17. Sloane #2
That’s the thing that gets me, sitting on the floor with the tea going cool in my hands. I always know where the exits are. It’s automatic, it’s the first thing I do in any room, I did it walking in tonight — and somewhere in the last hour I stopped tracking them.
I should leave. That’s the correct read. When a room starts feeling like this is exactly when a person like me should find the door I’ve stopped tracking and use it.
I don’t leave.
I’m getting bad at leaving.
Beau loses the game, finally and completely, and Cash does a victory lap that involves the laminated eyebrow photo, and in the reshuffle Beau ends up on the floor next to me with his back against the same couch, close but not touching, the careful tier-one inch of air between us that we maintain like it’s load-bearing.
“You actually know all the Sondheim,” he says, low, just for me.
“I actually know all the Sondheim.”
“In order.”
“In order is the easy part. You want to impress me, ask me to do it backwards.” I sip the cold tea. “Don’t, though. I’ll do it, and then you’ll know things about me that can’t be unknown.”
“Too late.” He says it lightly, but there’s something under it, the thing he does where the real sentence walks in wearing the casual one’s coat. “I already know things about you that can’t be unknown.”
“You know I can name musicals.”
“I know you check the exits when you walk into a room.” He’s looking at the middle distance, not at me, which is how I know he means it. “You did it tonight. At the door. Two seconds, and then you filed it. I don’t think you know you do it.”
The tea stops halfway to my mouth.
Because that — that’s not in the choreography.
That’s not a thing you notice about a person you’re running an arrangement with.
That’s a thing you notice about a person you’re watching, really watching, the way I watch people, and the idea that I’ve been watched back this whole time without clocking it does something cold and bright down my spine.
“Everyone checks the exits,” I say.
“No,” he says. “They don’t.”
And he lets it go — that’s the maddening thing about him, he sets the true thing down between us and then doesn’t pick at it, doesn’t make me account for it, just lets it sit there being true — and I’m left holding a fact I didn’t authorize him to have, which is that Beau Sorensen has been paying the kind of attention to me that I have spent my entire life making sure no one pays.
“Okay, I have a question,” Wyatt says, from the armchair he’s annexed from June, who has relocated to the floor with her book and her infinite patience. “And it’s a real one, not a Cash one.”
“My questions are real,” Cash says.
“Your last question was whether a hot dog is a sandwich.”
“That is the realest question there is and you all folded—”
“Sloane.” Wyatt’s got the warm steady thing turned on, gentle, genuinely curious, and I feel the small internal bracing I always feel right before someone aims a personal question at me.
“You’re from Pennsylvania, right? Beau said.
Whereabouts? My cousin’s out near Pittsburgh, I’m always trying to place people. ”
And there it is. The question that isn’t a hard question, that’s just a friendly person being friendly, that lands on me like a hand on a bruise because the answer is a town I’ve decided not to name and a house I’ve decided not to describe and a father I’ve decided not to have, and the whole architecture of not-saying that I’ve built my Whitmore life on requires me to do the thing I’m very good at, which is answer without answering.
“Western part of the state,” I say. “Small town. You wouldn’t know it. Nobody knows it, that’s sort of its whole personality.” I make it land light, make it a little funny, redirect with the speed of long practice. “Pittsburgh’s the glamorous cousin. We didn’t talk to Pittsburgh.”
Wyatt laughs, satisfied, and it works — it always works, the deflection’s a clean one — and the conversation moves, and June asks Wyatt about his cousin and the heat comes off me.
But Beau’s gone still beside me.
Not obviously. Nobody else would catch it.
But I catch it, because I catch everything, and I feel him do the math I just watched Wyatt skip past — feel him register that I answered a question about where I’m from without saying a single thing about where I’m from, that I have a town with no name and a family with no details, that he’s been fake-dating me for weeks and could not tell you my father’s first name or whether I have siblings or why I changed my last name or any of the things you’d know about a person you were actually with.
He doesn’t say anything. Of course he doesn’t. He’s learned, the way I’ve learned, that the not-asking is the kindness.