6. Sloane
Sloane
She didn't look at me once.
I want to be clear that this is worse than if she had.
If she'd turned around and smirked, or done the good luck at callbacks voice, or acknowledged in any way that less than twenty-four hours ago I'd walked in on her in bed with my now-ex-boyfriend, I'd at least have had something to push against. Instead, she sat there being brilliant about Chekhov, raising her hand at the right moments, treating me like furniture, which is its own kind of statement and one I recognize, because I've used it myself.
So that's the headspace I'm in when I walk out of the Hartwell Arts Building at 3:42 on the first day of classes.
Hartwell is, objectively, the best building on campus, and I will defend this position to anyone who challenges it, which no one does, because no one who isn't in the arts ever goes inside.
It's the oldest building Whitmore has red brick gone soft and rosy with age, tall arched windows that pour afternoon light into the studios, a central staircase with a banister worn smooth by a hundred years of hands.
The whole place smells like old wood and rosin and the dust of a building where people have been making things for a very long time.
The theater wing has a black box on the second floor and a proper proscenium house on the first, and I have spent more hours inside it than I've spent anywhere else at this school, and walking out of it always feels like stepping out of the version of myself that works and back into the version that has to manage everything else.
The afternoon is gold and cool, the maples along the quad just starting to turn.
I have fifteen minutes before my shift at the bookshop.
I'm doing the math on whether I have time to go back to the Sailmaker first or whether I should just head straight to Main Street, and I'm reaching into my bag for my phone to check the time, when I see him.
Beau Sorensen is leaning against the brick wall of Hartwell, just left of the main doors, holding two takeaway cups.
I notice several things at once, in the involuntary way you notice things.
Dark jeans. The black-and-silver hockey jacket, the one with RAVENS across the back that approximately a third of the female student body would recognize from a hundred yards.
Black Timberlands. He's got a bag over one shoulder and he's standing there with the easy weight of a person who is comfortable being looked at, which people are doing — two girls by the bike rack have noticed him and are conducting a conversation that is entirely about him while pretending to be about something else.
He's waiting for someone.
Obviously, he's waiting for someone. People like Beau Sorensen do not lean against the arts building holding coffee for people like me.
There is a girl somewhere — a dance major, probably, or one of the sorority girls, or honestly anyone — who is about to walk out of this building and have a very nice afternoon.
I adjust my bag and angle to walk past him.
“Sloane.”
I stop. I look around, because surely…
I do an actual scan of my immediate vicinity to confirm there isn't a different Sloane, a more plausible Sloane, standing somewhere behind me that he could reasonably be addressing.
There isn't.
When I look back at him, he's smiling — the kind of smile that starts at one corner of the mouth and gives the impression of being amused at something he's not going to explain.
“There's no one behind you,” he says.
“I was checking.”
“I noticed.”
“It seemed statistically more likely than the alternative.”
The smile deepens. He pushes off the wall and holds out one of the cups. “I got you a coffee.”
I do not take the coffee.
I look at the coffee. Then I look at him.
Two years of working in his grandmother's bookshop have given me a Beau Sorensen file thicker than the one the athletic department keeps, and not one item in that file explains why he is standing outside my building holding a beverage with my name attached to the gesture.
Margaret talks about him like he's a saint with a slap shot.
The campus talks about him like he's a force of nature with excellent bone structure.
Neither version of him has any reason to know my class schedule.
“Why?” I ask.
“Why what?”
“Why do you have a coffee for me?”
“Because you seem like a person who'd be more reasonable with caffeine.”
“I'm extremely reasonable without caffeine.”
“You just checked behind you for a second, Sloane.”
Fair. Irritating, but fair.
“I just want to talk,” he says, and there's something careful in the way he says it, a deliberateness that doesn't match the easy posture. “That's all. I'm headed to the bookshop anyway — going to see my grandmother. Figured I'd walk you.”
“I have a shift.”
“I know. Margaret told me. Four o'clock.” He's still holding out the cup. “You've got time. The Roastery was on the way.”
I should say no. There is a version of this afternoon, a sensible version, where I tell Beau Sorensen that I don't have time, that I don't drink coffee from strangers, that whatever he wants to talk about can be conducted via Margaret like every other piece of Sorensen business has been for two years.
