Page 71 of The Faceoff

I stand in the hallway of the building I love and let my heartbeat come back down.

I have rehearsal notes to log and a costume fitting to confirm and a body that wants to go home and not be perceived for several hours, and I’m doing the thing where I stand at the callboard pretending to read it so no one can see my face reassemble, when the energy of the hallway shifts.

It shifts the way a room shifts when something it wasn’t expecting walks into it.

I turn.

Beau Sorensen is standing in the doorway of the Hartwell arts building in his black-and-silver jacket, six-foot-three of obvious athlete in a building full of people who have strong feelings about athletes, and he is being looked at. The freshmen by the prop cabinet have stopped talking. A pair of dance majors are conducting an entire silent conversation about him. He looks faintly like a man who’s wandered into the wrong country and is too polite to mention it, and the sight of it — Beau, out of his element, in my element, getting looked at the way I got looked at in his arena — does something to me I don’t authorize.

He finds me. His whole face does the thing when he finds me, the unguarded thing, the one I’m choosing not to have feelings about.

“You’re in my building,” I say, when he reaches me.

“We have a public appearance scheduled.” He says it low, just for me. “Thursday. You flagged it yourself. I’m being a diligent fake boyfriend.” A beat, and his eyes move past me, around the building — the old brick, the posters, the costume racks visible through a doorway, the whole worn-wood theater smell of the place. “This is where you live.”

“It’s where I have class.”

“It’s where you live,” he says again, and doesn’t make it a question, and I don’t have a counter for it because he’s right.

The hallway is watching us. This is the point — this is the deployment, the two of us being seen in the place I’m most known, the news of it traveling through the department by dinner. It’s working exactly as designed. I should be relieved.

“Walk me out,” I say. “People are looking.”

“People are looking because I’m enormous and wearing the wrong clothes for this building.”

“People are looking because the captain of the hockey team came to the arts building for the theater girl, which is a sentence that’s going to be in four group chats by six o’clock, which is the entire point.” I shoulder my bag. “Come on. Be seen leaving with me.”

He doesn’t leave right away.

We’re passing the open door of Studio B — empty now, lights half-down, the space still holding the scene the way a rink holds a practice — and he stops. Looks in. Steps in, actually, uninvited, into the dark quiet of it, and stands in the middle of the floor where I stood an hour ago and turns a slow circle, taking it in.

“This is where you were today,” he says.

“How do you⁠—”

“Reyes posts the schedule. It’s on the door. Studio B, two to four.” He’s still turning, looking up at the lighting grid, the seats. “I almost came earlier. Watched the end of practice run long instead.” He stops, facing me, and there’s no one here — that’s the thing that makes my pulse do something — there’s no one in the studio but us, no hallway audience, no one to perform for, which means whatever he says next isn’t for the arrangement.

“I watched the clips,” he says. “From the spring show. Much Ado. On your — I looked you up. After the party.” He says it plainly, the way he says the things that cost him, no decoration. “You’re really good. I don’t have the words you’d have for it. But I know what it looks like when someone’s the best one out there, moving a half-beat ahead of everyone, like they already know where the play’s going. That’s you. On the ice we’d say you’ve got a great head. I don’t know what you call it here.” A pause. “I just wanted to say it. In here. Where it’s true.”

The studio is very quiet.

This is rule seven. This is the exact thing — kindness, unprompted, no audience, the small true thing said when there’s no one to convince — and he knows it’s rule seven, I can see that he knows, and he said it anyway, in the empty studio, on purpose, which means he’s broken it on purpose, the first rule either of us has broken, and he’s standing there having broken it and not taking it back.

“That’s against the rules,” I say, and my voice doesn’t come out the way I aimed it.

“I know.”

“Rule seven. No being kind when no one’s watching.”

“I know what rule seven is.” He doesn’t move. “I’m choosing to be in violation of rule seven.”

“You don’t get to just⁠—”

“You’re the best one in the room, Sloane.” Quiet. Certain. The captain voice with all the captain stripped out of it. “Somebody should say it to you when there’s nothing in it for them.”

And that’s the sentence that does it. Not the compliment — the when there’s nothing in it for them. Because that’s the whole architecture of rule seven laid bare, the reason I wrote it: that I don’t know how to be cared for without a transaction attached, that kindness with no invoice makes me freeze, that I built a rule specifically to stop a person from doing the exact thing he’s just done. He’s reached straight past the rule into the wound the rule was protecting, and he doesn’t even know that’s what he’s done, and the not-knowing is somehow worse.

My eyes are hot. In Studio B, where I never lose it, where this is the one version of me that’s whole.