Page 84 of The Faceoff

And neither of them moves. He doesn’t step back and she doesn’t step away, and they hold it a beat too long, a beat that has nothing to do with the cutting board, and then Theo turns back to the stove with a muscle going in his jaw and Margo smiles to herself like she’s won something, and I think, oh. Oh, that’s going to be a problem for somebody.

Not me. Not tonight. But somebody.

“Stop reading the room,” Margo says, dropping back down next to me without missing a beat, and I realize she clocked me clocking them.

“I don’t read rooms.”

“You read rooms like other people breathe. What did you see?”

“Nothing,” I say. “A man adding lemon.”

“Mm.” She steals a sip of my tea, unbothered, but there’s color high on her cheeks that wasn’t there a minute ago, and she doesn’t say anything else about it, which from Margo — who says everything about everything — is the loudest thing she could possibly do.

Here’s the thing about the Raven House that I didn’t expect, that I keep not being ready for: it’s easy.

I am not built for easy. Easy is suspicious. Easy is the thing that happens right before the floor opens. I grew up in a house where the temperature could change between the front door and the kitchen, where you learned to read a room the second you entered it because the reading was the difference between a fine night and a bad one, and I have never once in my life walked into a space and just — let my shoulders down. Chen has been trying to get me to drop my shoulders in Stage Movement for two years. The Raven House does it without asking.

It’s the noise, I think. The specific texture of it. Four people who’ve clearly been loud at each other for years and have nothing underneath the loudness but loyalty, and it fills the room in a way that doesn’t require anything from me, and I can sit in the middle of it being warm and filing complaints and nobody needs me to perform okay because nobody’s checking whether I am.

I notice I’ve stopped cataloging the exits.

That’s the thing that gets me, sitting on the floor with the tea going cool in my hands. I always know where the exits are. It’s automatic, it’s the first thing I do in any room, I did it walking in tonight — and somewhere in the last hour I stopped tracking them.

I should leave. That’s the correct read. When a room starts feeling like this is exactly when a person like me should find the door I’ve stopped tracking and use it.

I don’t leave.

I’m getting bad at leaving.

Beau loses the game, finally and completely, and Cash does a victory lap that involves the laminated eyebrow photo, and in the reshuffle Beau ends up on the floor next to me with his back against the same couch, close but not touching, the careful tier-one inch of air between us that we maintain like it’s load-bearing.

“You actually know all the Sondheim,” he says, low, just for me.

“I actually know all the Sondheim.”

“In order.”

“In order is the easy part. You want to impress me, ask me to do it backwards.” I sip the cold tea. “Don’t, though. I’ll do it, and then you’ll know things about me that can’t be unknown.”

“Too late.” He says it lightly, but there’s something under it, the thing he does where the real sentence walks in wearing the casual one’s coat. “I already know things about you that can’t be unknown.”

“You know I can name musicals.”

“I know you check the exits when you walk into a room.” He’s looking at the middle distance, not at me, which is how I know he means it. “You did it tonight. At the door. Two seconds, and then you filed it. I don’t think you know you do it.”

The tea stops halfway to my mouth.

Because that — that’s not in the choreography. That’s not a thing you notice about a person you’re running an arrangement with. That’s a thing you notice about a person you’re watching, really watching, the way I watch people, and the idea that I’ve been watched back this whole time without clocking it does something cold and bright down my spine.

“Everyone checks the exits,” I say.

“No,” he says. “They don’t.”

And he lets it go — that’s the maddening thing about him, he sets the true thing down between us and then doesn’t pick at it, doesn’t make me account for it, just lets it sit there being true — and I’m left holding a fact I didn’t authorize him to have, which is that Beau Sorensen has been paying the kind of attention to me that I have spent my entire life making sure no one pays.

“Okay, I have a question,” Wyatt says, from the armchair he’s annexed from June, who has relocated to the floor with her book and her infinite patience. “And it’s a real one, not a Cash one.”

“My questions are real,” Cash says.