21. Beau #2
I know I’m in a mood and I can’t get out of it, which makes the mood worse.
It rode home with me from the humanities building and it’s sitting in my chest like a swallowed stone, and I come through the door already braced to go straight upstairs and be alone with it, the way I deal with everything that costs me — go quiet, go up, ice it, don’t make it anyone’s problem.
Except the house smells incredible.
And there’s noise — the good kind, the Raven House kind — and when I come into the kitchen Sloane’s at the stove and Cash is setting the table wrong and Wyatt’s leaning in the doorway and Theo’s actually talking, and there’s a dinner happening, a real one, and Sloane turns from the stove with a wooden spoon and takes one look at my face and clocks the mood in about half a second, because she clocks everything.
She doesn’t say anything in front of the guys. That’s the thing. She just registers it, files it, and turns back to the stove.
“Sit,” Cash tells me, oblivious, delighted. “Beckett can cook. Beckett can actually cook. We told her she’s staying and she said and I quote ‘then I’m not eating whatever you three call food’ and she made — Beau, there’s a vegetable. A cooked one. With intention.”
“It’s a sheet-pan thing,” Sloane says. “It’s not hard. You people have a kitchen and you treat it like a crime scene.”
“She’s going to fix us,” Cash says, reverent. “She’s going to fix the whole house.”
I sit. I eat. It’s good — of course it’s good, she’s good at everything she decides to be good at — and the guys are loud and happy and Sloane’s folded into it the way she’s been getting folded into everything, and I should feel the good thing I felt this morning, the right thing, the her-in-my-house thing.
I can’t get to it. The stone’s in the way.
She gets me alone after.
I don’t know how she does it — some maneuver with the dishes and a look at the guys that sends them scattering — but suddenly it’s just us in the kitchen with the water running and the others gone to the living room, and she dries her hands and leans against the counter and looks at me, and doesn’t ask if I’m okay, because she knows I’m not and asking would just make me perform a no.
“What is it,” she says instead. Flat. Not a question I can deflect.
“It’s nothing.”
“It rode home with you. You’ve been carrying it since you walked in. Your jaw’s been set since the door.” She tips her head. “I’m not asking you to make it a thing. I’m asking you what it is.”
And the thing about Sloane — the thing that’s been undoing me for weeks — is that she doesn’t push the way other people push.
She doesn’t want to fix it or be part of it or make my hard thing about her.
She just wants to know what it is, plainly, so it’s not sitting in me alone.
And I’m tired, and the stone’s heavy, and the kitchen’s warm and it’s just us, and before I’ve decided to, I’m reaching into my bag and pulling out the letter and setting it on the counter between us.
She reads it. I watch her read it. Mandatory academic support, it says. Required tutoring. Our records indicate you are at risk of failing — the humanities requirement, the one with the reading, the essays, the wall of text that’s a different sport for me than it is for everyone else.
“I’m failing a class,” I say, because she’s read it anyway, so.
“The reading one. Comp lit. I’ve been —” the back of my neck’s hot, my jaw won’t relax, this is the thing I don’t say, the thing I’ve spent thirteen years not saying to anyone outside my family “— I’ve been getting by.
Audio, mostly. Getting the gist. But the essays, the close-reading stuff, you can’t fake your way through and I —”
I stop.
I don’t know how to say the next part. I’ve never said the next part. Even in my own head I don’t say it; I say the page is doing the thing, I say I’m taking my time, I say anything but the word, because the word makes it real and the word makes people look at me different.
“Beau.” Her voice is careful. “Are you dyslexic?”
The word lands in the kitchen and just sits there.
I press my thumb into the heel of my palm. The bruise from the boards is still there, gone yellow now. I look at my hands instead of her, and I make myself say it, the thing I’ve said out loud to maybe four people in my life.
“Yeah.” It comes out rough. “Diagnosed in eighth grade. My family knows. That’s — the list is my family and now you.
I hide it. I’ve always hidden it. People find out the captain can’t read a paragraph without it sliding around and they decide things about you, so I —” the jaw, again, the heat at my neck “— I handle it. I’ve always handled it.
And now there’s a letter, and a tutor, and the whole thing I’ve kept quiet for thirteen years is about to have an appointment attached to it, in the system, where people can —”
“I know.”
I look up.
“I know you’re dyslexic,” Sloane says. Quiet. Steady. Holding my eyes so I can see she’s not flinching, not recalculating, not doing the thing I’ve spent my life dreading people do. “I’ve known for a while.”