5. Beau
Beau
She’s gone before I get back across the room.
I know this because I look — not obviously, not in a way anyone would notice, just the automatic sweep of a person checking a room the way I check a room, which I do constantly and have done since I was old enough to be responsible for a locker room.
The four of them moved fast. White coat, dark coat, the taller one with the braid — gone, all of them, the front door already closed by the time I’ve cleared the knot of people near the hallway.
I stand there for a second.
Then Cash materializes at my shoulder.
“So,” he opens with.
“I know.”
“Football player.”
“I know, Cash.”
“Grabbed her arm.” He falls into step beside me as I move toward the kitchen, because standing still at a party is an invitation for conversation and I need approximately two minutes of not being talked at. “You stepped in. Very cinematic. I watched the whole thing from the stairs.”
“Why were you on the stairs?”
“Better sightline.” He grabs a drink off the counter — not his, by the look of it, but Cash has never in his life been precious about whose drink is whose — and leans against the cabinet with the ease of a person standing in the exact center of his natural habitat.
The Raven House at a party is Cash’s element the way the ice is mine.
He runs it without seeming to run it. “You know her?”
I pull the refrigerator open. There’s nothing in it I want.
There’s nothing in it at all, really, beyond the six blocks of cheese and the beer and the Tupperware none of us is going to open.
I look at it anyway, because looking at the inside of a refrigerator is a thing you can do with your face when you’d rather not be doing anything with it, and then I close it.
“No,” I say.
“Interesting.”
“It’s not interesting.”
“You stepped in for someone you don’t know.” He says it lightly, turning the cup in his hand, but Cash’s lightest sentences are the ones with the most underneath them, and I’ve known him long enough to hear the floor under this one.
“He was hurting her arm.” Which is the whole of it, as far as I’m willing to look at it standing in my kitchen at eleven at night with Cash reading my face like a box score.
The guy had her by the arm and she’d told him twice to let go and he hadn’t, and I’d crossed the room before I’d decided to cross the room, which is the part I notice now, after the fact, the way I notice most things about myself — a beat late, once it’s already done.
“Sure.” Cash tips the drink toward me. “And you specifically stepped in.”
“I was the closest person.”
“Wyatt was also close.” He lets that sit. “Wyatt was closer, actually. Wyatt was right there by the wall. Wyatt could’ve handled it without breaking stride and you know it, and you went anyway, fast, like the building was on fire.”
“Wyatt—” I stop.
The thing about Cash is that he’s not wrong, and the worse thing about Cash is that he knows he’s not wrong, and the worst thing of all is that he’ll wait — patient, grinning, drink in hand — for as long as it takes me to arrive at whatever he’s already figured out.
He does this. He’s done it since freshman year.
He throws something out sideways and then just stands there being right at me until I catch up.
“Why are you like this?” I ask.
Cash grins. It’s the grin he deploys when he has already won an argument and is just waiting for the other person to catch up.
“Her name’s Sloane Beckett. She’s Wren’s roommate.
Theater BFA, junior year, manages a bookshop on Main.
” He pauses, with the timing of someone who has been saving the best part. “She works for your grandmother.”
I look at him.
“Has for two years,” Cash continues, with the pleasant air of someone reading a welcome packet. “Which means Margaret has known exactly who she is for two years. Which means every single time Margaret has mentioned—”
“Don’t.”
“—the girl at the shop—”
“Cash.”
“—the wonderful, talented, very impressive girl at the shop who is applying to Yale and who restocked the new arrivals wall and who Margaret would describe, if asked, as—”
“I will actually end you.”
“—like a granddaughter to me, Beau, you’d love her, Beau—”
“I’m going to the porch.”
“She’s been setting you up,” Cash calls after me, with the satisfied energy of someone completing a thesis statement, “for two years.”
I go to the porch.
It’s quieter out here. The party has thinned to the back end of itself — small groups on their way out, the sound of a house winding down filtering through the screen door.
The maples are dark against the sky and the lamppost at the foot of the path is throwing its usual yellow circle on the pavement, and I stand at the railing and breathe out and try to think about something else.
