Page 34 of The Faceoff

“You're welcome.”

We start walking.

The quad gives way to the path that runs down toward the campus gates and Main Street beyond, and we walk it in silence for a while — not a comfortable silence, exactly, but not an unbearable one. He's matched his pace to mine, which I notice, because guys his size usually don’t. They usually expect you to keep up with them, and he hasn't. He just shortened his stride without making a thing of it.

The chai is good. I'm annoyed about how good it is.

We pass the library, the old stone one with the gargoyles that the freshmen always photograph, and I'm aware of people noticing us — the ripple of attention that follows Beau everywhere, now slightly recalibrated by the fact that I'm walking next to him, which is generating a kind of low-grade confusion in everyone we pass.

Who is that? Is that? No. Who is that?

I sip my chai and pretend I can't feel it.

“So I—” he starts.

“Are you going to—” I start, at the same time.

We both stop.

He huffs a quiet laugh — low, surprised, like he wasn't expecting to find it funny. And something happens that I have no explanation for and am going to be furious about for the rest of my natural life.

Heat moves up my neck and into my face.

I’m blushing.

I want to be extremely clear about the magnitude of this betrayal. I did not blush this afternoon when Vivienne Park performed brilliance at me for ninety minutes. I did not blush yesterday when I walked into Evan's bedroom and found him, to put it in the most generous available terms, mid-act, bare-assed and committed, with my theatrical nemesis looking at me over his shoulder. I stood in that doorway and felt my face do precisely nothing. I have a face that does nothing on command. I have built an entire personality around a face that does nothing on command.

And now Beau Sorensen has laughed once on a campus path and my face has decided, independently and without my authorization, to turn pink.

I take a very long sip of chai to buy time and possibly to die.

“You go first,” I say, when I'm confident my voice will come out level.

And here's the thing — now he's the nervous one.

I watch it happen. He clears his throat. He shifts the bag higher on his shoulder, a small adjustment that doesn't need making. He sips his own coffee, which I'm fairly sure is a stalling tactic because I've used the exact same one within the last thirty seconds, and then he says, in the tone of a person who has rehearsed this and is now discovering that rehearsal doesn't help:

“I have a proposal.”

I give him the side-eye.

“I'm not sleeping with you,” I say.

He barks out a laugh — a real one this time, loud enough that the two girls walking ahead of us turn around. “Okay,” he says, recovering. “Noted. For the record, that's not the proposal.”

“It's usually the proposal.”

“If I wanted to sleep with you, Sloane, you'd know.”

“Wow.”

“I'm just saying⁠—”

“You're awfully sure of yourself, Sorensen.”

“I'm not hurting for hookups,” he says, with a shrug that's almost apologetic, like he's aware of how it sounds and has decided honesty is worth the cost.

I let a beat go by.