11. Beau #3
The table is delighted. Cash is thrilled. ”So your grandmother set you up and doesn’t know it took. That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard. That’s unbelievable. Holy shit. We have to tell her.”
“We are not telling her,” I say.
“We’re absolutely telling her.”
“Cash.”
“I’m going to the bookshop tomorrow and buying a book.”
“You don’t read.”
“I’ll start. For this. I’ll learn to read for this.”
And the booth’s laughing, and Sloane’s almost laughing, the real one she keeps trying to shut down, and I’m reaching for my beer when Cash, mid-laugh, claps me on the shoulder — the bad one — hard, the way he’s done a thousand times, the way he has no reason to know not to.
It goes through me white.
I don’t make a sound. I’ve gotten very good at not making the sound.
But something must move in my face, because when I get the beer to my mouth and set it back down, Sloane is looking at me.
Just at me. Not at the table, not at Cash, not at the joke that’s still going.
At my shoulder, and then at my face, with the narrow attention of a person who catches things, the same look she gave the clipboard in the back room of the shop.
She doesn’t say anything.
We look at each other for a second across a noise that has nothing to do with us, and I think: she knows there’s a something. She doesn’t know what. And she’s not going to ask in front of the team, because she’s read the room well enough to know I wouldn’t want her to.
Which is — that’s a thing nobody does. People ask.
People always ask, right then, in the worst moment, in front of everyone, because they want to be seen being concerned.
She just filed it and let it go and turned back to the table, and the not-asking does something to my chest that the asking never could.
I’m in trouble.
I notice it the way I notice everything. A beat late. Sitting in a booth with my arm behind a girl who isn’t really my girlfriend, my shoulder screaming, the best team in the conference loud around me, and I think, with the delayed clarity that is the only kind I get: oh. I’m in trouble.
The night winds down the way good nights do, in stages, people peeling off in twos and threes. Theo leaves without announcing it, which is how Theo leaves everything. Wyatt walks the last of the freshmen back toward the dorms because that’s who Wyatt is.
Cash makes it to the door and turns around. “Beckett.” He points at her, serious for one second. “You’re alright. He’s lucky.” Then, ruined immediately: “Tell Margaret I’m coming for a book,” and he’s gone into the cold.
And then it’s just us in the emptying booth, the noise dropped to Marco wiping down the bar and a song nobody’s listening to.
Sloane slides out. I slide out after her. We end up on the sidewalk in the cold, the breath showing, the four blocks back toward where her people and my house diverge.
“We never discussed the rules,” she says.
“No. We didn’t.”
“You put your arm behind me without negotiating the arm.”
“The arm was situational.”
“The arm was presumptuous.”
“I know what I want,” I say, which is the text, which makes the corner of her mouth go before she catches it.
“We need a proper conversation,” she says. “Rules. Boundaries. What this is and what it isn’t. Before there’s another arm.”
“Agreed.” I shove my hands in my jacket. “When?”
She considers. “I close the shop Sunday at six. Come by after. Margaret leaves at five.” A beat. “We’ll do it properly. I’ll bring a list.”
“You have a list already.”
“I’ve had a list since Tuesday, Sorensen. I had a list before you finished the proposal.” And there’s the dry landing, the one that lands soft because it’s true, and she pulls her coat tighter and turns toward Sailmaker Lane where Margo’s already waiting at the corner pretending not to watch us.
“Sloane.”
She turns.
I don’t know what I’m going to say. I want to ask about the shoulder she clocked, or thank her for not asking about it, or say something about the moment at the booth that I didn’t mean to say and meant completely — and all of that is too much for a sidewalk at midnight on day one of a thing with rules we haven’t written.
“Good game tonight,” I say instead. “Thanks for coming.”
She looks at me for a second. Reads it. Reads all the things under it, because she reads everything.
“It was a good game,” she agrees, and goes.
I watch her reach Margo, watch the two of them turn down the lane, heads bent together already, and I stand on the corner in the cold longer than I have any reason to.
The plan worked. That’s the thing I should be thinking about.
Everyone bought it. Cash bought it, Wyatt bought it, the whole bar bought it, Bella will hear about it by morning and the math she’s running will stop working, and Evan will hear about it too, and the door I offered to be will be a door.
The plan did exactly what I built it to do.
That’s not what I’m thinking about.
What I’m thinking about, walking home with my shoulder aching and my breath showing and a rules summit on the calendar for Sunday, is that for about two hours in that booth I forgot it was a plan.
I don’t finish the thought.
I never do.