11. Beau #2
“His grandmother owns the shop I manage.” She turns the whiskey glass a quarter turn on the table, unhurried.
“I’ve worked there two years. He came in to see her.
We’d never actually met — he’s never around, he’s always off being —” she flicks a glance at me “— Captainy. And then we both ended up at the same party last week, and he turned out to be less insufferable than his reputation, which is a low bar, but he cleared it.”
“That’s it?” Cash looks between us. “That’s the whole story? That’s so boring.”
“It’s not boring,” Wyatt says. “It’s nice.”
“It’s boring as shit, Wyatt, there’s no — was there a moment? There has to be a moment. When did you know?” He’s looking at me now. “When’d you know, Cap?”
And the thing is, I open my mouth to deliver the rehearsed nothing, the deflection, the come on, Cash — and what comes out instead, before the lag in my own awareness can catch it, is the truth.
“When she told me no one would buy it.”
The table goes quiet for a second. Sloane’s gone still beside me.
“She told me, straight out, that nobody would believe it.” I’m looking at the beer now, not at her, because I can feel her not looking at me either.
“Said I had a type and she wasn’t it. Said people would think I lost a bet.
” I turn the glass. “And I thought — that’s the first person in a long time who’s looked at me and told me the truth about what they see instead of what they think I want to hear. ”
It’s quiet.
It is, I realize a beat too late, much more than the question asked for.
“Okay,” Cash says, subdued, blinking. “Okay, that’s — yeah. That’s a moment. That’s actually a moment, that’s not boring, I take it back.”
Wyatt’s looking at me with something careful. Theo’s looking at me with something flatter and harder to read. And Sloane, beside me, leg still against mine, says nothing at all, which from Sloane I’m learning is its own kind of loud.
It recovers. Cash can't sit in a serious moment longer than ten seconds, so he pivots to Wren, demands she tell her own embarrassing story, and she holds out a second too long, like she's deciding whether the story's worth the currency, then gives up the one about checking a ref by accident during a scrimmage and getting benched for it, and the booth roars and we're back to noise, thank God.
Under the table, Sloane’s foot taps mine. Once. On purpose.
I look at her.
She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at Cash, sipping her whiskey, completely composed.
But she tapped my foot, and I don’t know what it means, and I’m fairly sure it means that was too much and also possibly means the opposite, and I have no framework for this, none, I have spent twenty-one years reading rooms and I cannot read the one person sitting against my leg.
“You went to Whitmore games before this?” Wyatt asks her, pulling her into it.
“My roommate plays. Wren. Women’s team.”
“Kovalenko’s your roommate?” Theo says.
Three words. From Theo. To Sloane. Wyatt and I both clock it and both have the sense not to react.
“You know her?” Sloane says.
“She’s good.” A pause, which for Theo is a paragraph. “Better than half this room. Doesn’t get the cameras for it.”
“That’s exactly what she said tonight. Almost word for word.”
Theo grunts, which is Theo agreeing, and goes back to his drink, having expended what I’d estimate is his full social budget for the evening, and Sloane — I watch her do it — files him correctly.
Doesn’t push. Doesn’t try to draw him out.
Just lets him be a man who said his piece and is done, which is the exact right move, the move that takes other people months to learn, and Theo’s shoulders come down a half-inch in a way I don’t think he knows about.
She’s good at this. The reading. It’s the same thing I do, the room-mapping, except she does it quieter and I think she’s been doing it longer and for worse reasons, though I don’t have anything to base that on except the held-breath shape of her Instagram and the way Margo’s voice changed on the phone.
The way she goes quiet that you don’t even know about yet.
I don’t know it yet. I’d like to.
“Wait.” Cash sits up. “Wait wait wait. The bookshop. Margaret’s.” He points at Sloane. “Margaret. Beau’s grandmother Margaret.” He swings the point to me. “Does Margaret know?”
“Know what?”
“That you’re —” he gestures “— this. With her. Her shop girl and her grandson. Does she fucking know?”
And here’s the landmine I didn’t see coming, because the honest answer is that my grandmother has been trying to engineer this exact tableau for two years, that she knows Sloane’s coffee order and her Yale timeline and the way she redid the new arrivals wall, that the woman has been saying Sloane’s name to me in weighted sentences since before I knew there was a Sloane, and that the second Margaret Sorensen finds out about this — fake or not — she will become an unstoppable natural force and I will never know peace again.
“She doesn’t know,” I say. “And we’re keeping it that way.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s been trying to set me up with someone for two years and if she finds out it worked she’ll—”
“It was her,” Sloane says.
I look at her.
“It was always going to be her.” Sloane’s turning the glass again, and there’s something almost fond in it, the exasperation of a person who loves someone who meddles.
“She’s mentioned you to me approximately four hundred times.
The new arrivals wall. The shoulder she’s worried about.
The fact that you read more than people think you do.
” A pause. “She bought my coffee order today and made you carry it to me, by the way. She’s known what she was doing the whole time. We just caught up to her.”