25. Sloane #3
“You were perfect today,” he says. “They love you. My mom pulled me aside and — she loves you, Sloane. The twins have already started planning your next visit. My dad said—” he stops, and I feel him smile against my hair “—my dad said he likes you, which from him is basically a parade.”
You were perfect today. He means it as the highest thing he can give me.
He doesn’t know that perfect is the word for a performance, that perfect is what I am when I’m furthest from okay, that the more flawless I was at his family’s table the more underwater I was the whole time.
He read the performance as the truth. He always does.
He reads me as well as anyone ever has and he still, sometimes, reads the performance as the truth, because he wants it to be true so badly.
I turn around in his arms.
I should tell him. The sentence is right there, the way it’s been right there for two weeks.
Beau, I’m drowning. This house, your family, the kindness, the gap — I don’t fit here and I never will and being loved at that table today was the loneliest I’ve felt in years.
It’s true and it’s built and it’s ready and all I have to do is open my mouth.
I kiss him instead.
It’s not the angry kind or the desperate kind. It’s the other kind, the one that’s worse for me, the slow kind, the kind that’s the truth I won’t say out loud rerouted through my body because my body’s the only place I let it out.
“We have to be quiet,” he murmurs against my mouth, and there’s a smile in it. “These walls are not — this is my childhood house, Sloane, my parents are down the hall, the twins are right—”
“Then be quiet,” I say, and pull his shirt over his head.
We undress each other slow in the dark of his childhood guest room, and I push him back onto the bed and follow him down, and it’s careful and quiet and unbearably tender, both of us muffling everything, his hand coming up to cover my mouth gently when I gasp and mine pressed to his when he groans.
He rolls us so he’s above me and slides into me slow, watching my face in the dark, and I wrap my legs around him and pull him deep and we move together in near silence, just breath, just the slide of skin, just the headboard held still by his hand so it won’t knock the wall.
“Look at me,” he breathes, the way he always does, and I do, and that’s the part that breaks something loose in me — the eye contact in the dark, him moving in me slow and careful and looking at me like I’m the only true thing in this enormous certain house, and I have to bite down hard on the inside of my cheek to keep from making the sound that wants out, because the sound isn’t pleasure, or it isn’t only pleasure.
It’s grief. It’s the grief of having a thing you know you’re going to lose, of being held this carefully by someone you’ve already, somewhere underneath, started saying goodbye to.
He works a hand between us and finds my clit and I come like that, silent, shuddering, my face pressed into his neck and my nails in his back, and he follows me a few strokes later, his whole body going taut, a groan he muffles against my hair, my name a breath I feel more than hear.
We lie tangled in the dark after, both of us sweat-cooled and quiet, his heart slamming against my ribs.
“I’m so glad you came,” he whispers. “I wanted you to see it. Where I’m from. I wanted you in it.” He presses a kiss to my temple. “Feels like you fit.”
He’s quiet for a moment then, his thumb moving slow over my hip, and then he says it into the dark, plain and unhurried, like it’s the most obvious fact in the world and not the first time he’s ever said it to anyone.
“I love you, Sloane.”
He doesn’t say it like a question. He doesn’t say it to get it back.
He says it the way you’d name the color of the sky — like it was always going to be true and he’s only just now found the words, and now that he has them he’s not going to perform them or dress them up or take them back.
He just sets them down between us in his childhood bed and lets them be real.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he murmurs, and presses a kiss to my hair. “I just wasn’t going to lie in this bed next to you and not say the truest thing I know.”
And there it is. The thing I’ve wanted my entire life and built my entire life around never needing — said plainly, in the dark, by a boy who means it, in a house I don’t belong in, four days before the floor opens.
I love you too. It’s right there. It’s the truest thing I know, too.
And here is the thing I have known about myself since I was nine years old: I don’t say it back. Not because it isn’t true. Because it’s the truest thing I’ve got, and you don’t hand someone the truest thing you’ve got — it’s the first thing they take with them when they go.
