24. Sloane #2
And now I’m going to one. In a house with a name. With a boy whose mother does a whole thing, whose family makes an event of a Thursday, whose smallest ordinary holiday is bigger and warmer and more certain than the biggest day my childhood ever managed to scrape together.
I do the thing I do, which is run the scene before it happens.
I see the long table and the four of them, Annika and Erik and the twins, and Annika’s gardens and the house with a name, and I see myself at the table in my one good dress, the black turtleneck one, the one I wear when I’ve decided something, and I see them being kind to me, because they will be kind.
Beau’s family will be unfailingly, genuinely kind, and I see the kindness landing on me like it always lands, like a thing I have to brace against, and I see myself performing belonging at a table where I will know, the entire time, in my bones, that I don’t.
That’s the part I can’t block my way out of.
Not the cruelty — there won’t be cruelty.
The kindness. The kindness is worse. Because cruelty I know how to survive; I was raised on it.
It’s the kindness I have no defenses for, the warm bottomless certainty of a family who’s never once had to wonder where the next thing was coming from, and being inside it for three days will not make me feel like I belong.
It’ll make me feel, with total clarity, exactly how far I had to climb to be standing in the room. And it’ll make me wonder how long a boy from that table can possibly want a girl from mine before the difference in our ledgers stops being romantic and starts being a problem.
I don’t say any of this.
That’s the part that should worry me, if I were the kind of person who let things worry me in real time instead of filing them for later.
He told me everything this morning — I want them to meet the real you — and I said yes and made a joke about forks, and I have not said a single true word about what the yes is costing me, what it’s stirred up, the spiral I’ve been running since the shop.
I notice, distantly, that this is exactly the thing I’d have called him on a month ago.
The holding-back. The noticing-and-not-saying.
We built a whole love out of it, the two of us, the careful architecture of things observed and left alone, and for weeks it felt like intimacy — like being known without being interrogated.
But lately it’s started to feel like something else.
Like two people standing in a lit room each holding a thing behind their back, calling the not-showing closeness.
I know he’s holding something. The shoulder. I’m not stupid, I live with the ice and the ibuprofen and the way he came home from UConn somewhere else entirely.
And now I’m holding something too.
There’s a moment, at dinner, when I almost say it.
He’s telling me about the house — the layout, where I’ll sleep, which is my old room, the one with the window seat, you’ll like it — and he’s so happy describing it, so plainly thrilled to be folding me into the geography of his childhood, and I open my mouth to say the true thing.
Beau. I need to tell you what it’s going to be like for me, in that house.
I need you to understand the ledger. The sentence is right there.
I’ve built it, the way I build everything, in complete grammatical order, calm, ready to deliver to his face.
And then he says, “My mom already cleared a shelf in the guest bath for you. She asked what kind of tea you drink. I told her chai latte’s are your favorite and she wrote it down,” and the sentence dies in my throat, because he’s describing a mother who cleared a shelf and wrote down my order—for a girl she’s never met—and I cannot, I physically cannot, look at that open, uncomplicated kindness and answer it with I don’t belong at your table.
So I say, “Tell her I also drink coffee, I’m not precious about it,” and he laughs, and the moment closes, and the true thing goes back into the drawer with all the other true things I’ve decided he can’t carry.
That’s twice now I’ve chosen the drawer over the sentence. I’m keeping count. And I notice the counting feels less like discretion lately and more like a countdown.
He’s home before me for once — no practice, a rare empty evening, the guys all out — and when I come in from the shop the house is warm and quiet and he’s on the couch and he looks up at me with the soft thing in his face, and the spiral I’ve been running all day goes momentarily silent, because that’s the other truth, the one that complicates everything: I want him.
Not strategically. Not as cover. I walk into a warm room and he looks at me like that and every piece of math I’ve been running goes quiet under the simple animal fact of wanting to be near him.
“You’re brooding,” he says. “You’ve got the brooding face.”
“I don’t brood. I contemplate. There’s a dignity to it you wouldn’t understand.”
“Come and contemplate over here.” He holds out a hand.
And I should keep my distance — I should hold onto the wall, keep running the math, protect myself — and instead I cross the room and let him pull me down into his lap, and his hands settle warm on my hips, and I look down at him, this beautiful uncomplicated boy who wants me at his family’s table, and the wanting wins, the way it’s been winning for weeks.
I kiss him.
It starts slow and doesn’t stay slow.
I kiss him and he kisses back, easy at first, his hands moving up under my shirt, and then I shift in his lap and feel him already hard beneath me and the easy goes out of it.
He makes a low sound into my mouth. I pull his shirt off over his head and put my hands on his chest, his shoulders — gentle on the left one, even now, even like this, some part of me always cataloging the thing he won’t tell me — and he tips his head back against the couch and lets me look at him, lets me run my hands down the warm muscled length of him, and the spiral goes quiet, blessedly quiet, because this is the one place my head shuts up.
I slide off his lap and onto my knees on the floor in front of him.
“Sloane—” His voice has gone rough.
“Let me.” I get his sweats down and his cock free, hard and heavy against his stomach, and I wrap my hand around the base and lick up the length of him once, slow, watching his head drop back, before I take him into my mouth — and the sound he makes is worth the whole bad week, a groan torn out of him, his hand coming to my hair, not pushing, just holding.
I take him slow and then deeper, working him with my mouth and my hand together, my tongue dragging over the head on every pull, learning what makes his breath catch the way he’s learned the same about me.
He watches me do it with his eyes gone dark and wrecked, his thighs tense under my free hand, and there’s a power in it I never get anywhere else — that I can take this enormous controlled person apart with my mouth, can make Beau Sorensen forget every word he knows.
“Christ, your mouth—” His hand tightens in my hair. “Sloane, baby, you’ve gotta—if you keep going, I’m gonna—”
I pull off, slow, and look up at him, and he’s a mess, chest heaving, and I have never felt more in control of anything in my life, which is maybe why I want what I want next, which is to give the control away.
I stand back just far enough to reach behind me for the zipper, and his eyes track every inch of skin as it comes into view, like he's cataloguing it for later.
My shirt goes first, then my bra, and he makes a low sound in his throat that I feel between my legs before I've even gotten my jeans past my hips.
I kick them off along with everything else, and for a second I just let him look, let the wanting sit plain on his face, before I close the distance and climb into his lap in nothing at all
I face him, and I wrap my arms around his back, and I sink down onto him slow, taking him inch by inch until I’m seated all the way in his lap, and we both go still at the fullness of it, foreheads together, breathing each other’s air.
“Okay?” he murmurs. The check, always, even now.
“More than okay.” And I start to move.