24. Sloane
Sloane
The terrifying thing is how easy it’s been.
I keep waiting for the part where living with four hockey players turns into a problem — the noise, the chaos, the men, the loss of the careful solitary control I’ve built my whole life around — and the part doesn’t come.
I’ve been in the Raven House three weeks and somewhere in the second one it stopped being staying at Beau’s and started being home, and I didn’t even notice it happen, which is the part that should frighten me and mostly just doesn’t.
There’s a hook by the door that’s mine now.
There’s a drawer. There’s a mug the guys have silently agreed not to use because it’s mine, and a spot on the couch, and a rhythm to the house I’ve slotted into like I was always a missing piece of it.
Cash tells me things he tells no one. Wyatt saves me the good coffee.
Theo, who labeled an egg to protect it from his own teammates, leaves the better snacks where I’ll find them and would die before admitting it.
I cook on the nights I close early and they treat it like a religious event.
I belong here. That’s the sentence I can’t get used to. I belong here.
And I go to the games.
All of them. The home ones. I don’t even decide to anymore — it’s just Friday, or it’s just Tuesday, and I’m in the Nest in the seats behind the bench because that’s where I go now, that’s a thing about my life, Sloane goes to the games.
I stopped bringing a book around the third one.
I used to make a whole point of it — the book, the intermissions, the I’m-not-really-a-hockey-person-I’m-just-here armor — and then somewhere in October I realized I hadn’t opened the book in two games because I didn’t want to miss anything, and I left it home the next time, and I haven’t brought it since.
I’m a hockey girl now. God help me. I know what icing is. I yell at the refs. I have opinions about the power play. I came home from the Northeastern game last week hoarse and Margo looked at me like I’d grown a second head and I didn’t even have the decency to be embarrassed about it.
Because here’s the thing I’d never say out loud: I love watching him.
Not the way the puck bunnies love watching him, the captain, the golden boy, the highlight reel.
I love watching the version only I get — the one who finds the camera after he scores because that one’s mine, who looks up into the seats for me before the anthem like he’s checking I’m still there, who plays the boring ninety seconds after the other team scores with his whole body because that’s what holds a team together and nobody in the building knows to watch for it but me.
I cheer for him. Out loud. In front of nine hundred people.
Me. The girl who’s spent her entire life making sure no one could tell what she was feeling, on her feet in a freezing arena screaming for a boy in a black-and-silver jersey, because my boyfriend is the captain of the Whitmore Ravens and I am, against every single thing I know about myself, completely gone for him.
Boyfriend. I tried the word out in my own head a few weeks ago and it didn’t make me flinch, which was its own quiet alarm.
It’s stopped being the cover story. It stopped weeks ago.
We both know it. The whole campus knows it.
It’s just the truest thing in my life now, sitting there, undefended, with no rule left to protect it.
Which is exactly the state I’m in — soft, slotted-in, undefended, a hockey girl with a hook by the door and a boyfriend who finds the camera for her — on the Sunday morning he asks me to Thanksgiving, and ruins it
He asks me on a Sunday morning, which is how I know he’s been working up to it.
Beau doesn’t plan things, not the way I plan things — he moves through the world on instinct and lets his awareness catch up a beat behind — so when he does plan something, when there’s a thing he’s clearly been turning over and waiting for the right moment to say, I can see the machinery from a mile off.
He’s been off all morning. Quieter. He made the coffee and the chai and brought mine to me in bed, which he does, but he hovered after, sat on the edge of the mattress with his own mug and didn’t drink it, and now we’re at the kitchen table and he’s pushing eggs around his plate like they’ve wronged him.
“Spit it out,” I say. “Whatever it is. You’ve been circling it since you woke up.”
He looks up, caught. “How do you—”
“You’re a terrible liar and an even worse circler. What is it.”
He sets down the fork. Breathes out slow, the way he does before he says a thing that costs him, and I feel something in my chest tighten preemptively, because the last time he did the slow breath he told me he was failing comp lit, and I don’t know what’s coming.
“Thanksgiving’s in two weeks,” he says.
“It is.”
