Chapter 27
Andy
There was one year, on my birthday, where I had no clue what to ask for.
Mom and Luis bothered me about it for weeks, convinced I just wasn’t telling them to save them the cost or the disappointment of not being able to get it.
But I really didn’t know, had gladly accepted that I’d more than likely get new shoes for basketball like I did every year.
Good shoes cost you an arm and a leg, and I needed them, always.
At breakfast, over waffles with whipped cream and sprinkles, I unwrapped my new sneakers, some shirts that weren’t second hand, and what felt like a book, wrapped tight in dark green paper.
It was Waiting for Godot, and the binding was fine, gold threaded, and I could tell it was an important gift, not a last minute one.
Luis didn’t study theater formally—he went to fire school, joined the department, and read in his bunk.
We’d go to the community theater often, but always for the holiday shows.
This gift was the first time he told me, without telling me, that it could be for me, too.
Holding it, I knew it would always matter to me, and I hadn’t even read it.
My copy is now dog-eared, marked up with pencil and pen, worn.
I never asked him why he gave me this one in particular, but I know he loved it.
I know I love reading these two men waiting around for nothing, and maybe it’s been a weird sort of comfort to know that there’s nothing really waiting for me.
That the things I have—my mom, Carmen—are my purpose and everything else is just gravy.
It’s helped me rationalize things, and I wonder if it did that for him.
I didn’t know I needed something like that, but once I held it in my hands, I knew it’d always been waiting for me. Which is ironic, I know.
I’m bending the spine of it now, while Sloane sleeps beside me, just stirring. I brush her hair from where it’s fallen in her face as she slowly blinks awake, smiling.
“Good morning,” she says, light splintering through the blinds, pouring across the freckles on the bridge of her nose. “What’s that?”
I flick my gaze to the old thing in my hands. “A play.”
“Looks…well loved,” she smirks, sitting up. The blanket falls away and she’s not wearing anything when she snatches the play from my hands. “Can I read it?” she flips through the pages, her eyes making some assessment as her smile softens. “I’m goin’ to read it, if you don’t mind.”
I watch her take this thing I love and it’s easier than I wish it was to let her, so I kiss her instead of confirming what she already knows: that she can take anything.
Her hands find purchase in my shoulders before sliding down my back, and suddenly she’s wrapped around me the way she was last night, and the nights before, and the night on the roof.
I press her into the sheets, strands of blonde now stuck to her face, dewy and flushed, and I dip down to taste her lips, just barely apart as she inhales.
I reach for my nightstand before driving into her slowly, feeling her clench tightly around me.
I have to glance away, have to harden my jaw to draw my own pleasure back, only for her to sit up and force me against the headboard, straddling me once again.
Hair cascading past her bare waist, she settles around me as her head falls back on a moan. That almost ends me right there.
“I’m not gonna last,” I manage to mutter behind gritted teeth as she circles her hips, guiding me to the edge.
I feel her start to move out of rhythm, shuddering and unraveling just as I let my own release slam into me.
Fingers digging into my shoulders, Sloane falls apart, all the hot tension melting into me, an aching softness I want to somehow memorize.
“What are you feedin’ me this morning?” she says against my ear before sitting back, the light catching in her eyes thrown back at me with the warmth in her stare.
“Pancakes?” I look up at her, dreading that this is the end of our solitude.
A week can easily feel like forever when you let yourself exist out of time.
Together, in the limbo between Christmas and New Year’s, in my bed or hers, on a nondescript street in the city or on a deserted sidewalk on campus, it’s felt like we’ve traveled through a looking glass.
The rules that define our existence haven’t existed here.
I haven’t heard from Jean or my father; Sloane has declined every call from her brother or parents.
And Connie’s had a friend visiting and told her daughter, in so many words, to take the week off from hovering.
The conservatory’s been closed. Most of the team’s gone somewhere for the holiday’s.
We’ve been alone, and it’s been the sickest trick because it’s not real life.
