Chapter 42
Sloane
A voice rumbles in the hallway and, for a moment, I think it could be Andy. Blood rushes to my fingertips, floating flimsy hope to the top of my skin as I slowly roll to my side—until I realize it’s Grant.
“You’re sure?” he’s asking Evie, and I don’t hear her response, just her soft murmuring on the other side of the door. Eyes heavy, I drift in and out of sleep, only waking when something tricks me into thinking it could be him.
The winter I spent loving him is stretched wide when my eyes are closed like this, and I can almost forget that spring has thawed all of that away.
In my dreams he’s in my doorway, in my car, in a seat at the conservatory, watching me make sense out of oily pigments; watching me piece myself back together.
It’s only when my back starts to radiate with pain from lying down for so long that I finally decide to move. Stretching my limbs in the cloud like sheets, I push up against the headboard and scrub my face as it throbs, the emotional weight of the past few days still pulsing against my bones.
I sightlessly reach for the freshly topped water on my nightstand, and of course it’s there.
Evie would’ve refilled it while I was sleeping, the way she would when I was a mangy teenager, sneaking in and out of her windows at all hours of the night.
I’d escape back into the careful polish of the room she and Beau’d built me and not even bother to shrug off my jeans or wash the night off my face.
Just slump against the quilt and wait for daylight to break across my cheek, wait to start all over again.
And when I did, there’d be a glass of water. Sometimes a note.
Swinging my legs off the bed, I find it with my hand.
Just grabbing coffee. xx mom
A smile pulls at the corners of my mouth, has slow tears pricking in my eyes before I sniff them away and brush my hand across my face.
Hope still flits through my veins, but it’s hesitant, scared that once I leave the sanctuary of this room, where I’ve let myself fall into Evie’s security for the first time since she tried to hug me on her wrap-around porch, I’ll fall back apart.
The door cracks open, effusive hotel light slicing through the darkness I’m still washed in before falling shut, Evie’s footsteps quiet against the carpet.
She sets the coffees on the little table and slowly drags the outermost curtain open so the gauzy layer still filters the abrasive—I check the time—midday sun.
My arms reach high above my tangled hair, a yawn rolling out of me. “I wish you hadn’t let me sleep in so late,” I tell her, reaching for the paper cup with HC scrawled on the side. “Thanks.”
“Tried tellin’ me they don’t have heavy cream.
” She takes hers, HC and a plus sign with the number two on it, and smirks over at me, perching on the chair opposite me.
There’s a lightness in her gaze that I’ve rarely seen; there was always concern swirling in her eyes, like storm clouds, always this angst that I felt could leap out and smother me at a moment’s notice.
Right now, though, that almost feels like a fiction.
Evie looks at me and sees something she likes, and I consider that maybe it has nothing to do with how she’s looking at me at all. That maybe, this was always there, and that it’s me who’s just now seeing it.
“I don’t know how your brother does it up here,” she laughs, those exaggerated expression lines reminding me that she’s never shied away from feeling anything. Has always worn her heart right there on that sleeve.
I glance away from her, a knot in my throat forming anew the longer I remember the ways I denied myself her grace all these years. “What did he want earlier?”
“Just wanted to see him while I’m here,” she says behind a sip of her coffee.
“He’s off to that conference game. Your daddy’s goin’, you know.
” The smile she serves me is so sated, I envy it; it’s the kind of smile you give when love is working in everyone’s favor, and I know seeing Beau respect Grant’s choices, knowing he’s finally supporting him the way she’d always hoped, fills her with more joy than it fills me.
And it does—I can’t help that. I’ll want the best for my brother regardless of his impatience for me.
My heart warms knowing he’ll see Gen and Beau in those stands tonight, just as it seizes on itself thinking of Andy on that court, looking up and seeing no one.
Becs couldn’t get the night off and Carm’s not old enough to make that trek alone.
And I’m here. Every cell in my body yearns to find him, rejects whatever I’m supposed to feel about his deception.
Hard as I try, I can’t make that news blast hurt the way it ought to, and I think it’s because I know his heart.
Know that there isn’t a single thing he’s ever done that wasn’t done out of love.
“Can I ask you somethin’?” Andy’s absence weighs down on me as I watch her set her coffee down, see her give me her sweet attention.