“I’m going home. Greenwich. My parents, the twins — it’s a thing, my mom does a whole thing.” He turns his coffee mug a quarter-turn on the table. “I want you to come.”
The kitchen goes very quiet.
“To Greenwich,” I say.
“To Greenwich. For Thanksgiving. With my family.” He’s watching me now, and there’s something in his face I don’t see often, something almost shy, the captain stripped all the way down to the guy underneath.
“I know it’s — it’s a lot. It’s a big thing to ask.
You’d meet everyone. My mom, my dad, Liv and Britta.
It’s just us, but my family’s a lot when it’s all in one house — my mom turns it into an event, there’s too much food, my dad pretends he’s not emotional about it.
It’s a lot of house for not very many people.
” He stops, recalibrates, and lands on the true thing, the one he’s been circling all morning.
“I want them to meet you. The real you. Not the arrangement. You. I’ve been telling them about you for weeks and I want — I want you there. At the table. With me.”
And here’s the thing about me, the thing I know about myself the way you know a scar: I should say no.
Every instinct I have, every piece of the machinery that’s kept me alive since I was nine, is telling me to say no, to deflect, to make a joke about deserting Whitmore on a holiday, to do the thing I do where I close the door before anyone can see what’s behind it.
“Yes,” I say.
It comes out before I can stop it. Just — yes, fast and unguarded, because he did the slow breath and the shy face and said I want you at the table with me, and some part of me that I don’t have under management wanted to be at the table with him so badly that the word was out before the rest of me could veto it.
His whole face changes. Opens. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” And then, because the unguarded thing terrifies me and I need to put a wall back up fast: “Someone has to make sure you use the right fork. I’ve read about Greenwich. There are a lot of forks.”
He laughs, the real one, and reaches across the table and takes my hand and kisses my knuckles, and he’s so happy, so plainly and completely happy that I said yes, and I hold onto the warmth of it and try very hard not to hear the sound that’s started up underneath, low and familiar, the sound of the floor beginning to think about opening.
The spiral starts that afternoon and I can’t stop it.
It’s not dramatic. That’s the thing about my particular brand of unravelling — it doesn’t look like anything from the outside.
From the outside I’m shelving returns at the shop, ringing up a woman buying her book club’s next pick, recommending a translation of Chekhov to a grad student.
From the outside I’m fine. Composed. The offstage version handling the onstage tasks.
Because I know what Greenwich is. I’ve known for two years, in the way you know a place you’ve never been because someone who loves it has described it to you four hundred times.
Margaret talks about Greenwich the way she talks about everything, in a river, and over two years of afternoons I’ve absorbed the whole topography of it without meaning to — the house with the name, not a number, a name, on a road near the water.
Annika’s gardens. Erik’s trophy room that Margaret calls “the shrine” with a particular dryness.
The boat. The club. The schools the twins go to that cost more per year than my full scholarship is worth.
The casual, bottomless, generational money of it, the kind that doesn’t announce itself because it’s never had to, the kind that’s so deep in the bones of a family that they genuinely don’t see it.
And I know what I am.
I’m a girl from a town I won’t name with a father who’s a functioning alcoholic and a mother in Arizona who signs Christmas cards with her first name.
I’m a scholarship and a part-time bookshop job and one travel bag’s worth of belongings, most of them thrifted.
I changed my last name at eighteen so two people couldn’t find me.
I have, to my name, a half-brother in Germany and a framed photo and a thesis I’m betting my whole future on. That’s the entire ledger.
I think about the Thanksgivings I actually had.
The good years, the ones where my father was working and mostly sober, we had a turkey breast from the grocery store, the kind that comes in a plastic dome, and we ate it off the good plates, which were the plates with only one chip in them.
The bad years we didn’t mark the day at all, and I learned early that a holiday is just a regular day that other people have decided to make load-bearing, and that the safest thing to do with a load-bearing day is keep your head down until it passes.
Danny used to make a thing of it when he was still home — canned cranberry sauce sliced into rings, the ridges from the can still on it, served like it was something.
I loved those rings. I have never once in my life sat at a table where the turkey got brined for two days and nobody flinched at the cost of anything.