Page 72 of The Faceoff

I am not going to cry in front of Beau Sorensen.

What saves me — or doesn’t, I haven’t decided — is the voice in the doorway.

“Oh, this is cute.”

Vivienne. Coat on, bag on her shoulder, leaning in the doorway of the studio with the expression of a person who’s just found the last piece of a puzzle she’s been working. She looks at Beau in the middle of the floor, at me with my too-bright eyes, at the whole tableau of it, and her smile sharpens into the real one, the one under the gracious one.

“I wondered,” she says, “when I’d get to meet the famous boyfriend.”

And I feel Beau read the room in about a second — read her, read me, read the brightness in my eyes she just observed and the thing she’s clearly come back to do — and something in him shifts from the open studio-quiet thing into something smoother and more deliberate, the public version coming online.

“Beau,” he says, easy, holding out a hand she doesn’t take.

“Vivienne. I’m a friend of Sloane’s.” She says friend like it’s a punchline only she knows.

It is, in fact, a punchline only she knows — friend, from the woman I last saw naked in my ex-boyfriend’s bed — and the sheer nerve of the word makes something flare hot under my sternum, the same flare I didn’t feel in Evan’s doorway eight days ago and have apparently been saving up for exactly this. But I keep my face the way I keep my face. I’ve had practice.

Her eyes come to me. “I just didn’t totally believe it, if I’m honest. You and a hockey player. It seemed so — unlike you. So out of character. I kept thinking there had to be more to the story.” The smile. “But here you are. In the dark. Very convincing.”

She knows. Or she suspects, hard enough that suspicion and knowledge are the same weapon. And she’s going to keep pulling this thread — in the department, in front of Reyes, in front of the Yale observer if she has to — until the story comes apart, because the story coming apart is worth a center slot to her, and Vivienne has never once in her life left a loose thread unpulled.

I open my mouth to do the thing I do, the calm dismantling, the cool sentence that gives her nothing—and Beau kisses me.

He does it like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

One hand comes to the side of my face — unhurried, deliberate, his palm warm against my jaw and his fingers sliding back into my hair like he’s done it a hundred times, like he has the right — and he closes the distance he’s spent a week never quite closing, and he kisses me.

For one full second my brain is a flat sheet of static. Every system offline. Because this is the single most against-the-rules thing that has happened since we signed the rules, and somewhere under the static a small administrative part of me is still trying to file a complaint—and then the static burns off, and what floods in behind it is so much worse than panic, because it isn’t panic at all.

His mouth is warm and sure against mine and he kisses me like he means it. Not a performance of a kiss — not the closed-mouth press you’d give for an audience, the kind designed to be seen rather than felt. He kisses me like the audience isn’t the point. Like I’m the point. His thumb strokes once along my cheekbone and his hand tightens just slightly in my hair, tilting my head, and the way he angles me exactly where he wants me without asking undoes something at the base of my spine.

I make a sound. Low, into his mouth. I don’t authorize it. It just happens, the way the blush happens, the way all my worst tells happen lately.

And I kiss him back. My hand is suddenly fisted in the front of his jacket, dragging him down, closer, the way I rise into it instead of holding my ground. His mouth softens and then doesn’t, catches my lower lip, and heat goes through me in a long unbroken line from my mouth to somewhere I am absolutely not going to name in a studio I have to be professional in on Monday. The hand not in my hair has found the small of my back and flattened there, warm through my sweater, and it isn’t holding me up so much as holding me to him, and I let it, I lean into the whole length of him, and for the length of that kiss there is no contract and no Vivienne and no Yale slot and no eight rules — there is just the warm specific overwhelming fact of Beau Sorensen, the taste of him, the scrape of stubble I’ll feel for an hour after, the quiet wreckage of every wall I’ve ever built going down at once.

And the one part of my brain still online, drowning, files the single most dangerous observation of my life:

Oh no.

Oh no. I like this. I like this far too much.

He pulls back first.

Slow. Reluctant — I feel the reluctance, feel him not want to, which is its own catastrophe — his mouth leaving mine by degrees, his thumb grazing my jaw one last time as the hand in my hair eases free. For a half-second he doesn’t go anywhere. Our foreheads nearly touch. His breath isn’t quite even and neither is mine, and his eyes drop to my mouth and come back up, and that half-second has nothing to do with Vivienne, nothing to do with the plan, nothing to do with anything either of us wrote down.

Then he straightens. Surfaces. Turns, easy as a man stepping out of warm water, the hand at my back sliding away — and looks at Vivienne with a small, private, unbothered smile.

“Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry. “What were you saying about the story?”

Vivienne’s face has done something it’s never done in two years of me watching it. It’s blank. The script she came in with is gone. She looks at the two of us — me flushed and gripping his jacket and visibly, catastrophically affected, him calm and certain with his hand still warm at the small of my back — and whatever she suspected, whatever thread she came to pull, she can’t find the end of it anymore.

“Nothing,” she says. “Have a good night.”

She goes.

The studio is quiet again.

His hand is still at my back. I’m still holding his jacket. We’re standing exactly where we were, except everything is different, and I become aware of both of those facts at the same time and let go of his jacket like it’s hot.