But I'm tired, and Vivienne sat two rows in front of me being brilliant about Chekhov for ninety minutes, and Evan texted me twice before noon, and the coffee is right there.
I take the cup.
It's warm. I lift it on reflex — and the smell hits me before I've thought about it. Cinnamon, rich and dark, and underneath it something creamy and spiced.
Chai.
A chai latte with cinnamon.
Which is — that's my order. That's the exact thing I order at The Roastery, the thing I've ordered probably two hundred times, the drink I get when I want the version of comfort that doesn't require explaining itself to anyone.
I look up at him.
“Margaret,” he says, before I can ask. Reading the question off my face. “She knows what you drink.”
Of course she does. Of course Margaret knows my coffee order, and of course Margaret has at some point relayed my coffee order to her grandson, which means this conversation has been in production longer than I've been aware of it, which is a thought I file under to be examined later and set down.
“Thank you,” I say, because my mother left when I was nine but she did at least teach me that much.
“You're welcome.”
We start walking.
The quad gives way to the path that runs down toward the campus gates and Main Street beyond, and we walk it in silence for a while — not a comfortable silence, exactly, but not an unbearable one.
He's matched his pace to mine, which I notice, because guys his size usually don’t.
They usually expect you to keep up with them, and he hasn't.
He just shortened his stride without making a thing of it.
The chai is good. I'm annoyed about how good it is.
We pass the library, the old stone one with the gargoyles that the freshmen always photograph, and I'm aware of people noticing us — the ripple of attention that follows Beau everywhere, now slightly recalibrated by the fact that I'm walking next to him, which is generating a kind of low-grade confusion in everyone we pass.
Who is that? Is that? No. Who is that?
I sip my chai and pretend I can't feel it.
“So I—” he starts.
“Are you going to—” I start, at the same time.
We both stop.
He huffs a quiet laugh — low, surprised, like he wasn't expecting to find it funny. And something happens that I have no explanation for and am going to be furious about for the rest of my natural life.
Heat moves up my neck and into my face.
I’m blushing.
I want to be extremely clear about the magnitude of this betrayal.
I did not blush this afternoon when Vivienne Park performed brilliance at me for ninety minutes.
I did not blush yesterday when I walked into Evan's bedroom and found him, to put it in the most generous available terms, mid-act, bare-assed and committed, with my theatrical nemesis looking at me over his shoulder.
I stood in that doorway and felt my face do precisely nothing.
I have a face that does nothing on command.
I have built an entire personality around a face that does nothing on command.
And now Beau Sorensen has laughed once on a campus path and my face has decided, independently and without my authorization, to turn pink.
I take a very long sip of chai to buy time and possibly to die.
“You go first,” I say, when I'm confident my voice will come out level.
And here's the thing — now he's the nervous one.
I watch it happen. He clears his throat.
He shifts the bag higher on his shoulder, a small adjustment that doesn't need making.
He sips his own coffee, which I'm fairly sure is a stalling tactic because I've used the exact same one within the last thirty seconds, and then he says, in the tone of a person who has rehearsed this and is now discovering that rehearsal doesn't help:
“I have a proposal.”
I give him the side-eye.
“I'm not sleeping with you,” I say.
He barks out a laugh — a real one this time, loud enough that the two girls walking ahead of us turn around. “Okay,” he says, recovering. “Noted. For the record, that's not the proposal.”
“It's usually the proposal.”
“If I wanted to sleep with you, Sloane, you'd know.”
“Wow.”
“I'm just saying—”
“You're awfully sure of yourself, Sorensen.”
“I'm not hurting for hookups,” he says, with a shrug that's almost apologetic, like he's aware of how it sounds and has decided honesty is worth the cost.
I let a beat go by.
“Right,” I say. “Speaking of which. The girl in the white dress, last night, the one who made a scene in your hallway and stormed out trailing enough perfume to fumigate a small building. How's that going for you?”
He winces. It's a good wince — genuine, the wince of a person who knows he's been caught out. “That's — yeah. Fair.”
“She seemed very chill about the breakup.”