So I don’t.
I have the not-saying right there, ready, the way I keep everything ready — and then I hear my own voice, in the dark, with no stage and no blocking and no version of me out in front of it where I can watch it land, say it anyway.
“I love you too.”
It comes out plain. No frame, none of the careful staging I put around every true thing before I let it out of my mouth. Just the words, the way other people say them — the way I have never once said them to a single person in twenty years of being alive.
Beau goes still against me.
And then he laughs — soft and startled, a sound I haven’t heard him make before, like it got away from him before he could decide whether to let it — and he pulls me back into him so my spine is flush to his chest and his mouth finds the nape of my neck, and he doesn’t say anything clever, doesn’t make it into a thing.
He just holds on. Like I’ve handed him something and he has no intention of fumbling it.
And that’s when it comes.
All at once, cold, up through the floor of me, because it’s out now and there is no version of the next hour where it goes back in. I said it to him. Out loud, in a bed, in a house with his name on the mailbox, his heart going steady against my back and nothing between me and the open air.
I gave it away.
That’s the part I can’t take back. Not the loving him — I couldn’t help the loving him, the loving him happened to me the way weather happens to a town.
The saying. The saying was a choice, and I made it, and now he has it, and the people who end up with the truest thing you’ve got are the same people who can take it with them when they go, and everyone who could leave me has left me, and I just lay down in the warm dark and handed the last one the map.
“Hey.” His voice is a low rumble against my neck. “I can hear you thinking.”
“You can’t hear thinking.”
“I can hear yours.” He presses his mouth just below my ear. “Go to sleep, Sloane. Nothing’s on fire.”
Something is, I don’t say. Something always is. You just can’t smell the smoke yet.
I don’t sleep.
He drops off the way he does, all at once, trusting, his arm heavy across me, and I lie awake in the dark and watch the ceiling of his childhood room and let myself, finally, stop performing, because there’s no one awake to perform for.
The knowing is done. It’s been done for two days; I just wouldn’t let myself look at it — and now I’ve said it out loud, which is so much worse than knowing, because knowing stays in your own chest where you can manage it, and saying puts it in someone else’s hands.
Here it is, the thing I handed him tonight: I love him.
That’s not in question anymore, hasn’t been for weeks, and as of an hour ago it isn’t a secret either.
I love him and his family is kind and his mother teared up and his father sees through people and his sisters have planned my next visit and the house has a name and the plates have no chips and none of it, none of it, changes the thing the nine-year-old me has known since the powder room, since the gravel drive, since the named mailbox: that I am a girl from a floor that opens, standing in a house that’s never once shifted under anyone, and that the distance between those two facts is not a thing love closes.
It’s a thing love postpones. For a while.
For as long as the season’s good and the boy’s in love and nobody’s looked too hard at the seams.
And then something happens — there’s always a something, the floor always finds its reason — and the postponement ends, and the gap is still there, exactly as wide as it always was, except now you’ve let yourself believe, and the believing is the part that kills you.
I’m not going to wait for the something. That’s the decision I make, somewhere around three in the morning, in the perfect quiet, in his arms. I’ve spent my whole life leaving rooms before the floor goes. I’m good at it. It’s the one mercy I know how to give myself.
I said it tonight. I meant it. And I’m going to leave anyway — because in my experience, meaning it has never once been the thing that let me stay.
I just have to figure out how to leave this one.
I don’t know yet that I won’t have to figure it out. That in four days a different floor is going to open all on its own — that my father, two hundred miles away in the town I won’t name, is about to hand me the reason I’ve been waiting for, gift-wrapped, the way he handed me everything else.
I don’t know that yet.
For now I just lie in the warm and the dark and memorize the weight of Beau’s arm, and I let myself have the last of it, and I do not cry, because I don’t, because I never.
It’s so quiet in this house.
You’d think a house this certain would be the safest place in the world to fall asleep.
I’ve never felt less safe anywhere in my life.