13. Beau
Beau
Mormor leaves at five. I know because she texts me to say so, which she has never once done in three years, and which is about as subtle as a slapshot off the glass.
Mormor
Mormor
I bought more of the cinnamon she likes. It’s behind the counter.
Mormor
Don’t tell her I said anything.
I read it twice, once for the words and once for the meaning, and I put the phone in my pocket and walk down to Main with my hands jammed in my jacket and my breath showing, because it’s gone cold for real now, the first week of the season folding into the part of the year this town does best.
The shop’s lit when I get there. Closed sign turned, lights low, and through the glass I can see Sloane behind the counter with a stack of paper in front of her, and even from the sidewalk I can tell she’s organized it. There are sections. There is, I would bet money, a numbering system.
I knock.
She lets me in, relocks the door behind me — not making a thing of it, just turning the bolt, but I notice, because I notice everything about her lately.
“You brought paper,” I say.
“I brought a list.”
“You brought a numbered list.”
“It’s an arrangement with terms.” She walks back to the counter. “Terms go in lists. That’s what lists are for.” She picks up the top sheet, then looks at me over it, and there’s the look on her face, the thing she does before she’s decided whether you’re worth the effort. “Did you bring anything?”
“I brought myself.”
“That’s not a negotiating position, that’s just attendance.”
“I’m a strong closer. I don’t need notes.”
“Everyone who says that,” she says, “needs notes.”
She’s got two stools pulled up to the counter. I take the one across from her, which she’s positioned with the counter between us like a conference table, like a border, and I clock that too — the furniture is doing diplomacy.
There’s a coffee already poured for me. Black, no chai, because she remembers I drink it black, and the fact that she did does something small and stupid to me that I do not examine.
“Okay,” she says, capping and uncapping a pen. “Rules. I’ll go through mine, you flag objections, we negotiate where there’s friction. I want this clean. If we define it properly now, we don’t have to keep relitigating it every time something comes up, which is how these things fall apart.”
“You’ve thought about how these things fall apart?”
“I’ve thought about everything, Sorensen.
That’s the entire personality.” She looks down at the list. “Rule one. Duration. This runs until Evan gives up and Bella moves on, or until either of us calls it, whichever’s first. No fixed end date, but a hard exit clause — either party can end it at any time, no questions, no negotiation, no —” she glances up “— guilt.”
“Agreed.”
“You agreed too fast.”
“It’s a good rule.”
“Read it back to me.”
“Either of us can quit whenever, no guilt, no questions.” I lean back on the stool. “Sloane. I was listening. I’m capable of listening.”
She narrows her eyes, like fast agreement is a tactic she hasn’t accounted for, and makes a small mark on the page.
“Fine. Rule two. Visibility. We have to actually be seen — that’s the whole mechanism — but I’m not living at the rink.
I have a thesis. I have an audition in February.
I’m not abandoning my entire life to stand in a freezing arena being decorative. ”
“How often?”
“Twice a week, publicly. One of those can be low-effort — coffee, walking somewhere, being seen on Main. The other should be a real thing. A game, a party, something people register.” She taps the pen.
“Negotiable up during peak — if Bella’s being loud, if Evan escalates, we dial it up.
Negotiable down during finals and the audition stretch. ”
“Counter,” I say.
“Already?”
“Home games. I want you at home games when the schedule allows. Not all of them. The big ones.” And before she can object: “Not because you’re decorative.
Because that’s the most public room I’m in all week, and it’s the cheapest, most natural place for people to see us being a thing.
It’s efficient.” I hold her look. “It’s strategy. ”
She considers this with the suspicion of a person who can tell when a true thing is also a self-serving thing. “Home games when the schedule allows,” she allows. “I reserve the right to bring a book.”
“You’re going to read at my hockey game?”
“During intermissions. I’m not an animal.”
“Rule three,” she says. “Physical contact.”
“This is the good part.”
“This is the logistics part.” But the corner of her mouth moves, just barely, and I file it. “We need to agree on what’s pre-approved and what requires —” she searches for the word “— situational judgment. Because at the bar, you put your arm behind me without consultation.”
“The arm was reflexive.”
