21. Beau
Beau
She owns less than I expected, and packs it like she’s done it before.
That’s the thing I notice, standing in the wreck of her smoke-stained room while a fireman waits in the hall — that Sloane Beckett can fit her whole life into one travel bag and a laptop case, fast, no wasted motion, folding things flat and setting them by the door the way she does everything.
Clothes. The laptop. A stack of books she chooses one at a time, like triage.
The toiletries. And last, off the windowsill where the smoke didn’t reach, a framed photo she wraps in a sweater before she puts it in the bag, careful, the only thing she handles like it might break.
I don’t ask about the photo. I’ve learned not to ask about the things she handles like they might break.
“That’s it?” I say, when she zips the bag.
“That’s it.” She looks at me, daring me to make it a thing. “I travel light. It’s a virtue.”
It’s not a virtue. It’s a girl who’s learned to be able to leave any room in under ten minutes. I take the bag off her shoulder before she can argue and carry it out to the truck.
I load it in the bed and then I go find Margo and June, because somebody should, and because Sloane’s busy being useful and won’t think to need it herself.
“You two set?” I ask. June’s got a duffel and Margo’s got two and a tote and the vibrating energy of a person running on adrenaline and triage. “Rides? You need anything hauled, I’ve got the truck all day.”
Margo blinks at me, like she didn’t expect the captain to be checking on her welfare on a frozen lawn. “We’re — yeah. Priya’s coming for me. June’s got Hana.” A beat, and something softens in her face, the pre-law armor dropping a notch. “Thanks, Beau. For staying. You didn’t have to.”
“Sloane’s house. Sloane’s people.” I shrug, because it’s not complicated to me even if it seems to surprise everyone. “That makes you mine to check on too. For today, anyway.”
I catch Sloane watching me when I say it.
She’s a few feet off, by the porch, and she’s gone still in the way she does when something lands somewhere she wasn’t guarding, and when I look over she looks away too fast. But she heard it.
Sloane’s people, that makes you mine to check on.
I didn’t say it for her. That’s probably why it landed.
Margo’s on the phone with Wren when we come back around — Wren at practice, just getting the news, and I can hear the tinny shape of her voice asking the questions Wren asks, calm and fast, is everyone out, what do you need, what time.
Margo’s relaying and packing at the same time, one-handed, and Sloane steps in without being asked and starts pulling Wren’s things — she knows which drawer, knows which jacket Wren actually wears versus the ones she doesn’t, packs for her roommate with the same fast economy she packed for herself.
“She’s staying with one of the team,” Margo says, hand over the phone. “Tash. The D-pair partner. There’s a couch.”
“Tell her the team’ll sort her,” I say. “Whatever she needs. Tash is solid.”
Margo relays it. I hear Wren’s voice change — relief, the relief of an athlete finding out her people have already closed ranks — and Sloane zips Wren’s bag and sets it by the others, and stands up, and looks around the lawn at the three bags and the smoke-stained house and her two roommates, and I watch her do the count again, the head-count, the one she’s done a hundred times today.
“I’ll see you on campus,” she tells them.
“Both of you. Today. I mean it — I’ll find you between classes, we’ll figure out the rest.” She hugs June, who holds on too long, and squeezes Margo’s arm, and that’s as much as Sloane does, that’s her whole register of falling apart, a squeezed arm and a promise to find people later. “Go. Priya’s here. Go.”
And then it’s just us and the truck and the cold.
“Ready?” I say.
She looks at the house one more time. Whatever’s on her face she folds up and puts away before I can read it.
“Ready,” she says, and climbs up into the cab, and this time she doesn’t argue about the height.
I don’t drive straight in.
I pull into the driveway at the Raven House and put it in park and don’t reach for the door, because something’s wrong with her and has been the whole drive — not the smoke-and-disaster wrong, a quieter wrong, the wrong of a person who’s run out of things to manage and doesn’t know what to do with her hands when there’s nothing left to fix.
I look over at her.
“You okay?”
She doesn’t answer.
That’s not like her. Sloane always has an answer — a dry one, a deflecting one, a complete grammatical sentence built to give nothing away — and the silence where the answer should be is louder than anything she could’ve said.
She’s looking out the windshield at my house with her jaw set and her hands in her lap, and she’s gone somewhere I can’t follow, and I don’t push.