That hair that’s usually so stiff and immovable is soft for once, is a supple mass of pale blonde waves that brush just past her shoulders. “Of course, darlin’. What is it?”
Against the hazy afternoon light, she looks down right angelic.
When I first met her, that’s how she looked, too.
Like she dropped right out of the sky on a mission, was just missing a trumpet.
My knee jerk reaction was to tell myself she was too good to be true.
That she was a temptation, a test of my allegiance to Connie.
My teeth tug at my bottom lip as I consider the question, the longing that won’t let up wrapping itself around me the longer I keep it bottled up. “Did it ever scare you, how much you love Beau?”
I rake my fingers tips against my thighs, pulling in a breath as my molars scrape against each other. Worry holds me by the neck, and it’s this silent fear that I’m not built for love. That the intensity of it will always threaten to swallow me whole; that it’s not like this for everyone else.
Evie’s lips twist in a wry smile as she moves to settle next to me. She hums, letting her head fall against mine. “Yes. That’s how I knew. And I told him so. I said ‘if you think you’re leavin’, think again.’ Told him it was a done deal now that he had me lovin’ him that much.”
I stutter on my laughter, the nerves in my gut breaking into butterflies as my skin pricks with anticipation, that hope brushing right behind it. “I can just hear it. And what’d he say?”
“Well there wasn’t much talkin’,” she jeers, knocking an elbow into me as I stifle my giggle.
“You’re thinkin’ about that boy, aren’t you?
” My brows pinch, wondering what she knows about Andy.
“Jean stopped by. Told me all about that movie star lookin’ boy of yours.
” She sighs, tilting her head. “Baby, I don’t know if it’s love or if it’s forever.
But what I do know, just lookin’ at you, is that you’re not done.
” She arches her brows at me, her lips tugging expectantly as tears gather at my waterline and I shake my head, sniffing.
“No,” I say, voice thick with emotion. “I’m not done. But—” I pause, my heart swelling in my chest “—but I do know. That I love him.”
I say it to Evie and, suddenly, it’s all I want him to know. All I can do to keep my bones latched at the joints, keep my feet on the ground, keep myself from picking up the phone and just spoiling it, satisfying the urge.
“Mm. I had a feeling,” she grins, standing up and offering me her hand. “Come on then. That flight’s already in the air so you’ve got a plane to catch.”
Those heavy jet wheels clunk against the runway, hurtling the Fielder Foods private plane through the early evening mist. When I check the clock it’s only five, but my anxiety swears they must be warming up, are already at the venue, and are out of my reach for the foreseeable future.
Anticipation churns in my stomach as I deplane, the pilot letting me know he won’t leave the small airport reserved for private use until I call and tell him my plans.
And what is my plan, actually? I haven’t a fucking clue.
All that I know is that my mind hasn’t settled since I left Andy in that parking lot, hair clinging to his forehead, agony marked on his beautiful face.
It’s the face I’ve seen when I’ve slept, the voice I’ve sworn I’ve heard when awake.
I hate that I didn’t stay, that I didn’t fend them off me—hate that I wasn’t stronger.
But I was lost to myself that night, too, was so far gone, had been drinking without rest to near oblivion, and I know Jean was right.
I needed to go, even if it meant leaving him alone with demons I wanted nothing more than to shield him from.
Something broke in his gaze when he pleaded with me across the splintered lot, like the perfection he’d fought so hard to mold was shattering in real time.
The shouting. The yelling. The betrayal, thick in the damp air.
And as I sobbed, I prayed for God to make it matter because that would’ve made it all easier, if he’d cut me so deep.
If he’d irreparably sliced through the careful tapestry of this little world, but it just didn’t—he didn’t.
My boots clip against the tiled lobby, the red leather stark against the white squares, fear of the unknown lacing itself through the reckless hope I’m still clinging to. He could turn me away for all I know and I’d deserve it. Would have to accept it but—
“Sloane?”
My attention flies to him, standing at the front desk with his Astor duffle slung around his shoulder, decidedly not at the venue but here, at the airport.
And I’m frozen in place, wholly unprepared for the way my longing would overwhelm me once I saw him again.
I watch as his throat bobs, as the muscle in his jaw ticks, and I struggle to make sense of it.