6. Sloane #2
“I could've handled it better,” he admits, and to his credit he doesn't dress it up.
“But in my defense, I was clear from the start.
I told her it was just fun. Casual. Hockey's my life right now, I don't have room for anything serious, and I said that to her before anything happened, and she said she was good with it.” He exhales.
“She was not, it turns out, good with it.”
“They usually aren't,” I say. “When you tell someone you have no room for them and they hear it as a challenge.”
He looks at me sideways. “You sound like you're speaking from experience.”
“I'm speaking from observation.” I sip my chai. “I observe a lot.”
We reach the campus gates and pass through them onto the top of Main Street, where the town starts — the bakery, the antique store that's perpetually dying, the bookshop two blocks down with its windows catching the late light.
The street's busy with the first-week energy of students rediscovering the town, and I slow down because I am increasingly certain this conversation is building toward something I'm not going to like, and I'd rather find out before I'm standing in front of Margaret.
I stop walking. He stops too.
“Is there a point to all this,” I say, with a sigh. Not unkind. Just tired. “Because I have a shift in—” I check my phone “—fifteen minutes, and you've now bought me a coffee, complimented your own sexual magnetism, and admitted you handled a breakup badly. I'm not sure what the throughline is.”
“There's a point.”
“Get to it.”
He's quiet for a second. Then: “Are you still having trouble with Evan?”
I don't answer right away.
The thing is, I don't want to answer. Evan is mine to manage.
I have been managing him for eight months, and it's exhausting in a way I've gotten very good at hiding, and the last thing I want is for the captain of the hockey team to have a window into how much real estate one mediocre football player occupies in my week.
But he's looking at me with the steady, patient attention of someone who already knows the answer and is just waiting to see if I'll be honest, and I'm tired, and the chai is good.
“He texted me last night,” I say. “And again this morning. Asking if we could talk.”
Something moves in Beau's jaw. It's subtle — there and gone — but I catch it, because I catch things, and it's the same thing his face did last night when he saw Evan's hand on my arm.
He's not happy about it. I don't know what to do with the fact that he's not happy about it, so I don't do anything with it.
“After last night,” he says.
“After last night.”
“After you broke up with him.”
“He doesn't consider it broken up. He considers it a misunderstanding that I'm being dramatic about.” I roll the cup between my hands. “Which is its own kind of impressive, given that the misunderstanding was him being inside another person.”
Beau is quiet for a moment, and we start walking again, slower now, down Main Street toward the shop.
“I think we can help each other,” he says.
I almost laugh. “You think I can help you.”
“Yeah.”
“With what? Do you need someone to proofread your econ papers? Block a scene? I'm not sure what skills I have that would be of use to the campus golden boy.”
“I'm being serious.”
“So am I. I genuinely can't construct a scenario where I'm useful to you.” I gesture with the cup, encompassing him, the jacket, the general phenomenon of him.
“You have — everything. You're the captain. People reorganize themselves when you walk into a room. I work in a bookshop and audition for things. What could I possibly—”
“I think we should be seen together.”
I stop again.
I squint at him.
“Seen together,” I repeat.
“Yeah.”
“Like.” I'm genuinely trying to parse this. “Seen together how? At — places? Doing what? Are you proposing we start a book club?”
He bites his lip — an actual nervous tell, which is fascinating coming from someone who has spent the last fifteen minutes radiating self-assurance — and then he says it plainly, the way he said I have a proposal, like he's decided the only way to get the sentence out is to not decorate it:
“Fake dating.”
I look at him. I keep looking at him.
He holds the look, which I'll give him credit for. Most people can't.
“You want to fake date,” I say slowly, “me.”
“It solves both problems.” He says it fast now, the pitch he's clearly been building toward.
“Bella thinks I'll come crawling back within a week — she said it last night, I heard her say it.
As long as I'm single and around, she's going to keep circling, because in her head it's just a matter of time.
But if I'm visibly with someone — if there's a girlfriend in the picture, someone she has to factor in — the math changes.
She can't wait me out if there's nothing to wait for.”
“And me?”
“Same thing, other direction. Evan's counting on you being alone.
He texts, he shows up, he gives it a week, he tries again — and the whole plan runs on you not having anyone else.
He grabbed your arm last night in front of fifty people and called you his girlfriend while you were telling him you weren't.” His jaw does the thing again.
“If you're with someone — visibly, publicly — he loses the story he's telling himself. There's no door for him to push on.”
I take a sip of chai, mostly to have something to do with my face, which I am now monitoring with the vigilance of air traffic control.
It's not a stupid plan.
That's the irritating part. I can see the architecture of it — I'm a theater major, I understand the difference between what a thing is and what a thing looks like, and I understand that to a certain kind of person, the looks-like is the whole game.
Evan operates entirely on the looks-like.
His persistence isn't about me, it's about the version of events where I come back and the story stays intact.
Remove the possibility and you remove the persistence.
It's not a stupid plan.
It's just a plan with a fatal flaw, which I am about to explain to him.
“No one will believe it,” I say.
He frowns. “Why not?”
“Because, Beau.” I stop walking — we're half a block from the shop now, the bell-over-the-door close enough that I lower my voice. “Look at me. And then look at you. And then think, for one honest second, about the last four girls you were seen with.”
“That's not—”
“You have a type. Everyone has a type, but you have a publicized type.
Bella's type. The type that gets into your hockey jacket and shows up at the games in it and knows the difference between a power play and a penalty kill.
The type that's — visible. Magnetic. Built for the camera.” I gesture at myself, the cream sweater, the boots that are a half size too big, the general silhouette of a person who dresses to not be perceived.
“I am not that. If you want this to be believable, you cast for it.
You want someone people will buy. Wren, maybe — no, Wren would never, but at least people would believe it.
Margo, absolutely, Margo's exactly your speed. Me?” I shake my head.
“Nobody's going to look at the two of us and think yeah, that tracks. They're going to think you lost a bet.”
He's quiet for a second.
Then he says, “You're wrong about a couple of things in there.”
“I'm rarely wrong.”