29. Sloane
Sloane
I’m in the living room when the truck pulls up.
I’ve been hearing trucks all afternoon and deciding they weren’t his. This one is.
My bags are by the door. Two of them. Everything I came with and a few things I didn’t, the things I’m leaving behind because they’re his, or they were ours, and ours stopped being a word somewhere between the closet and the front door.
Today only has room for one hard thing, and I picked this one.
I packed this morning while he was at practice.
It didn’t take long. That’s the other thing the bags tell you — three months of the best life I’ve had folds down into almost nothing, like it was always meant to be portable, like some part of me kept it ready to walk out the whole time.
I found his grey hoodie in the clean laundry.
I held it longer than I’m going to admit to anyone, including myself.
Then I folded it and left it on the end of the bed. I’m not a thief. Whatever else I am.
I’ve rehearsed it. I rehearse everything. I know all my lines.
I don’t know his. That’s the part I can’t plan around. I never could.
So I sit very straight on the edge of the couch with my hands folded and my coat already on, and I wait, and I am not going to cry.
I decided in the shower this morning with my forehead on the tile.
I’m not going to give him that. Crying would make it a tragedy, and a tragedy is a thing you can be talked out of.
This isn’t a tragedy. This is maintenance.
You shut the water off before the pipe bursts. You don’t weep about the valve.
I ran the whole speech in my head while I packed, start to finish, twice, the way I used to run lines pacing the wings before a call.
I know the load-bearing sentences. I know which ones do the work and which ones are only there to carry me to the next one.
I know to keep my hands folded so they can’t give me away and my voice low so it can’t climb.
I know everything except how to make myself believe the part where this is good for him.
Which is fine. I don’t have to believe it. I only have to say it like I do.
The door opens.
They come in loud, the way they always come in. Cash first, mid-story. Then Wyatt. Then Theo. The cold comes in with them and the noise comes in with them.
Then the noise stops.
They see me. They see the coat. They see the bags by the door.
Hockey players read a room in under five seconds. I’ve watched them do it before. I watch them do it now, all four faces landing on it one after another, and I watch the easy go out of the afternoon.
“Hey.” Beau’s still got his practice bag on his shoulder. He looks at the bags. He looks at me. “What’s going on?”
“Can we talk?” My voice comes out level. I made sure of it. “Just us.”
Nobody moves for a second.
Then Cash, who is never quiet, goes quiet.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. We were just gonna—” He doesn’t finish it.
He claps Theo on the arm. Theo’s already turning.
Wyatt looks at me on the way past, and there’s no drawl in it this time, just a long steady look, like he’s leaving a door propped open behind his eyes in case I want it later.
None of them say a word to Beau. Theo’s hand lands on his shoulder going by and stays a second too long.
Then the stairs take them, and a door shuts somewhere above us, and it’s the two of us and my coat and the bags.
Beau sets his practice bag down slow. Like the floor might be wired.
“Okay,” he says. “I’m here. Talk to me.”
“I’m moving out.” I keep my hands folded. “Today. My things are packed. I wanted to do this in person. You deserve that much.”
He doesn’t say anything. He’s just looking at me.
“It isn’t working,” I say. “Us. This. And the kind thing is to stop it now, before it gets any further in, while it’s still—”
“Sloane.”
“—still a thing we can both walk out of clean. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m walking out clean. It’s for the best.”
“It’s for the best.” Flat. Not a question. He’s heard the phrase before. Everyone’s heard the phrase before. “Okay. No. Back up. This morning you stole my coffee and told me my comp lit professor has a punchable face. Six hours ago. What happened in six hours?”
“Nothing happened. That’s the point. Nothing has to happen. I had three good months and I’m getting out while they’re still good.”
“Of what?” His jaw works. “Getting out of what? Of me?”
“Of this.” I don’t gesture. Gesturing is for people who need their hands to sell a thing. “Before it’s the kind of thing that takes years to climb out of.”
“Okay.” He puts his hands up. Not surrender.
The way you gentle something that might bolt.
“Then talk to me like I’m on your side. Because I am.
Whatever this is — you need room, you need me to back all the way off, you need to not live here — tell me the actual thing.
