33. Beau #2
“People have been telling me what I want my whole life and getting it close enough that I never had to check the work. My dad. The scouts. Coaches. Everybody’s got a Beau ready to go and I just wear whichever one’s nearest the door.
” I have to stop for the air. “You’re the first thing I ever wanted that didn’t just show up.
The first thing I ever had to stand up in my own life and say that one, I pick that one.
And when you left I did what I always do — went quiet, let it go, told myself wanting it out loud was more than I had coming.
I’m done being quiet. I want you. Not the cover story.
Not the fake thing we started in a hallway.
Not the room till the Sailmaker’s fixed.
I want you in my actual life, on purpose, chosen — move in, here, with me, not because anything’s on fire and not because you’ve got nowhere else to be, but because I picked you, and I want to wake up and have it already be true. ”
It comes out exactly as wrong as I was scared it would. Doubled back, half the words in the wrong spot, no shape to it at all. And it’s the truest thing I’ve ever said to a human being. I said it out loud. The page didn’t win.
Sloane has a face she wears right before she takes you apart.
Calm. Exact. I’ve watched it disassemble a department chair without once raising the volume.
I watch her reach for it now. I watch her go to load the last of the closing argument, the you deserve someone who isn’t this, the exit she’s used her entire life, the one that’s never failed her.
She doesn’t take it.
Everybody in her life left. Her mom. Her dad. She left first, every time, so it couldn’t be done to her. And she’s standing in my hall betting against all of it on a guy in a sling who can’t even say it good.
“Okay,” she says.
Just that. Quiet. The way she says the true ones.
“Okay?”
“You said it so bad.” Her voice isn’t steady, which from her is the ground opening up. “You said it so bad, Beau.”
And then she crosses the hall. The whole thing. The distance she wouldn’t cross at the hospital, the rail she wouldn’t let go of — she crosses it. She’s careful of the arm, so careful of the arm, and she puts her hand flat on my chest over the sling strap and looks up at me.
“I have never once believed a person could stay.” As steady as she can make it, which isn’t very.
“I don’t know how it’s done. But I want to find out whether you’re the exception — and I’ve never wanted to find anything out before, I’ve only ever wanted to already know, so I could leave first. So that’s new.
That’s the most honest thing I’ve got. Is it enough? ”
“That’s everything,” I say. “That’s the only thing I was ever asking for.”
She kisses me careful, like I might come apart, and I kiss her back like I won’t, and somewhere in there she makes a sound that isn’t careful at all.
The last of the long stretch goes out of me.
The house is empty. The guys aren’t coming back until I text them, and I am not going to text them for a long time.
Getting a man with one working arm and a list of forbidden movements up a flight of stairs is not the smooth thing the movies sell you. We laugh twice on the way. She takes more of my weight on the landing than she’ll ever admit to.
“This is undignified,” she informs me, halfway up.
“You picked me.”
“I’m aware. I’m filing a complaint with someone.”
By the time we get to my room I’ve worked out this is going to be the least graceful thing either of us has ever done, and she’s worked it out too, and instead of killing it that does the opposite.
There’s no version of tonight where I get to be smooth.
No version where she gets to be composed.
So we both quit trying at the same second, and that turns out to be the whole thing.
She undresses me one-handed-careful, works the strap loose, won’t let me help, and when she catches me trying to do more than the list allows she sets two fingers in the middle of my chest and pushes me down onto the bed, gentle.
“No,” she says. “You don’t get to be the captain tonight. Lie there and let me.”
So I lie there and let her, which is a thing I have never once been good at.
She gets the cream sweater off, the one I’ve thought about more than I’ll ever tell her.
She’s careful with the shoulder the whole time, and every careful thing she does she does while looking right at me, and Sloane looking at you is not a careful thing at all. It’s the most direct thing there is.
She straddles me slow, mindful of the arm, one hand flat on the good shoulder for balance, and when she lines me up and sinks down onto my cock there’s no show in it for either of us.
Just her face going open in a way she’s never let me see in daylight, and a low sound, like it caught her off guard.
“Okay?” she asks, watching the arm.
“You’re asking me if I’m okay.” I get a laugh out, rough. “Sloane. I’ve never been—” The word won’t come; the big ones never come; so I do the thing I learned downstairs and say it bad. “There’s no word for how far past okay I am. Move. Please.”