the same party every first week of school.
Same keg on the back porch, same playlist that starts with something everyone knows and devolves into whatever Cash considers a personal statement by eleven — he took over the speaker three years ago and has not relinquished it since, which the team has collectively decided to accept because the alternative is Theo choosing the music, and Theo’s taste runs to things that make people feel like they’re in a car chase.
Same crowd, more or less. Athletes and their orbits.
Theater kids who came with someone. Freshmen doing the thing where they’re performing casual about being here, which is always the most painful part of the first week and which I remember doing and choose not to think about too hard.
I’ve thrown this party three times now.
I don’t mind it. That’s the thing people get wrong about me — they assume because I’m captain I’m above the party, that I’m hosting for the team and tolerating the rest of it.
I’m not. I like the noise of a full house and the cold of a beer and the looseness of the first week of school, before anyone’s behind on anything, when the semester still feels like a door someone’s holding open.
The Raven House is good at parties the same way it’s good at most things — the porch, the kitchen, the living room that’s somehow big enough, the fact that we’ve been here two years and it shows in the comfortable way that means people know where the cups are and where the bathroom is and which floorboard to step over on the stairs.
Cash is in his element. This is the only way to describe it.
He moves through his own party like he’s visiting it for the first time, perpetually delighted by what he finds, somehow always exactly where something interesting is about to happen.
He’s been gone for forty minutes and I’ve already heard his voice from three different rooms, which is a physical accomplishment I’ve stopped trying to explain.
Wyatt is near the kitchen doorway with a drink, talking to someone from the football team.
He’s got the body language of a person who is genuinely interested in what he’s hearing, which with Wyatt is always real — he doesn’t perform attention.
He just has it. I’ve never figured out if that’s an Alabama thing or a Wyatt thing, but either way it’s one of his better qualities, which is saying something given the competition.
Theo is on the back porch.
I know this because Theo gravitates toward exits and porches in approximately equal measure, and the back porch of the Raven House is both.
I’ve known him since freshman orientation, when he sat next to me in the hockey welcome and said, about the coach who was speaking, “He’s going to rise us hard,” in the tone a doctor uses to read an X-ray.
He was right. Coach O’Grady is intense, but his track record for conference wins and Frozen Four trophies makes him one of the best college coaches in the country.
I’m working my way toward the back of the house when someone steps into my path.
“Beau.”
I stop.
Bella Hastings is standing in the hallway between the living room and the kitchen wearing a white dress that she absolutely knew she was going to wear when she got dressed tonight.
She has dark hair and green eyes and the quality of beauty that has always made her aware of it — not vain, exactly, just calibrated.
She knows the angles. She knew them the first night I met her and she’s known them every night since.
She’s smiling at me in a way that is not a smile.
“Hey,” I say.
“You didn’t text back.”
“I did text back.”
“That was a text back?”
I press a thumb into the heel of my palm. “I said what I needed to say.”
“You said four sentences.”
“It didn’t need more than four sentences.”
She tilts her head. It’s a gesture I recognize — she does it when she’s deciding whether to be reasonable.
I can’t tell yet which direction this is going.
The hallway is narrow and warm and there are people on both sides of us and I’m aware of all of it.
This is my house. That’s the part I keep coming back to.
She came to my house and walked into my kitchen and is standing in my hallway.
She planned this, which means the four texts were a prelude, which means I have been, for the past three days, underestimating the situation.
“I just thought,” she says, “that we could talk.”
“We’re talking.”
“I mean really talk. Not —” she gestures at the party around us — “here.”
My thumb presses harder. “Bella.”
“I’m not asking for a relationship.” She says it quickly, which means she rehearsed it. “I know that’s not what you want. I’m just saying things were good last semester, and I don’t understand why we can’t—”
“Because I told you in May.”
“You said you needed space.”
“I said we were done.”
“You said—”
“I was clear.” I keep my voice even. I know what my voice sounds like when I’m managing something — Cash calls it the Captain voice, which he means as a dig and which I take as a compliment, because at least it means I’m not shouting. “I wasn’t trying to be unkind. I meant it.”