I’m not thinking about something else.
I’m thinking about the way she said we broke up this afternoon, in front of the entire party, in the same tone she’d use to state the square root of sixteen.
No heat, no damage in it. Just a fact, delivered to a person who had grabbed her arm and was apparently expecting a different reaction, which he did not get.
I’m thinking about you don’t get to tell me where we do this.
I’m thinking about her spine straightening — a small, involuntary thing, over in a second, but I was standing close enough to see it, and it was the most honest thing that happened in that whole exchange, this one physical tell in the middle of all that controlled composure, and I can’t entirely explain why I’m still thinking about it.
Margaret’s Sloane, I said.
The look on her face. Quick — a half-second of something before the composure came back up.
I placed her at the same moment she placed me, which means my grandmother has been talking about both of us to both of us and we’ve been having parallel one-sided conversations about the same person for two years without knowing it, which is the kind of thing Margaret thinks is romantic and which is actually just extremely Margaret.
The screen door opens behind me.
“She’s going to take him back,” a voice says, from the other end of the porch.
I go still.
Two girls have come out through the side door — I didn’t hear it over the music, and the far end of the porch is dark enough that they haven’t noticed me at the railing.
They settle into the chairs down there with the ease of people claiming a private space, voices dropping to the register of a conversation they don’t want overheard.
“She’s not going to take him back,” the second voice says. “Did you see her face?”
“She’ll take him back. She always does.”
“They literally just broke up—”
“Evan says she just needs space. He’s going to give her a week and then show up with flowers and she’ll fold.” A pause. The sound of a drink being set down. “She’s got no one else. He knows that.”
I know the first voice. It takes me a second longer than it should, which is probably the company I’ve been in for the last twenty minutes, but I get there.
Bella.
I breathe out slowly through my nose.
I should go back inside. This is genuinely not my situation and nothing about it is my business and I have enough going on with my own shoulder and my own preseason and my own grandmother’s matchmaking agenda without adding someone else’s post-breakup drama to the inventory.
I should absolutely go back inside.
“Evan’s delusional,” the second girl says. “She walked in on him with Vivienne Park. That’s not flowers-and-forgiveness territory, that’s—”
“Evan’s going to be fine.” Bella’s voice has the flatness of someone who is less interested in Evan’s situation than in the point she’s making about the person adjacent to it.
“Sloane Beckett has been at Whitmore for two years and her entire social life is those three roommates and an old woman’s bookshop. She’s not exactly swimming in options.”
I press my thumb into the heel of my palm.
“And the hockey captain?” the second girl asks.
A pause.
“Beau was just being Beau,” Bella says, and something in her voice has shifted — still flat, but with an edge underneath it now. “He steps in for people. It’s the captain thing. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“He looked pretty—”
“It doesn’t mean anything.” Cleaner this time. Final. “Give him a week. He’ll be texting me again.”
I hear the scrape of chairs. Then footsteps, and the side door, and they’re gone.
I stand at the railing for a long moment.
She’s got no one else. He knows that.
Give him a week.
The lamppost throws its yellow circle on the pavement and I look at it and I think about Evan’s hand on her arm, the way his grip tightened when she tried to pull away, the very deliberate way he said she’s my girlfriend to a room full of people while she was standing right there telling him she wasn’t.
I think about a week and then flowers and she’ll fold, delivered with the confidence of someone who has watched a pattern repeat enough times to rely on it.
She was going to break up with him tonight. She told me that. Came over for dinner, was planning to end it in person — which is a decent thing to do, a generous thing to do, and he showed up at my party two hours later with his team and his plan and his certainty that she’d come around.
He’s going to keep coming.
The thing about that kind of certainty is that it feeds itself.
He shows up, she holds the line, he shows up again, and everyone around her watches it and decides it means something about what she’s willing to accept, and that’s the story that sticks, and I know how that story goes because I’ve watched it go that way before and I’ve never been close enough to do anything about it.
I’m thinking.
I’m aware that I’m thinking about something that is genuinely not my problem.