“The arm was presumptuous. We established this.”
“The arm worked,” I point out. “Cash bought it. The whole booth bought it. If I’d asked permission first — ‘excuse me, Sloane, may I place my arm along the back of this booth in a manner suggesting romantic familiarity’ — that’s the thing that blows it, not the arm.”
She stares at me. “That’s annoyingly correct.”
“I’m full of annoyingly correct.”
“Fine. Tiered system.” She actually writes TIERED SYSTEM at the top of a fresh section, underlines it, and I have to look at the coffee for a second so I don’t smile at her doing it.
“Tier one, pre-approved, no consultation: arm around the shoulder, hand on the back, standing close, the —” she gestures vaguely “— the general proximity stuff. Tier two, situational, read the room: hand-holding, anything that lasts. Tier three—”
“Tier three,” I say.
“Tier three is discussed in advance. Every time.”
“What’s in tier three?”
She looks at me flatly. “You know what’s in tier three.”
“I want to hear you define tier three.”
“I’m not defining tier three, Sorensen, you know exactly—”
“For the contract. For clarity. You’re the one who said define it properly now so we don’t relitigate—”
“Kissing,” she says, fast and clipped, and there it is, the faint color coming up the side of her neck that she would deny under oath, the same one from the sidewalk, and she keeps her eyes hard on the page like the page did something.
“Tier three is kissing. It’s pre-approved per instance.
We discuss it before, not during, not as a surprise.
It only happens if the situation genuinely requires it, and the situation will almost never genuinely require it, so this is largely theoretical. ”
“Largely theoretical,” I repeat.
“Almost entirely.”
“You left yourself a window.”
“I left myself accurate language.” She points the pen at me. “Don’t read into the window.”
“I would never.”
“You’re reading into the window right now. I can see you reading into it.”
We get through rule four (no involving the real people in our lives more than necessary — her roommates know, my guys can suspect but don’t get confirmation, and Mormor absolutely does not find out, which Sloane writes in capital letters and underlines twice, and which makes me laugh out loud, because she has correctly identified the single greatest threat to both our peace).
We get through rule five (a shared story, simple, mostly-true, which we already half-built at the bar).
We get through rule six, which is logistics about texting frequency, and which is where it happens.
“We should be able to reach each other,” she says.
“For coordination. So — exchange schedules, basically. I’ll text you mine, you text me yours, we flag the public appearances in advance.
” She slides her phone across the counter.
“I’ve already saved your number. I’ll just text you the rules so you have the document. ”
And there it is. The small cliff I walk up to about four times a week and have to decide how to walk around.
Because she’ll text me the rules, and then they’ll be a wall of text on a screen, and reading a wall of text on a screen is a different sport for me than it is for her — it’s slow, and it’s effort, and it’s the kind of thing that’s fine when I’m alone with time and bad when someone’s watching and waiting for a reply.
I can do it. I just can’t do it casually, and casual is the whole disguise.
“Just talk me through them now,” I say. “I’ll remember.”
She looks up. “It’s six rules with sub-clauses. You’ll remember six rules with sub-clauses?”
“I remember every line combination O’Grady’s run in three years and half of them don’t have names. I’ll remember six rules.”
“That’s a very specific deflection.”
“It’s not a deflection, it’s a skill.”
She doesn’t push it. That’s the thing — she looks at me for a half-second longer than the moment needs, the one she gave the clipboard in the back room and my shoulder at the bar, and I watch her decide not to chase it.
She just slides the phone back, and says, “Fine. But you’re getting the document eventually.
I’m not running this on your memory and good intentions. ”
“Text it to me whenever,” I say, which is true, because whenever is a word that means when I have time alone to sit with it, and she doesn’t know that’s what it means, and someday she might.
“Rule seven,” she says, and her voice changes.
Not a lot. But I’ve spent a week learning the registers of this voice and this is a new one — flatter, more careful, the words coming out in the exact grammatical order of a person who has rehearsed them.
“You don’t get to be kind to me when no one’s watching.”
I wait, because I can tell there’s more, and because I’ve learned that the space after a Sloane sentence is sometimes where the real sentence lives.