4. Sloane #2
“Just listen to me,” he says, and his voice is up another notch, the sober-and-planning version giving way to something less controlled. “You walked in, you made your little scene, you left without letting me say anything, and now you’re here at a party acting like I don’t exist—”
“I didn’t make a scene.” I keep my eyes on his. “I walked in. I saw you. I left. That’s it.”
“You laughed at me.”
“Yes.” I don’t look away. “I did.”
Something crosses his face.
“You want to know what’s funny?” His grip tightens, and I feel it in my shoulder now, a pulling ache, and I am very carefully not reacting to it because reacting is what he’s waiting for. “Three years. I gave you three years—”
“Eight months.”
“—and you walk out like it’s nothing, like I’m nothing, and you can’t even give me ten minutes—”
“Let go of her arm.”
The voice comes from behind me and above me, low and flat and carrying in the way that voices carry when they don’t need to try.
Evan stops talking.
I turn my head.
The blond guy from the hallway is standing two feet away, and he is — I’m revising several things in real time here — considerably taller than I processed from across the kitchen.
Six-three, at minimum. The kind of build that comes from years of professional-grade athletic training, all of it currently arranged into the configuration of a person who is not going to move.
He’s looking at Evan.
He is not looking at me.
His expression is the kind of neutral that isn’t actually neutral — it’s controlled, which is different, the way a held breath is different from not breathing.
“Mind your business, Sorensen,” Evan says. He doesn’t let go of my arm.
Sorensen?
The blond guy’s eyes drop to where Evan’s hand is on my arm, and then come back up, and something in the neutral expression shifts by approximately two degrees.
“Last time,” he says, and his voice has dropped further, which is somehow worse than if it had gotten louder. “Let go of her arm.”
Evan lets go.
Not gracefully. He releases me with the energy of someone who wants it to read as a choice rather than a concession, fingers peeling back slowly, chin coming up.
He’s five-ten, maybe five-eleven on a generous day, and standing next to the blond guy he looks like a different species — not just the height, but the sheer physical presence of someone who has been training seriously since he could walk versus someone who lifts three times a week because it’s part of the package.
Evan knows this. I can see him knowing it.
“We were having a private conversation,” Evan says, with the careful dignity of a man who understands he has already lost the room and is now performing for a different audience — himself, maybe, or the football guys who have drifted closer, drawn by the gravity of something about to happen.
“You were hurting her arm,” the blond guy says.
“I wasn’t—”
“I watched you do it.”
The flatness of it lands harder than an accusation would have. No heat, no challenge. Just a statement of fact from a person who was standing close enough to see and has no particular investment in Evan’s version of events.
Evan looks at me. It’s the look he uses when he wants me to be the one who smooths things over, who says it’s fine, he didn’t mean it, who makes the room comfortable again.
I have made rooms comfortable for him before.
I have apologized for scenes he created.
I have done this more times than I’m going to count right now, in this living room, in front of people I have to see for the next two years.
I don’t say anything.
I straighten my spine instead, which is not a conscious decision, just the thing my body does when it has finished being managed.
Evan reads it. Something in his face shifts.
“This is between us,” he says to the blond guy, with the edge of someone who has run out of reasonable and is working with what’s left. “She’s my girlfriend.”
“I’m not your girlfriend.” I keep my eyes on Evan, not the blond guy. “We broke up this afternoon.”
“You walked out—”
“After I found you in bed with someone else.” I keep my voice exactly where it is. Level. Precise. The kind of sentence that doesn’t need volume to land. “Which is the generally understood as the endpoint of a relationship.”
A beat of silence in the immediate radius.
Someone nearby makes a sound that is half-laugh, half-wince, and gets shushed by the person next to them.
Evan’s jaw goes tight. “You’re going to do this here?”
“You started it here.”
“Sloane—”
“You grabbed my arm in front of fifty people.” My voice stays exactly where it is. “You don’t get to tell me where we do this.”
He stares at me. There are two versions of Evan when he’s losing an argument — the one who retreats and regroups, and the one who doubles down. I’ve seen both. I know which one the jaw means.
He looks at the blond guy. Then back at me.
“Fine,” he says, with the clipping of a word that means the opposite of fine. “We’ll talk later.”
“We won’t.” I don’t soften it.
He holds my gaze for another second — long enough to make a point, not long enough to make another scene — and then he turns and moves back toward his teammates, who rearrange themselves around him with the practiced ease of people who have been his audience before.
I watch him go.
My arm aches where his fingers were. I don’t reach for it.
“You okay?”
I turn.
The blond guy is looking at me now — actually looking at me — and his expression has changed from the controlled nothing he had pointed at Evan to something less strategic. More direct. Blue eyes, which I register and then don’t do anything with.
“Fine.” The word comes out steadier than I feel.
“Your arm—”
“Is fine.”
He holds my gaze for a moment. He doesn’t push it, which I note.
“Thank you.” I make myself say it. “For the intervention.”
“He wasn’t letting go.”
“No,” I agree. “He wasn’t.”
A pause. Not uncomfortable, exactly. The quality of silence between two people who have just shared something they didn’t plan to share and are both figuring out what to do with that.
I should find my friends. Margo and June are still somewhere in the living room, and Wren’s situation looked like it needed addressing twenty minutes ago, and I want to go home with a thoroughness that has upgraded from preference to physical need.
“I’m Beau.” He offers it like it’s nothing.
Something clicks into place.
Not loudly. Just the soft, internal click of a thing settling into context — the pieces I had separately, assembling themselves in the space of about two seconds.
Beau.
Beau Sorensen.
Margaret’s Beau.
I look at him. I take him in properly for the first time, which I have been actively avoiding doing, for reasons that made a lot more sense thirty seconds ago.
The dirty blond hair. The blue eyes. The build, which Margaret once described as he takes after his father, who was very large, which you’d know if you followed hockey, which I know you don’t.
I have worked in his grandmother’s bookshop for two years.
I have heard about him approximately four hundred times.