4. Sloane #3
I have also, just now, watched him back down a Division 1 athlete in his own living room using only a flat voice and a willingness to hold his ground, and I am choosing not to have a reaction to that.
“Sloane.” I give him only that.
Something crosses his face. Quick — a half-second recalibration, the look of a person who has just placed a name they’ve heard before and is now matching it to a face.
“Margaret’s Sloane,” he says.
“Is that how she describes me?”
“More or less.” The edge of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. The shape of one. “She mentioned you.”
“She mentions you too.” I let it land dry. “Constantly.”
“Yeah.” He exhales. “I know.”
There it is — the resignation of a person who loves someone and has accepted that love includes being meddled with. I recognize it because I wear it myself, on a weekly basis, every time Margaret drops his name into a sentence that didn’t need it.
We stand there for a moment in the middle of his living room, the party moving around us, the music still going, Evan presumably somewhere behind me being consoled by his teammates.
I should say something gracious and leave.
“I should find my friends,” I say instead.
“Yeah.” He nods once. “Okay.”
He doesn’t move. Neither do I, for approximately one beat longer than the conversation requires.
Then I do the sensible thing.
I go find my friends.
Margo sees my face before I reach her.
This is the thing about Margo Ashby — she has the emotional radar of someone who grew up in a house where everyone performed fine and learned early to read the performance. She spots me from ten feet away, mid-dance, and her expression shifts by a single degree that only I would catch.
She lets June finish her sentence. Then she drifts toward the edge of the dance floor in my direction, which she makes look completely natural, which it isn’t.
“What happened,” she says, not a question.
“Evan’s here.”
Her eyes go flat in the way Margo’s do when she is angry on someone else’s behalf and is deciding how to use it. “Where?”
“Football guys, by the door. Don’t—” I touch her arm, lightly. “Don’t. He’s already made enough of a scene.”
“Did he—”
“I’m fine.”
She looks at my arm.
I don’t look at my arm.
“Margo.”
“I’m just looking.”
“Stop looking at my arm and look at my face.”
She looks at my face. Studies it with the attention she gives to things she’s decided to be worried about, the same attention that in four hours will have converted into a detailed plan she’ll present to the group over tea.
I know this about her. I love this about her in a way I’m not going to say out loud right now.
“Okay,” she says, finally. “Are we leaving?”
“Where’s June?”
“Right here,” June says, appearing at Margo’s shoulder with the timing of someone who has been hovering within earshot for the past thirty seconds.
“We need to get Wren,” I say.
Margo glances toward the far wall, where Wren is still in what appears to be the same argument she was in twenty minutes ago, now with two additional hockey players having joined what was presumably already an efficient disagreement. “What’s happening over there?”
“I haven’t gotten to it yet.”
“Should we be concerned?”
I look at Wren. Wren’s posture is the controlled upright of someone who is winning. “No.” I almost smile. “She’s fine. She’s winning.”
We collect Wren, who concedes the argument with the graceful finality of someone who has made her point and no longer requires the other party’s acknowledgment of it.
She asks no questions until we’re out the front door and onto the porch steps, coats retrieved, the night air cool and clean after the heat of the party.
Then she looks at me and says, “Evan?”
“Evan,” I confirm.
She nods once, with the economy of someone who has already done the math. “Cash is going to hear about it.”
“Cash doesn’t need to do anything.”
“Cash is going to anyway.”
This is probably true. Cash and Wren’s relationship might be best described as two people who communicate primarily through mutual irritation and would absolutely have each other’s backs in an emergency, which this technically was, which means Cash is going to know about it by morning regardless of what either of us wants.
“Let him.” I pull my coat closed against the cold.
We walk down the Raven House’s porch steps and onto the path toward campus proper, the four of us shoulder to shoulder the way we’ve been shoulder to shoulder since freshman year, the maples dark overhead, the lampposts throwing down their yellow light.
I don’t look back at the house.
I don’t think about blue eyes, or the flat, carrying voice, or the way he said Margaret’s Sloane with the tone of someone who has heard a name enough times to have a feeling about it.
I don’t think about any of that.
I think about tea, and the Sailmaker, and my own bed, and how tomorrow I’m going to go to the bookshop and have a very direct conversation with an eighty-two-year-old woman about the appropriate limits of matchmaking.
The night is cool and the path is quiet and my arm aches in a way that’ll be a bruise by morning.
That’s fine.
I’ve had worse.