16. Beau #3
It costs her, the thank-you. I’ve learned that about her — that being helped is harder for her than being hurt, that a kindness lands on her like a thing she has to brace against. So I don’t make it a moment.
I just nod, once, the way I nod on the ice, and say, “That’s what the wall’s for,” and let her have the out.
The music shifts to something with a pulse and the living room turns into a dance floor, bodies and noise and the football guys losing whatever inhibition they had left, and I get an idea that is probably bad and definitely against the spirit of several rules.
“Come dance,” I say.
Sloane looks at me like I’ve suggested we file a tax return together. “No.”
“Come on.”
“I don’t dance at parties. I’m a theater major, I dance when it’s choreographed and someone’s paying me in course credit. This—” she gestures at the writhing football team “—is not that.”
“Everyone’s watching us anyway.” Which is true, and which is the strategic cover for the thing I actually want, which is just to have her out there, in Margo’s clothes, with her hair down, having decided something.
“We’re the thing people are looking at tonight.
A couple that doesn’t dance at a party is a couple people start asking questions about. A couple that dances is just a couple.”
“That’s manipulative.”
“It’s strategy.”
“It’s manipulative strategy.”
But she’s wavering — I can see it, the calculation, the part of her that knows I’m half right doing battle with the part of her that has built a personality out of not being perceived.
So I do the thing. I hold out my hand, palm up, and I drop the strategy, because the strategy isn’t going to win this and I don’t want it to.
“Roll with it, Beckett,” I say. “Have some fun. Nobody out there is watching as hard as you think, and the ones who are can’t tell the difference between a good actor and a girl having a good time.” A beat. “And you’re the best actor in any room you walk into. You told me so yourself.”
She looks at my hand.
She looks at me.
And then she takes it — exhales, rolls her eyes, mutters something about regretting this, and lets me pull her into the crush — and the second we’re in it she’s good, of course she’s good, her body knows things mine never will, and she stops performing reluctance somewhere in the first thirty seconds and just moves, loose and unbothered, and there’s a moment where she laughs at something, the real one, the one she keeps trying to strangle, and it gets all the way out, and her hair’s down and the bare shoulder catches the light and she is, for once, not managing a single thing.
I forget the room.
That’s the truth of it. I forget the plan and the wall and Bella and Evan and the whole architecture of why we’re here, and it’s just her, dancing in borrowed clothes in a loud bright room, having decided something, and me watching her have decided it, and the thing in my chest that I’ve been refusing to name for two weeks gets very loud and very clear and I notice it the way I notice everything—a beat late, and all at once.
I like her. Like like her like her. A lot.
Not the plan. Not the cover. Not the strategically advantageous fake girlfriend who makes the math work on my ex.
Her. The one who notices the things I hide and doesn’t ask.
The one who said thank you like it hurt.
The one who wrote a rule reminding herself this is fake because some part of her already knew it was getting real, the same way some part of me has known since a dark studio and has been filing it, a beat late, every single day since.
She catches me looking.
“What?” she asks over the music, still moving, still loose.
I’m not going to tell her. It’s the worst possible thing I could tell her, here, now, with everything working and her walls down for the first time and rule eight sitting between us like a closed door she doesn’t know I’ve read.
Telling her would end it. She’d run. She’d write a ninth rule and a tenth and she’d never dance in a party again.
“Nothing,” I say. “You’re a good dancer.”
“I’m an adequate dancer,” she says, throwing my own word back, grinning, and pulls me deeper into the crowd, and I let her, and I hold the thing I’m not saying the way I hold everything — quietly, completely, with the part of me that’s been holding things my whole life.
We leave before it gets sloppy.
That’s a Sloane call, not mine — she clocks the exact moment a party tips from fun into the part where people start making decisions they’ll regret, and somewhere around midnight she finds my eyes across the room and tips her head at the door, and that’s that.
We go. Hand in hand on the way out, because the plan, and then hand in hand down the dark street after, because neither of us lets go and neither of us mentions it.
The cold is a relief after the heat of the house. Our breath shows. The party noise falls off behind us until it’s just our footsteps and the streetlights and the long quiet walk back toward Sailmaker Lane, where Margo’s light is on and waiting.
“You had fun,” I say. “Admit it.”
“I had a tolerable amount of fun.”
“You laughed. I saw it. The real one.”
“I had a lapse.” But she says it with the corner of her mouth going, and she doesn’t take her hand back, and when we get to her corner she stops and looks at me in the streetlight with her hair down and the borrowed boots and something on her face she hasn’t decided to put there.
“Goodnight, Sorensen.”
“Night, Beckett.”
She goes. I watch her reach the front door, watch her and Margo disappear inside, and I stand on the corner in the cold a while longer than the cold makes reasonable, the way I’ve started to do, and then I walk home alone with the whole loud night going quiet in me.
The plan is working. Bella’s gone. Evan spent the night watching a door that won’t open.
And I’m walking home half in love with a girl who thinks I don’t know it, in a town that’s gone to sleep around us, and the joke — the real joke, the one only I’m in on — is that the performance ended somewhere weeks ago and nobody told the audience.
I notice that too.
A beat late.
The way I notice everything that matters.