16. Beau #2
“Margo? To Evan?” Cash grins like it’s Christmas.
“Okay, so — and Wren swears this is verbatim — she gets right up in his face, this tiny terrifying woman, and goes, ‘She has a boyfriend, she has a restraining-order-shaped future if you keep this up, and she has better things to do than relitigate the worst decision of her sophomore year. Walk away, Evan. You’re embarrassing the whole offensive line.’ And then he just — left, man.
Didn’t finish his sentence. Folded like a fucking lawn chair.
” He shakes his head, reverent. “I’m a little in love with her. Don’t tell Wren.”
I laugh. And then I don’t, because under the laugh is the part I don’t like — that he keeps coming, that the door I’m supposed to be hasn’t fully shut him out, that boyfriend did some of the work and Margo did the rest and Sloane shouldn’t have needed either of us standing between her and a guy who can’t take an answer.
My jaw’s tight about it before I’ve decided to be angry.
I notice the anger a beat after it arrives, the way I notice everything, and I notice it’s bigger than the strategy would explain.
I don’t say any of that to Cash.
I just file it with the rest of her, on the list that has no system, and I think about Tuesday, and Margo two steps back, and a chai going cold in my hand outside the building because I wasn’t there, and I decide — quietly, the way I decide the things that matter — that I’m going to be there more.
Which is, I’m aware, not in the plan either.
The football team wins a game.
I want to mark the strangeness of that sentence, because it’s a strange sentence — Whitmore football has been a rumor of a program for two years, three-and-eight last season, the kind of team you forget the school has.
But they beat someone they weren’t supposed to beat, some Saturday upset, and a winning football team throws a party the way a man who’s never had money spends his first paycheck, which is to say loudly and all at once.
It’s the same week — the Saturday that closes it.
The shoulder’s better — not good, but better, manageable, iced and hidden and holding.
And it’s a public appearance, flagged on the schedule Sloane keeps, because a football party is exactly the kind of room where being seen matters: the whole athletic ecosystem under one roof, which means Bella’s circle and Evan’s circle and everyone whose belief in the thing is the thing’s entire point.
I get to the Sailmaker to pick her up — we decided to arrive together, hand in hand, maximum visibility, which was in the plan and which I am not pretending I didn’t also just want — and Margo answers the door and looks me up and down once, fast, like a quality inspection, and says, “She’s almost ready.
Don’t make that face when you see her, you’ll embarrass yourself,” and walks off before I can ask what face.
Then Sloane comes down the stairs, and I understand what face.
She’s — okay. I notice it the way you notice a hit you didn’t see coming.
Off-the-shoulder sweater, the soft expensive kind, one bare shoulder and the line of her collarbone, jeans that do not leave a lot to the imagination and brown boots up to the knee, and her hair’s down and done, and there’s something on her eyes that makes them more than they already are, and the whole effect lands somewhere in my chest and a couple other places I’m not going to itemize in her roommate’s front hall.
I don’t make the face. I think I don’t make the face. Margo, on the stairs behind her, mouths the face at me, so I made the face.
“Margo’s clothes,” Sloane says, by way of explanation, doing the thing where she gets ahead of the moment so she doesn’t have to be inside it. “The boots are hers too. I look like a person who attends parties on purpose.”
“You look—” I stop, because the true word is going to cost me, and I’ve broken enough rules. I find the safer one. “You look like the plan’s going to work.”
It is not the word. She knows it’s not the word. Something moves at the corner of her mouth, and the color comes up the side of her neck the way it does, and she covers it by grabbing her coat.
“Let’s go be convincing,” she says.
We arrive hand in hand.
That part’s in the plan — I take her hand on the porch of the football house, lace my fingers through hers, and we walk in together, and it lands exactly the way it’s supposed to.
You can feel a room reorganize. Heads turn, the small recalibration of a campus absorbing a fact: the hockey captain and the theater girl, together, holding hands, walking into the biggest party of the month like it’s nothing.
By Monday it’ll be settled history. That’s the mechanism. That’s why we’re here.
What’s not in the plan is that I don’t let go of her hand.
There’s no rule that says I have to keep holding it once we’re inside and seen.