Our friends, our teammates, start funneling back into this world today, start slowly warping the glass we’ve holed-up on the other side of.
We’ll be forced to see things as they are.
I worry reality will warn her off of this—of us. That she won’t trust me to handle it.
“That’ll do,” she grins, sliding off me before pulling on one of my large hoodies. Hand on the door knob, I jump out of bed and stop her.
“I have roommates still here, Sloane,” I tell her, my eyes dipping to where the hem of the hoodie barely hides the perfect swell of her ass. She seems to realize the moment I do, and sucks her teeth as she scans the room.
“Right,” she mutters, pulling on the flannel pants that hang over my desk chair. “My virtue safer for you, now?” She moves to open the door and I press behind her, my mouth low in her ear as I grasp her waist through the sweatshirt she’s swimming in.
“Not you I’m worried about. Just don’t want to do something I regret if any of these guys look at you the wrong way.”
Her laughter rumbles against me, smoke and honey, as we make our way to the kitchen, where we in fact see no one. Without hesitating, she finds the mixing bowl and pancake mix, measuring out just enough water before I nudge her toward the table. She flips the book over in her hand.
“So the theater thing,” she says, pulling her legs up on the chair.
“The theater thing,” I repeat, leaning against the counter as I watch her, arms crossed like it’ll keep my heart in rhythm.
“What’s the story there? It’s kind of…random?” she laughs, tossing her hair to the side. “Caffeine?”
I turn the pot on, finding our least nicked mug.
“It was Luis’s thing. He passed it on to me, and then to Carmen, I guess.”
“Did you do, like, family plays?”
“No,” I chuckle. “Carmen’s always been into musicals, so I’ve been into musicals by default. Luis was into straight plays, though. We just…appreciated theater together. In high school I took the theater survey class and the director convinced me to go out for the fall play.”
“That’s a cliche. You know that right?” She fights a grin as I slide her coffee on the table, rushing back to flip the pancake.
“Oh, yeah. It was very good for me. Girls love an athlete who can do Hamlet.” Claudius, actually—the villain thing was a goddamn birdsong, and my teammates were pestering the director to play even a tree before the semester was through.
Her cheeks deepen into a rosy hue and she brings her mug to her lips, hiding the flush with a weathered radio station logo. “A real Troy Bolton. Did you have a Gabriella?”
“Yeah,” I laugh. “For a couple years. She got married right after graduation.” Bianca, whose sporadic posts about her toddlers are a bizarre reminder of how much life has happened in the same span of time that Luis has been gone.
Her eyes fly wide. “Oh my god, Andy. You’re jokin’?” The mug sounds against the table and she rests her head against her hand.
“I wish I was,” I admit, slightly embarrassed but relieved to be telling her about my life. No one knows much, I realize, other than Will.
The pancakes are perfect, and I drench them in butter and syrup without checking before setting it in front of her.
“How’d you go from that,” she cocks her head as she cuts into the stack, “to…this?” Her eyes don’t lift when she asks, just flutter shut as she savors the bite.
I flip the trio burning in the pan, silently cursing the unevenness of this stove as I turn down the heat. “This?”
“You know. You’re like…a different woman every weekend kind of guy,” she says, pursing her lips, and I can’t tell if there’s jealousy laced in her gaze or true curiosity.
Raking a hand through my hair I sigh, pouring my own cup of joe before plating my breakfast and sitting across from her.
“I think…” I cut a piece of the stack until it’s mush, and Sloane sits there in silence.
“I think Luis dying changed the way I see things. And college is the time for all that, I guess,” I tell her, regretting that this will always be her first impression of me as I shove the bite in my mouth before sitting back.
Gazing into her coffee, she squints. “I get it. You don’t really know yourself yet, you know?”
“I mean, do you ever?”
Her eyes float past me, latching onto something as she squints. “I should grab my stuff.”
