19. Beau #2
“That’s the second time you’ve called me warm instead of finishing a sentence.” She catches my eyes, and there’s the sharp thing, the one I love. “You’re doing a lot of not-finishing-sentences this morning, Sorensen.”
“I’m conserving words. Big practice.”
“Mm.” She doesn’t believe me. She knows exactly what I’m not saying.
That’s the thing about her — she reads everything, always has — and for a second I think she’s going to call it, and I think maybe I want her to, and then she looks away and the moment closes and she says, “Is there coffee in this house or do I have to be brave about it,” and we go downstairs.
The guys are at the table.
All three of them, dressed for practice, mid-eggs — and the second Sloane and I come down the stairs together, her in my hoodie with her wet hair and me failing to wipe whatever’s on my face off my face, the kitchen goes dead silent in the way a kitchen goes silent when three people have been waiting for exactly this.
Cash sets down his fork like he’s at a fine restaurant.
“Well,” he says.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said well.”
“Well is a complete sentence, legally, and I stand by it.” He’s grinning so hard it looks painful.
“Sloane. Good morning. Lovely hoodie. Is that the—” he squints “—is that his old practice one? The soft one? He doesn’t lend that out.
I asked to borrow that hoodie in October and he said it was special—”
“It’s not special,” I say.
“You said it was special!”
“It’s worn in, that’s different—”
“Sloane’s wearing the special hoodie,” Cash announces to the room, to the universe, deeply moved. “Wyatt. Are you seeing this?”
“I’m seeing it,” Wyatt says, the warm crinkle around his eyes that means he’s happy about something and isn’t going to make it weird the way Cash is. “Morning, Sloane. There’s coffee. Real coffee, not Cash’s situation.”
“My coffee is bold—”
“Your coffee is a war crime,” Theo says, not looking up from his eggs.
His plate, I notice, has a single egg on it.
He defended his egg to the death and is now eating it in victory.
He glances at Sloane, one second, the Theo X-ray, and then says, “Hoodie’s a good color on you,” and goes back to his eggs, which from Theo is basically a wedding toast.
Sloane takes it all — the silence, Cash’s joy, Wyatt’s warmth, Theo’s six words — and I watch her decide how to play it, watch the calculation run, and then she walks to the coffee pot like she owns the kitchen and says, over her shoulder, “He cried a little. About the hoodie. Just so you all know. Made me promise to be gentle with it.”
The room loses its mind.
“I KNEW IT,” Cash roars, and Wyatt’s actually laughing now, and even Theo’s mouth does the thing it does instead of smiling, and I stand there at the bottom of my own stairs getting roasted in my own kitchen by a girl in my sweatshirt and I think, with the late-arriving clarity that’s the only kind I get: I would burn this entire house down before I’d give this up.
Sloane drinks her coffee through all of it, perfectly composed, like she didn’t just hand Cash a story he’ll be telling at my wedding.
I watch them decide, all three of them, in their own ways, that she’s in.
That she’s one of ours now. Wyatt slides the good coffee toward her without being asked.
Cash starts telling her the eyebrow story again, the director’s cut, with new details that did not happen.
Theo, washing his single plate, says to no one, “She can stay,” which is the highest sentence in his language, the one he’s issued maybe twice in three years, and I have to turn and pretend to look for my skate bag so nobody sees my face do the thing it’s doing.
“Did Theo just—” Cash starts.
“I didn’t say anything,” Theo says.
“You said she can stay—”
“I was talking about the coffee.”
“You were NOT talking about the coffee, you don’t even—”
“Forty minutes,” I say, because O’Grady fines you and because if I stand here one more minute watching my whole life eat eggs in my kitchen I’m going to say something I can’t take back. “Practice. Move.”
I don’t know yet how close I’m about to come to testing that — the burning-the-house-down part.
You’d think a guy would feel a thing like that coming.
I don’t. I never do. I just refill her coffee and tell Cash to find his other shoe and miss it completely, the way I miss everything, right up until it’s already happened.
Her phone’s been going off.
I notice it while she’s drinking the coffee, leaning against the counter in my hoodie with her bare feet on the cold kitchen floor — the buzz, again, then again, a cluster of them — and she pulls it out and her face does a small thing, and I learn later what was on the screen but in the moment I just watch her read and go still.
Margo, Wren, June. I find out after. Three different versions of the same question, the group chat lighting up and then the individual texts when the group chat didn’t get answered fast enough:
you didn’t come home
are you okay?
SLOANE where are you, answer the group chat you menace we’re worried.
She doesn’t answer the group chat. I notice that too, later, when it matters — that she opens Margo’s name specifically, just Margo, and types something short, and I see it over her shoulder without meaning to:
I’m fine. Stayed at Beau’s. Talk later.
That’s it. Nothing else. Not the group, not the details, not I’m okay with the reassurance the others are clearly asking for — just Margo, just the facts, just the door closing gently on the conversation.
I think, a beat late, that it’s a strange way to answer people who are worried about you.
That you’d pick the one person and give her the minimum and leave the rest on read.
But I’m twenty-one and stupid and happy and I file it under Sloane’s private, she’s always private, because that’s true, and because the other thing I could file it under is one I don’t want to look at this morning.
“Everything okay?” I ask.