Chapter 13 #2
Even though I know this is how I sully our waters enough that there’s no return to innocence—by saying yes instead of no.
“Yeah. Sure.” I watch the easy swish of her hips as we ascend the stairs, tracking the silence of her authority, the one that forces my walls to retreat.
I wonder if she knows she does that, or if it’s a force of nature thing.
A consequence of who she is, such an integral part of her makeup and how she moves in the world that it doesn’t mean anything that it affects me, specifically.
We escape into a room peppered with Polaroids fastened to the wall with thumbtacks, before Sloane pushes up on a wide but narrow window frame.
“I used to do this all the time when I was younger, in Atlanta,” she says, glancing back at me like a kid in a candy store. I step through the window, shocked by the intensity of the slope, looking at her with brief alarm. “Come on, Spellman. Don’t be a pussy.”
I drop down onto the roof and lay back, sensing my hand just a few inches away from hers. She doesn’t move it, just turns her head to the side so she’s facing me, an unrushed smile settling on her lips when I do the same. From her other side, she pulls out a joint.
“Got a light?” she asks, quiet excitement creasing at the corners of her eyes as she lifts it to her lips.
My eyes are on the spliff as I focus on catching the flame, but her eyes are on me, searing into me with single minded determination.
When it’s done I back away, watching as her eyes flutter shut and take a hit, holding it for a long moment before blowing it over her shoulder.
She passes it to me and I take a long drag, feeling the laces of my guilt loosen.
Sloane subtly grins, watching. “For the life of me, I can’t get a read on you. Thought you were gonna try to convince us to get off this thing. ”
“No way,” I huff out, coughing. “Would you even have listened?” I ask, watching in awe as she bursts out in laughter.
“Of course not.” She lolls her head away from me so she’s staring back at the sky, the stars beginning to shine as the clouds drift away. “Maybe out of pity. Seems Carmen gives you a hard time,” she adds, but I know there’s a question hidden there.
I help myself to another hit before passing the joint back.
“She does. But she’s also having a hard time,” I admit, losing a breath.
“She appreciates you. That’s why she does it,” she says to the stars instead of me. “I gave my family a hard time.”
“Yeah?” I trace the outline of her against the roof, barely lit by the moon.
“I was adopted,” she says, like it’s as much a revelation to her as it is to me. “Grant doesn’t really tell people. The Fielder’s adopted us when we were barely teenagers.”
“Shit. How was that?” I’d be lying if I didn’t worry about Carmen, about what would happen to her if something happened to Mom. It’s unlikely, but so was Luis dying after that fire.
“Crazy,” she laughs, but it’s sad, a tragic weight to her usually feather light voice. “I was horrible. Probably still am, dependin’ on who you ask,” she says, the subtle lilt of her voice skating across me like the breeze.
“I find that hard to believe.” That telltale weightlessness comes over me, and I let the roof hold me as any tension finally melts away. I only really smoke with Will, and even then it’s when he thinks he can keep it from Liv.
Sloane hums, and it buzzes just beneath my skin, warms me despite the chill in the air.
“You don’t really know me,” she muses, her soft giggles vibrating into the roof tiles, and I know she feels it, too.
“And you don’t know me. But I have a feeling,” I say to the sky, and I hear her roll over until she’s on her stomach, head propped in her hands.
It’s gone in this moment—the perimeters that dictate my life.
I try to grab for the thread that binds this all together, that casts me as a villain in disguise, but it’s been blown away.
Right now, I’m just a guy looking at a girl, wanting to kiss her, and anything else that I could be feels like pure fiction.
The task echoes in the back of my mind and, were it not for the pot, it’d probably be crisper, but it isn’t.
It’s as hazy as the smoke we’re blowing between us.
“What does this feeling tell you?” she asks, peering at me through her lashes. Her deep sea eyes almost glitter.
“That it’s all a front.” She reels back just slightly, like I just peeled a layer she wasn’t ready to shed.
“You’re a front, too,” she challenges, her tone dipping into defensiveness, and I still, my skin buzzing at her perception.
“And what is it? My front?” I counter, knowing I should leave it alone, but I’m mesmerized by the way she talks. By the way her lips move when she’s talking about me.
“Carelessness. The whole douchey shtick you do when everyone’s watching. The…playin’ dumb. Kind of an asshole.” She rolls those lips of hers, narrowing her eyes at me. “You weren’t like that in the prop closet. You’re not like that when it’s just me.”
It’s too raw, that perception, and I bristle.
“I say thank you for watching my sister and, all of a sudden, I have a sensitive side I don’t show?” I try to joke in an attempt to reel this conversation back into safe territory, but she doesn’t budge.