Turning, I notice it’s already eleven, and that Connie’s supposed to be discharged at noon. The hospital’s half an hour away, and I’m out of time. Her half eaten pancakes sit on the table as we pad back down the hallway.
“Will I see you tomorrow?” I say instead of please don’t go. A small smirk plays at the corner of her lips as I step close and draw circles on her smooth skin beneath the hoodie, my gaze dipping to her lips.
“I haven’t seen my friends in forever. I need to…debrief them,” she adds with a small shrug before disappearing to the bathroom.
When she comes back, I’m mentally fumbling over ways to get reassurance.
It’s fucked, how lost I am to this feeling.
“And what are you going to tell them?” I ask her, dragging her toward me by the hips.
I gaze up at her, wanting nothing more than to pull her back down to this bed and…
not even touch her. Just talk. Listen to everything she usually leaves unspoken or carefully tiptoes around.
I watch her change out of my clothes and into her own.
Handing her the jeans she wore here, a folded up piece of yellow printer paper falls out of them.
I know it’s an invasion of privacy, but my curiosity takes the better of me as I unfold it, quickly skimming the flyer in my hands before it’s snatched out of them.
“Excuse me.” A playful smile dances across her face as she repockets what I now know is a flyer for an art competition sponsored by the conservatory and Boston Museum of Fine Art.
“You gonna do it?” I ask, even though it’s hard to tell if I have the right to.
She sighs, putting her hair up with a rubber band and pulling the front pieces only to get frustrated and tuck them back behind her ears.
“I don’t know…I haven’t really been inspired lately.” She bites her lip, shyly like this is a half truth and she isn’t ready to give me all of it.
I move behind her, running my fingers up her arm and feel her shiver at the sensation. “I think you're scared,” I breathe into her ear. She turns on me quick. Hands on her hips as she cocks her head, that fire I love so much burning behind her eyes.
“And what might I be scared of, Andrew?”
One eyebrow up, I wrap an arm around her waist pulling her into me, a small gasp escaping her.
“The inspiration.”
We stand centimeters from each other, our mouths so close I can feel her breath hitch on the bow of my lips. For a second her eyes are an open and heated blue flame, until her phone pings with a text pulling us both out of it.
“Shit, I’m gonna be late pickin’ up my mom.” She lightly pulls from my hold grabbing her stuff.
“Let me go with—”
“No,” she tells me, pressing her lips together. “That’s sweet but…it’s fine. Really.”
I nod to myself, wondering if I overstepped with the art show thing, with calling her out on lowering her guard but I know it’s true. She’s scared to let me in, maybe more scared than I am to let her.
Cradling her face in my hands I tip her head back, surprising her with a kiss. “You know you just have to ask, right?”
Her breath hitches when I look at her, and I want it to mean something. Desperately. She rakes her teeth over her bottom lip, softly smiling. “I know. But it’s not like we’re…”
“What?” My heart feels heavy against my ribcage, but I already know what she’s thinking. She fought this so hard; she was never giving in this easily.
“You know,” she shrugs, her brows and nose pinching.
“What I do know is that you,” I pull her toward me, “are the only woman I’m seeing.”
Her eyes turn like a deer in headlights before her blush deepens, and she glances away instead of telling me how that makes her feel. “You don’t seem like the exclusive type.”
I huff a laugh as she levels her attention back to me. “Do you want me to see other people?” I joke, my amusement falling when her lips don’t lift at all.
“Maybe,” she says, her throat bobbing. “I mean, don’t like…stop your life for me.” A laugh finally leaves her when she says that.
Asking if this applies in reverse is sure to irritate me, so I don’t do it. Just pass a hand through my hair to distract from the voice in my head telling me to pump the brakes, to stop investing in this outcome. To stop believing there is an outcome.
She kisses me, quickly, pulling away like you’d rip off a bandaid. “I’ll see you later,” she tells me as she walks away, and once I’ve watched her drive away, I notice she took the play.