14. Sloane #3
And I kiss him back. My hand is suddenly fisted in the front of his jacket, dragging him down, closer, the way I rise into it instead of holding my ground.
His mouth softens and then doesn’t, catches my lower lip, and heat goes through me in a long unbroken line from my mouth to somewhere I am absolutely not going to name in a studio I have to be professional in on Monday.
The hand not in my hair has found the small of my back and flattened there, warm through my sweater, and it isn’t holding me up so much as holding me to him, and I let it, I lean into the whole length of him, and for the length of that kiss there is no contract and no Vivienne and no Yale slot and no eight rules — there is just the warm specific overwhelming fact of Beau Sorensen, the taste of him, the scrape of stubble I’ll feel for an hour after, the quiet wreckage of every wall I’ve ever built going down at once.
And the one part of my brain still online, drowning, files the single most dangerous observation of my life:
Oh no.
Oh no. I like this. I like this far too much.
He pulls back first.
Slow. Reluctant — I feel the reluctance, feel him not want to, which is its own catastrophe — his mouth leaving mine by degrees, his thumb grazing my jaw one last time as the hand in my hair eases free.
For a half-second he doesn’t go anywhere.
Our foreheads nearly touch. His breath isn’t quite even and neither is mine, and his eyes drop to my mouth and come back up, and that half-second has nothing to do with Vivienne, nothing to do with the plan, nothing to do with anything either of us wrote down.
Then he straightens. Surfaces. Turns, easy as a man stepping out of warm water, the hand at my back sliding away — and looks at Vivienne with a small, private, unbothered smile.
“Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry. “What were you saying about the story?”
Vivienne’s face has done something it’s never done in two years of me watching it.
It’s blank. The script she came in with is gone.
She looks at the two of us — me flushed and gripping his jacket and visibly, catastrophically affected, him calm and certain with his hand still warm at the small of my back — and whatever she suspected, whatever thread she came to pull, she can’t find the end of it anymore.
“Nothing,” she says. “Have a good night.”
She goes.
The studio is quiet again.
His hand is still at my back. I’m still holding his jacket. We’re standing exactly where we were, except everything is different, and I become aware of both of those facts at the same time and let go of his jacket like it’s hot.
“That was tier three,” I manage. My voice is unsteady and I hate it. “That was — categorically tier three. Pre-approved per instance. Discussed in advance. You broke—”
“I know.”
“That’s two rules. Seven and three. In one afternoon.”
“I know.” He’s looking at me, and he’s not smug about it, which is somehow worse — if he were smug, I’d have something to fight.
He just looks a little wrecked himself, a little surprised, like the static caught him too.
“She was about to take the whole thing apart. You were about to give her a perfect cool answer and she’d have known it was an answer.
I gave her something she couldn’t argue with.
” A beat. “It worked. You saw her face.”
“That’s not—” I stop. Start over, shorter, because the long sentences are the tell and I can hear myself getting long. “You should have asked.”
“There wasn’t time to ask.”
“You should have asked,” I say again, quieter, and we both know I’m not really talking about Vivienne anymore, I’m talking about the hand on my face and the thing that flooded in when the static cleared, the oh no, the part where I kissed him back and meant it in a way that is not in any rule, that breaks the only rule that was ever just mine.
He hears it. I watch him hear it. He steps back, gives me the air, drops his hand.
“Okay,” he says. “Next time I’ll ask.”
Next time.
Neither of us says anything about next time.
He walks me out, and the hallway’s mostly cleared, and the news of the kiss is already traveling — I can feel it, the looks, the phones — which means it worked, which means Vivienne will tell people the boyfriend is real because she watched it be real, which means the plan did exactly what the plan was built to do.
By Monday, the department will have absorbed it.
By the showcase, it’ll be old news. The arrangement is functioning perfectly.
At the door, he stops, half into the cold, the way he does.
“You’ve got the showcase thing,” he says. “The Yale slot. Reyes posts Monday.”
“How do you—”
“You said it. Just now. In the studio.” He shrugs. “I listen. Whatever happens Monday — you’re the best one in the room. I already told you that, when there was nothing in it for me, so you know it’s true.” A beat. “Go get it, Beckett.”
And he’s gone, into the blue evening, leaving me in the warm doorway of the building where I’m most myself, with my mouth still warm and my plan working perfectly and a rule — the only rule that was ever mine alone, rule eight, do not under any circumstances forget that this is fake — lying in pieces on the floor of Studio B where I will not be able to find all of them again.
I press two fingers to my lips before I can stop myself.
And admit the thing I’m not going to say out loud to anyone, not Margo, not the sealed record, not even fully to myself:
I forgot it was fake.
For about ten seconds in Studio B, with his hand on my face, I forgot completely.
Which is the one thing I wrote down, in pen, underlined, specifically so it would never happen.