“You’re doin’ it again.”
Head tilted to the side and framed by the golden spillage of her hair, she looks like an angel, and I wonder: what does that make me?
“I’m not pretending, Sloane. Sometimes I just am an asshole.” I work my jaw as I trace the almost black outline at the edges of indigo in her eyes.
“Bullshit,” she says, sitting up so that we’re face to face. We’re too close, but I can’t seem to make myself move. “I saw you with Carmen. You care about things.”
“Why do you care so much?” I ask, irritation attempting to claw its way through the hazy cloud we’re slowly falling from. “I don’t know if you remember, but all those nights ago, you wanted nothing to do with me.”
Her scoff is hard, grates across my skin like a rug burn. “Because I was trying not to do somethin’ stupid with my brother’s teammate.” Her scoff is bitter, laced with hurt pride and tired amusement as she shakes her head at me.
“So you admit it. You did want me.” I let my gaze play across her lean lines and she smacks my arm, biting back a smirk as she scowls at me.
“Can you be serious?”
I breathe in the cool night air, embracing the way it burns. “Hand me that.” I reach toward the joint, taking a brief hit. “Fine,” I confirm, blowing the smoke out in a long stream.
“Okay,” she says, sighing. “Tell me something real.”
“Too vague.” Parameters. I need parameters so I know how to avoid tripping a wire.
I hear her shift on the roof. “Fine. Why were you talking to Ian at the warehouse?”
Well shit.
“Watching me, Fielder?” I ask, hiding my dread.
“Serious, Andrew.”
“He was just trying to get a quote.” I can sense Sloane deciding if she believes me, so I move on. “My turn.”
She hums, and I can see the moment she decides to move on. “Fine. Go ahead.”
I look into the night, my nerves newly rattled by the line it feels we’ve crossed, the curtain we’ve started to lift.
I should ask. Just ask, without committing to telling anyone what I know.
“Why’d you really leave California?” Gravity presses into my chest, shoves any sense of calm away as I watch her mull over the question.
“Sloane!” Jean’s voice comes from below, and I can imagine him roaming the dark tree line, thinking to look anywhere but up.
Neither of us move, like we know leaving the roof will shatter the moment—our first real one, I think.
Sloane’s teeth rake her bottom lip as a smile teases at the corners of her mouth, and the moonlight cuts across her cheekbones, highlighting the freckles that fall across the bridge of her nose—the ones I suddenly want to count. Trace.
A breath whooshes out of her and her smile falters, turns serious. “I left my art program and am hiding out here while I take care of my birth mom who’s sick and probably dying.”
“Jesus, Sloane.” I sit up and face her, shaking my head, feeling like shit for dragging that out of her. “Are you…okay?” Real concern courses through me because I get the sense she hasn’t shared this. That for whatever reason, she’s leaving this with me.
“Oh my god, yeah,” she forces a laugh. “Just high. Sorry I told you that.”
“No, don’t be. You can…” I wet my lips, rolling them together as I dread the words begging to leave my mouth. “You can tell me anything.”
“Are we secretly friends, Andrew?” she smirks, tilting her head at me.
I swallow hard. “Don’t tell Carmen. She’ll never let me hear the end of it.”
“See, now I have to tell her. She was my friend first,” she whispers playfully, leaning into me with all the subtlety of a rock. She rolls her lips, drops her gaze before flicking it back up, and suddenly, we’re closer than we should be.
“Sloane,” I mutter, hating myself.
“Andrew,” she mocks, the corner of her mouth tugging into a smile I want nothing more than to kiss off her. She looks at me, her confidence down-sliding into uncertainty, and I immediately reach for her.
“I just,” I start, throat bobbing. “I just think we should be friends.” The words might as well be acetone in my mouth, that’s how badly I want to wash them away, say something entirely new. Instead, I level my gaze at her, bringing all the surety I can find to the fore.
Her brows lift in surprise, amusement playing at her lips. “I agree,” she says, a dimple popping, a shoulder shrugging, a strand of her golden hair gently blown by the wind.
“Okay, so…” I chuckle, furrowing my brows. “What’s happening here, Sloane?”
“I just…felt like kissin’ you. But if that’s confusing—”
“I mean, your brother—”
“Right.” She looks down, pressing her lips into a tight line. “Forget it, Spellman. I’m like…very high.”
The window we came through slides up, the sudden air pressure shattering the bubble.
“Why can I never find you?” Jean complains, popping his head through. “Oh. Andy.”
“See you later, friend,” Sloane says, her voice soft with smoke, as she pushes up off the roof before disappearing through the window, already regretting the kiss I didn’t take.