6. Sloane #3
“You're wrong about my type.” He says it evenly, no heat. “And you're wrong that nobody would believe it, but we don't have to settle that right now.”
“It's not a small flaw, Beau. The entire premise depends on people believing it. If they don't, you've got a worse problem than Bella and I've got a worse problem than Evan, because now we're the couple nobody buys and everyone's talking about, and—”
“Sloane.”
“—I genuinely do not have the bandwidth to be a subject of speculation, I'm trying to get into Yale, I have an audition in February, I cannot be the theater girl who fake-dated the hockey captain and—”
“You're spiraling.”
“I'm not spiraling. I'm risk-assessing. There's a difference.”
“It looks identical from the outside.”
“Everything I do looks identical from the outside,” I say. “That's the point of it.”
We've reached the shop. I can see Margaret through the window, at the counter, her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and the brass bell over the door catching the light, and the whole warm dim interior of the place that is, despite everything, the closest thing I have to a home.
Beau stops on the sidewalk. He turns to face me, and he's not doing the easy-charm thing anymore, and he's not doing the nervous thing either. He's just looking at me, direct, like he's decided to spend whatever he has to spend to land this.
“Just think about it,” he says. “That's all.
You don't have to decide anything right now.
The plan's good, even if you don't believe the casting yet, and I think if you sit with it for a day you'll see that the version where we do nothing is worse for both of us than the version where we try this.” He shifts the bag again.
“He grabbed your arm last night, Sloane.
He's going to keep doing things like that until something makes him stop. I'm offering to be the thing.”
And there it is — said plainly, no performance in it, which is the thing about him I keep not being prepared for. He doesn't dress it up. He just says the true thing and lets it sit.
I open my mouth.
I don't know what I'm going to say. I'd love to tell you I had a devastating line locked and loaded, something dry and final that would have closed the conversation on my terms, but the truth is I have nothing, because for once in my carefully managed life I’m standing on a sidewalk genuinely uncertain of my own next sentence —and the bell over the door rings.
“Beau Sorensen.”
Margaret is standing in the open doorway, eighty-two years old and four-foot-eleven and lit up like a woman who has been waiting two years for exactly this tableau to assemble itself on her sidewalk.
Her reading glasses are still in her hair.
Her face is doing something I can only describe as triumphant.
“You finally came to the shop,” she says, “and you found Sloane.”
“Hi, Mormor,” Beau says.
“I've only been asking you to come by for—” she counts on her fingers, theatrically “—a week. And here you are. With Sloane. The two of you. Walking down Main Street together.” She looks between us, and the look she gives me is the look of a woman who has put a great deal of work into a project and is watching it come, against all reasonable odds, to fruition. “Isn't that something.”
“It's something,” I agree, with as much neutrality as I can manufacture.
“Are those Roastery cups?”
“He bought me a chai,” I say.
Margaret's entire face transforms. I have made a tactical error of catastrophic proportions and I realize it the instant the words leave my mouth, because the information that her grandson bought me my exact coffee order is, to Margaret Sorensen, roughly equivalent to a marriage announcement.
“He bought you a chai,” she repeats, with the delight of a woman receiving the best news of her decade.
“Mormor—” Beau starts.
“Come in, come in, both of you, it's getting cold out here.” She's already turning back into the shop, waving us in with one hand, and over her shoulder, in a voice that is not remotely as quiet as she thinks it is, she says, “I always knew you two would get along.”
I look at Beau.
Beau looks at me.
His mouth has gone to that one-cornered thing again, the not-quite-smile, and he raises his coffee cup at me an inch, a small private gesture that means something like see what I'm dealing with — and I feel my face threaten to do the thing again, the pink thing, the betrayal—and I walk into the shop before it can, past Margaret, toward the counter, toward the work, toward the version of myself that knows exactly what she's doing.
Behind me, the bell rings its half-step-off note as the door swings shut.
I do not have an answer for him yet.
I'm aware that yet is doing a tremendous amount of work in that sentence.
I set the chai down on the counter, pull my apron off its hook, and get to work, and I do not think about blue eyes, or the careful way he said I'm offering to be the thing, or the fact that for the first time in a very long time someone looked at my situation and saw it clearly and offered to stand in the middle of it.
I don't think about any of that.
I think about shelving.
I'm extremely good at shelving.