I reach over instead and take her hand.
It’s freezing. She’s been cold this whole time and didn’t say, sat with bare legs on a frozen lawn in my hoodie and didn’t mention it once, because mentioning it would be needing something.
Her hand is small and cold in mine and I fold both of mine around it, warming it, and I lift it and press my mouth to her knuckles, slow, and I don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say that she could take right now.
I just hold her cold hands against my mouth and wait.
She turns and looks at me. Her eyes are too bright and she’s furious about it, I can tell, furious at her own face for doing a thing without permission.
“I can still talk to Margaret,” she says. “About the store. The cot. I don’t have to —”
“No.”
“Beau—”
“You’re not staying in a freezing storeroom on a cot because you can’t stand to need the warm room that’s right here.
” I keep her hand in mine. “You’re staying with me.
As long as you need to. Not until it’s convenient, not until you’ve worked out how to pay me back, not until you’ve found a way to make it a transaction you can live with.
As long as you need to. That’s the whole offer. There’s no fine print.”
She stares at me.
I watch her try to find the angle, the catch, the thing she can argue with — and there isn’t one, I made sure there isn’t one, and the not-finding-it undoes her more than the fire did.
She doesn’t have a file for this. I can see her reaching for one and coming up empty.
Nobody’s ever handed her a thing without a bill attached and she genuinely does not know what to do with her hands.
“I don’t know what to do with that,” she says, finally. Quiet. The most honest thing she’s said all day.
“You don’t have to do anything with it,” I tell her. “That’s the point. Come inside. It’s warm.”
The house takes us in the way the house takes everyone in.
It’s empty — the guys still at practice, the one I bailed on — and it’s quiet and warm after the cold, and I carry her bag up the stairs to my room with her trailing behind, and I set it on the bed and then I do the thing I’ve been thinking about doing since the lawn, which is make space.
I clear the top drawer of my dresser. Just empty it — socks and whatever into the drawer below, doesn’t matter — and leave it open, empty, hers.
Then I go to the closet and shove my stuff down the rail, all of it, hangers screeching, until there’s a clear foot and a half of space, and I find the spare hangers in the back and hang them in the gap, waiting, ready.
“There.” I step back. “Drawer’s yours. Closet space is yours. Bathroom’s the one you know. There’s a key to the front door on the hook by the stairs, take it, it’s yours while you’re here.”
She’s standing in the doorway watching me do all this with an expression I can’t read, which is rare, because I’ve gotten good at reading her.
“You cleared a drawer,” she says.
“You need a drawer. People need a drawer.”
“You cleared a drawer in under a minute. Like you’d thought about it.”
“I thought about it.” No point lying. “On the drive. Figured you’d argue less if it was already done than if I asked where you wanted to put things.”
And there — finally — the corner of her mouth goes, the real one, small and reluctant. “That’s annoyingly correct.”
“I’m full of annoyingly correct. You’ve said.”
I feel good. That’s the thing I notice, standing in my own room with a cleared drawer and a foot and a half of closet and a girl who travels light enough to fit in both — I feel good, steady, useful in a way that’s got nothing to do with hockey or being captain or any of the performances.
She needed a warm room and a drawer and someone to not make it a thing, and I’m the one who got to be that, and even if she’ll never say out loud that she needed it — and she won’t, I know her, she’d sooner freeze on a cot — I know she did, and getting to be the answer to a need she won’t admit feels better than any goal I’ve ever scored.
I don’t say any of that. She’d bolt.
“Hang out till you’ve got class,” I say instead, checking my phone, swearing under my breath at the time.
“I’ve gotta go or I’m late for the first one and O’Grady already gave me the morning, I can’t push it.
Get settled. Eat something. The kitchen’s yours, just don’t let Cash tell you the loud hot sauce is mild, it’s a trap. ”
“I can manage a kitchen, Beau.”
“I know you can.” I cross to her, and I kiss her — soft, unhurried, my hand at her jaw, the morning still in it somewhere — and she leans into it for a second before she remembers to be careful, and I file that too. “Get settled, Beckett. I’ll be back this afternoon.”
I leave her standing in my room in front of an open empty drawer, holding the photo she still hasn’t put down, and I drive to class feeling like I’ve done one entirely right thing today.
I hold onto that feeling for about six hours.
I come home in a mood.