The seeing is the point; the seeing is done.
But her hand is in mine and letting go would require a decision and I keep not making the decision, and she keeps not making it either, and we move through the party like that — through the kitchen, past the keg, into the loud warm crush of a house full of people celebrating a thing that almost never happens — still holding on.
The football guys are riding high. Somebody’s got a speaker doing damage.
There’s a trophy from a previous, better era being passed around and drunk out of.
We mingle, and we’re good at it now — that’s the thing, we’ve gotten good at it, the two of us, the small choreography of a couple working a room.
She does a thing where she’ll deliver a dry landing to a group and then glance at me like she’s checking I caught it, and I always caught it, and the glance is the best part.
I do a thing where I keep one hand at the small of her back, tier one, pre-approved, and she lets it stay, and neither of us mentions that it’s been there longer than the room requires.
We don’t part ways. Not once. At a party I’d normally have drifted off into six conversations, captain things, team things, the social work of being me in a room — and instead I stay at her side the whole night, and people notice.
I see them noticing. I see two girls clock our hands and lean into each other.
I see a guy from my own team raise his eyebrows across the room.
The plan is working so well it’s stopped looking like a plan and started looking like the truth, which is convenient, because lately I can’t tell the difference either.
Bella’s here.
I clock her before she clocks us — across the room, in the white again, holding court with her circle, doing the thing she does. And I feel Sloane feel me notice, because Sloane misses nothing, and her hand tightens in mine a fraction.
“She’s here,” I say, low, just for Sloane.
“I see her.”
“You okay?”
“I’m fine. Are you?” She looks up at me, and there’s something protective in it, quick and surprising, gone before I can be sure I saw it. “She made a video about you. People can be —”
“I’m fine.” And I am, which surprises me a little. Bella ran her mouth to thousands of people two weeks ago and I find I genuinely don’t care, and the not-caring has everything to do with whose hand I’m holding. “Let her look.”
Bella looks. Of course she looks. Her eyes find us — me and Sloane, hands laced, my other hand at Sloane’s back, the whole obvious public fact of us — and I watch the thing happen that the plan was built to make happen.
I watch her do the math. The math that used to end in give him a week, he’ll text now ends somewhere else, somewhere with no opening in it, and her face goes through something complicated and lands on a tight bright smile aimed at her circle, the smile of a woman pivoting hard to a different conversation.
That’s it. That’s the whole war, won quietly across a crowded room, no shot fired. She’ll find a new thing to be loud about. She’s already turning away.
I should feel like I won something.
What I feel is Sloane’s hand in mine, and the strange hollow fact that the plan’s two enemies are both in this house tonight and beating them has started to feel beside the point, because somewhere in the last two weeks the point stopped being the enemies and started being the hand.
I find Evan before he finds us, which matters.
He’s by the trophy, in his element for once, a football player at a football party on the one night a year the football players are kings.
He’s got the loose expansive energy of a guy who won today and thinks it means something about him.
And he’s watching Sloane. He’s been watching Sloane since we walked in — I clocked it early, the way, registered that his eyes keep finding her and that there’s something in it that isn’t wistful, like she’s a thing he’s deciding whether to file a claim on.
I don’t like it. My jaw’s been tight about it for a while without my permission.
He doesn’t come over. That’s the read I get — he wants to, and he’s doing the math too, the same math Bella did, the math where the variable he didn’t account for is six-three and holding her hand and has already once put him on his heels in public.
He’s not going to make a scene in a house full of his own teammates on the best night of his season.
He’s just going to watch, and seethe, and look for an opening.
I make sure there’s no opening. I keep her close.
Not possessive — she’d hate possessive, and she’d be right to — just present, a wall she can stand behind if she wants to and ignore if she doesn’t.
She knows what I’m doing. I can tell she knows.
And she doesn’t tell me to stop, which from Sloane is a whole sentence.
“He’s watching,” she says, at one point, not looking at Evan, looking at me.
“I know.”
“You’re doing the thing. The wall thing.”
“Is it working?”
A pause. “Yes.” And then, quieter, the dry gone out of it for a second: “Thank you.”