She looks at me for a long moment.
Something shifts behind her eyes. I see it happen.
“You know,” she says, and her voice has changed now — the rehearsed version gone and what’s underneath coming through sharp and aimed, “I talked to three girls who said the same thing. That you do this. You’re great, and then you check out, and you act like it’s because of hockey, but it’s not really hockey, is it? ”
“Bella—”
“You’re just scared.” She says it like she’s handing me information I don’t have. “You’ve got the whole captain thing, and the family thing, and the—”
“I’m not doing this.”
“Doing what? Listening?”
“Having this conversation.”
Her chin comes up. She’s getting louder and I know it and she knows it and the three people nearest us in the hallway have gone carefully still in the way people go still when they don’t want to be involved and absolutely don’t want to leave either.
My jaw has been tight for forty-five seconds. I’m aware of it.
She is in my house. She came here. She walked through my front door at a party she knew I was throwing and she has been waiting in my kitchen and she is doing this in my hallway, and I have been polite about it twice already.
The polite is running out. I can feel it going, the way you feel a stick about to crack, and the part of me that’s still holding the line thinks, very clearly: don’t. Not here. Not in front of the team.
“You don’t get to just—” she starts.
“I was clear.” I say it again, and something in my voice finally gives — not a shout, not cold, but past managed.
Past the Captain voice. Past the fourth time I’ve said the same true thing to the same person who keeps deciding not to hear it.
“I was honest with you from the start. I was honest in May. I was honest in that text. And I am being honest right now, in my own house, at a party you were not invited to, in a hallway where half my team can see us, and the fact that you’re here doing this means you know exactly what you’re doing and you’re doing it on purpose.
” I stop. I breathe. “I’m not going to say it a fifth time. ”
The silence in the hallway has weight.
I don’t look at who’s in it.
Bella stares at me. Her eyes are bright in the way that means she’s deciding between two responses and one of them would require crying in front of an audience, which Bella Hastings does not do.
I know this about her. I know more about her than I probably should, for something that was never supposed to be serious, and the knowing makes the whole thing worse in a way I’m not going to examine right now.
She says, very quietly, with a precision that means she means it: “I hope she’s worth it.”
Then she turns around.
She moves through the hallway and the living room and out the front door, and I can smell her perfume in the space she left — something floral, something that’s been in every room she’s been in since September of last year, too sweet, too much, the smell of a decision I made over and over and rationalized because nothing was ever technically official.
I stand in the hallway for a second.
My jaw unclenches slowly.
I breathe out.
A hand comes down on my shoulder from behind, and I don’t startle because the footfall is Cash’s. Cash moves heavy. He always has.
“So,” he says.
“Don’t.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I know what you’re saying.”
“Bullet.” He pauses for effect. “Dodged.”
“Cash.”
“I’m being serious.” He comes around to stand next to me, which takes some navigation because the hallway is narrow and Cash is not small.
“She would’ve poked a hole in the condom and saddled you for eighteen to life, I’m telling you.
I’ve thought this since November. I said it to Wyatt. Wyatt agreed.”
“Wyatt’s too nice to agree with that.”
“Wyatt said, and I’m quoting, ‘I see what you’re saying.’”
“That’s not agreement, that’s acknowledgment.”
“With Wyatt, those are the same thing.”
A low whistle from the kitchen doorway. Wyatt, materializing with a fresh beer and the expression of someone who witnessed everything from a sensible distance and has decided the sensible distance is no longer necessary.
“That was something,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“You okay?”
I take the beer he’s holding out before I register he was holding it out for himself. He doesn’t say anything about it. That’s the thing about Wyatt — he gives things away and makes you feel like it was your idea.
“Yeah,” I say again.
Cash grabs himself a drink from the counter behind him. “She’ll be fine,” he says. “She doesn’t actually want you. She wants the idea of you. There’s a difference, and honestly it’s a relief, because the idea of you is way less of a pain in my ass than the actual you.”
This is sharper than Cash usually runs. I look at him.
He shrugs. “I pay attention.”
“Since when?”