I’ll fix it. I’m good at fixing things. Tell me what it is. ”
“You can’t fix this.”
“You don’t know that. You haven’t let me try.”
“It isn’t a leak in the roof, Beau.” Flat.
The flatter I keep it the more it holds.
“You can’t order a part. The broken thing is me.
From the foundation up. There’s no version of you good enough with your hands to fix a foundation, and you’d spend years finding that out, and I’d let you, because I’m selfish, and that is exactly why I’m not going to. ”
He’s quiet for a moment. He’s looking at me like he’s trying to find the seam.
We are two centers lined up on the dot, both of us waiting for someone else to make the first move, both of us too disciplined to false-start.
I have spent almost four months in cold arenas learning the particular stillness that comes right before a puck drops — the held breath, the weight already shifted forward onto the blades, everyone pretending this is about to be fair.
It isn't fair. It's never fair. Whoever wants it more loses something to get it, and I have already decided which one of us that's going to be tonight.
“Sloane.” He says my name like it's the whistle. Like the second he says it, something is supposed to start.
I don't move. I have gotten good, this year, at not being the one who moves first.
“My father is in a holding cell in Pennsylvania,” I say, because the silence is dangerous and the script is safe.
“He put a woman through a wall on Thursday. A woman I didn’t know existed.
My mother lives in a state four thousand miles away and signs her cards like we met once at a conference.
My family is a thing I changed my legal name to escape.
That’s what I come from. That’s the line. That’s what’s in the blood.”
“I know all that.” His voice is low. “You told me. On the drive. I know all of it.”
“You know it like a story someone told you in a warm truck. You don’t know it like a thing that lands on you in your own house at two in the morning for the rest of your life.
” I refold my hands the other way. “You’ve got a mother who cried when I left.
A father with a lake and a name on the mailbox.
Two sisters who already planned my next visit.
People who love you on purpose, who chose it.
I’ve got wreckage and a holding cell and a clock.
And I am not going to stand in your warm house and let it spread into your life and ruin the best thing you have going, just because I was selfish enough to want it for a season.
You deserve someone who isn’t this. That’s not me being hard on myself. That’s just true.”
“You don’t get to decide that.” Quiet. “What ruins my life. Who I deserve. That’s mine.”
“Somebody has to decide it clearly. You won’t. You’re too far in it. So I’m deciding it for both of us, and the only genuinely good thing I have to give you is the door.”
He takes a step closer. I make myself not step back.
“You’re really good at this,” he says. Not mean. Almost wondering. “You’ve got every piece stacked. I can’t get a hand in anywhere.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“You’re telling me a truth. Stacked so neat there’s no gap to grab.” Another step. “And I’m not going to argue the stack, because you’ll win. You’ve been winning arguments like this since before you could spell. You told me where you learned it.”
My throat does something. I hold it.
“Is this your dad?” he says. “The arrest. Is that what flipped it? Because Friday you were fine. Sunday your brother’s on my porch. Now there’s bags by the door. So it’s that. A thing happened two hundred miles away to a man you don’t even talk to, and somewhere in your head it became about us.”
“There’s no us for it to be about. That’s what I keep—”
“Did I do something?” It’s quieter than the rest. It costs him to say it; I can hear what it costs. “Just tell me. I can take it. I’d honestly rather it was me. Tell me I did a thing and I’ll—”
“You didn’t do anything.”
And that’s the one that nearly takes me down, because it’s true, because the unbearable center of all of this is that he did everything right, every single day, the shampoo and the heating pad and the hand on the back of my chair, and right is the problem. Right is the whole problem.
“You didn’t do one thing wrong,” I say. “Not one. Whatever you tell yourself after I’m gone, don’t tell yourself it was something you did. It wasn’t you. It was never going to be you.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
“I know. You’re not supposed to. You’ve never had to.”
He’s quiet again. And then he finds the thing I didn’t armor for, because he’s the only one who could, because I handed him the key myself.
“You told me about this,” he says. “In Greenwich. You said you’re good at leaving rooms before the floor goes.
You said it like it was just a fact about you, like your eye color.
And you’re doing it. Right now. In front of me.
You’re leaving before I can, and you’ve got it dressed up so nice I almost can’t see it’s the same old thing underneath. ”