Page 101 of The Faceoff

“You liked that.”

“Don’t be smug.”

“You told me not to be careful and then made a sound I’m going to think about during practice for a week.” I feel him grin against my shoulder. “I’m allowed to be a little smug.”

I should have a comeback. I always have a comeback. I’ve got nothing — just the warm heavy weight of him at my back and the unfamiliar quiet in my own head and the dangerous, dangerous feeling of being a person who got exactly what she wanted from someone she’s started to trust.

I let him hold me. I’m getting so bad at not letting him hold me.

This is the part I didn’t plan for: the ordinary.

The sex I could have predicted. Two people, proximity, chemistry that’s been building since a parking lot in September — that math works itself out, and it did, spectacularly, repeatedly, in his bed and his shower and once memorably against the kitchen counter at two in the morning when the guys were asleep. The sex isn’t the dangerous part.

The dangerous part is the evenings.

We’ve got a system now. I come back from a shift at the shop and he’s at the kitchen table with his comp lit, and we work. It’s good work — I was right about the method, he talks the argument out and I shape it, and watching Beau Sorensen discover he’s not stupid, that he was never stupid, that his brain just takes the side door, is one of the better things I’ve gotten to witness. He records himself making the case for what Woolf’s doing with time in Mrs. Dalloway, loose and verbal and genuinely sharp, and then we build the essay from the recording, and the first time he gets a paper back with a B and a note that says insightful close reading he stares at it for a full minute and then doesn’t say anything, just goes very quiet, Captainy, and I pretend not to see him put it in the drawer where I now know he keeps the things that matter.

“You did that,” I tell him. “I just held the flashlight.”

“You held the flashlight,” he agrees, rough, and doesn’t look at me, and that’s how I know.

I don’t make it a thing. I’ve learned that about him too — the not-making-it-a-thing is the kindness.

He walks me home from the shop. Every shift. It started the first week and it didn’t stop, and I’ve given up arguing about it.

There’s no public-appearance value to Beau Sorensen walking me the six blocks from Margaret’s to the Raven House in the dark and the cold every single time I close, no audience, no plan, no rule it serves — which is exactly why it terrifies me, because it’s the purest possible proof that he just wants to, that he’d rather be cold and walking next to me than warm and not. He shows up at five to close, every time, leans on the counter while I cash out and listens to me complain about the BookTok shelf and Margaret’s QR codes, and then he takes the heavy tote off my shoulder before I can argue and we walk.

“You don’t have to do this,” I tell him, the fourth or fifth time, the cold making clouds of us.

“I know.”

“It’s six blocks. I’ve walked it alone for two years.”

“I know that too.” He shifts the tote. “I’m not walking you home because you can’t do it alone, Sloane. I know you can do everything alone. That’s sort of the whole problem with you.” He says it easy, no edge, the truest thing anyone’s said about me said like a weather report. “I’m walking you home because I’d rather be cold with you than warm without you. That’s it. That’s the entire strategy.”

And I don’t have anything to say to that, because it’s the thing, isn’t it, the exact thing I’m most afraid of and most starved for, said plainly on a freezing sidewalk like it costs him nothing, when I know it costs him something to be that honest because it costs me everything just to hear it.

I take his arm. I don’t decide to. My hand just finds the crook of his elbow and stays there, and he doesn’t comment, and we walk the rest of the way like that, and it’s the most normal thing in the world and the most extraordinary thing that’s ever happened to me, both at once.

There’s a thing I notice, in the ordinary, that I file and don’t open.

It’s the shoulder. The left one. I live with him now, which means I see the parts he doesn’t perform — the way he winces pulling a shirt over his head when he thinks I’m not looking, the way he ices it at the kitchen table some nights, wrapped, casual, like it’s nothing. The bottle of ibuprofen in the bathroom that empties faster than a bottle of ibuprofen should. The night I woke at three and he wasn’t in bed, and I found him in the dark of the kitchen with the ice on it and his jaw set, and he said couldn’t sleep and I said okay and neither of us said the real thing, the way neither of us ever says the real thing about the parts that hurt.

I know what hiding an injury looks like. I know what it looks like to be in pain and decide it’s not anyone else’s problem, to wrap the thing and ice the thing and play through the thing and never once let it show on your face. I know it because I do the emotional version every day of my life.

I should ask. I don’t ask. Because asking would mean he’d have to lie to me or tell me the truth, and I’m not sure I want to make him choose, and because — this is the part I don’t look at directly — some quiet part of me understands that a man hiding a thing that could end his whole future is a man who isn’t telling me everything, and I am the last person on earth with the standing to mind that.

So I file it. The way he files things about me. The way we’ve built a whole love out of the things we notice and don’t say.

I tell myself it’s probably nothing.

I’m wrong, but I don’t know that yet.

He has an away game, and I learn what the Raven House sounds like empty.

The team buses out Thursday for a two-game road swing — somewhere in Vermont, a conference rival, the kind of trip that means a hotel and a late return — and the house empties out around me, Cash and Wyatt and Theo and Beau all gear bags and noise and then suddenly gone, and it’s just me, alone, in Beau’s room, in Beau’s bed, in a house that isn’t mine surrounded by the evidence of a life I’ve somehow been folded into.

It’s the first time I’ve been properly alone since the fire.