Page 112 of The Faceoff

I excuse myself before dessert. I’m fine, I tell Annika, just need a moment, the drive, you know? She squeezes my hand. I find the powder room — there’s a powder room, of course there is — and I stand at the sink and grip the edge of it and breathe, the way I breathed on the hallway floor after Evan, and I do not cry, because I don’t, because I never, and I get my face back, and I go back to the table and I am luminous for the rest of the night.

Nobody can tell.

That’s the whole tragedy of me. Nobody can ever tell.

He comes to find me that night, in the guest room, after the house has gone quiet.

I’m at the window — there’s a window seat, the kind in books — looking out at the dark shapes of Annika’s gardens, and he slips in and closes the door and crosses the room and stands behind me and puts his arms around me, his chin on my hair, and for a second neither of us says anything.

“You were perfect today,” he says. “They love you. My mom pulled me aside and — she loves you, Sloane. The twins have already started planning your next visit. My dad said—” he stops, and I feel him smile against my hair “—my dad said he likes you, which from him is basically a parade.”

You were perfect today. He means it as the highest thing he can give me. He doesn’t know that perfect is the word for a performance, that perfect is what I am when I’m furthest from okay, that the more flawless I was at his family’s table the more underwater I was the whole time. He read the performance as the truth. He always does. He reads me as well as anyone ever has and he still, sometimes, reads the performance as the truth, because he wants it to be true so badly.

I turn around in his arms.

I should tell him. The sentence is right there, the way it’s been right there for two weeks. Beau, I’m drowning. This house, your family, the kindness, the gap — I don’t fit here and I never will and being loved at that table today was the loneliest I’ve felt in years. It’s true and it’s built and it’s ready and all I have to do is open my mouth.

I kiss him instead.

It’s not the angry kind or the desperate kind. It’s the other kind, the one that’s worse for me, the slow kind, the kind that’s the truth I won’t say out loud rerouted through my body because my body’s the only place I let it out.

“We have to be quiet,” he murmurs against my mouth, and there’s a smile in it. “These walls are not — this is my childhood house, Sloane, my parents are down the hall, the twins are right⁠—”

“Then be quiet,” I say, and pull his shirt over his head.

We undress each other slow in the dark of his childhood guest room, and I push him back onto the bed and follow him down, and it’s careful and quiet and unbearably tender, both of us muffling everything, his hand coming up to cover my mouth gently when I gasp and mine pressed to his when he groans. He rolls us so he’s above me and slides into me slow, watching my face in the dark, and I wrap my legs around him and pull him deep and we move together in near silence, just breath, just the slide of skin, just the headboard held still by his hand so it won’t knock the wall.

“Look at me,” he breathes, the way he always does, and I do, and that’s the part that breaks something loose in me — the eye contact in the dark, him moving in me slow and careful and looking at me like I’m the only true thing in this enormous certain house, and I have to bite down hard on the inside of my cheek to keep from making the sound that wants out, because the sound isn’t pleasure, or it isn’t only pleasure. It’s grief. It’s the grief of having a thing you know you’re going to lose, of being held this carefully by someone you’ve already, somewhere underneath, started saying goodbye to.

He works a hand between us and finds my clit and I come like that, silent, shuddering, my face pressed into his neck and my nails in his back, and he follows me a few strokes later, his whole body going taut, a groan he muffles against my hair, my name a breath I feel more than hear.

We lie tangled in the dark after, both of us sweat-cooled and quiet, his heart slamming against my ribs.

“I’m so glad you came,” he whispers. “I wanted you to see it. Where I’m from. I wanted you in it.” He presses a kiss to my temple. “Feels like you fit.”

He’s quiet for a moment then, his thumb moving slow over my hip, and then he says it into the dark, plain and unhurried, like it’s the most obvious fact in the world and not the first time he’s ever said it to anyone.

“I love you, Sloane.”

He doesn’t say it like a question. He doesn’t say it to get it back. He says it the way you’d name the color of the sky — like it was always going to be true and he’s only just now found the words, and now that he has them he’s not going to perform them or dress them up or take them back. He just sets them down between us in his childhood bed and lets them be real.

“You don’t have to say anything,” he murmurs, and presses a kiss to my hair. “I just wasn’t going to lie in this bed next to you and not say the truest thing I know.”

And there it is. The thing I’ve wanted my entire life and built my entire life around never needing — said plainly, in the dark, by a boy who means it, in a house I don’t belong in, four days before the floor opens.

I love you too. It’s right there. It’s the truest thing I know, too.

And here is the thing I have known about myself since I was nine years old: I don’t say it back. Not because it isn’t true. Because it’s the truest thing I’ve got, and you don’t hand someone the truest thing you’ve got — it’s the first thing they take with them when they go.

So I don’t.

I have the not-saying right there, ready, the way I keep everything ready — and then I hear my own voice, in the dark, with no stage and no blocking and no version of me out in front of it where I can watch it land, say it anyway.

“I love you too.”

It comes out plain. No frame, none of the careful staging I put around every true thing before I let it out of my mouth. Just the words, the way other people say them — the way I have never once said them to a single person in twenty years of being alive.

Beau goes still against me.