Page 98 of The Faceoff

And there — finally — the corner of her mouth goes, the real one, small and reluctant. “That’s annoyingly correct.”

“I’m full of annoyingly correct. You’ve said.”

I feel good. That’s the thing I notice, standing in my own room with a cleared drawer and a foot and a half of closet and a girl who travels light enough to fit in both — I feel good, steady, useful in a way that’s got nothing to do with hockey or being captain or any of the performances. She needed a warm room and a drawer and someone to not make it a thing, and I’m the one who got to be that, and even if she’ll never say out loud that she needed it — and she won’t, I know her, she’d sooner freeze on a cot — I know she did, and getting to be the answer to a need she won’t admit feels better than any goal I’ve ever scored.

I don’t say any of that. She’d bolt.

“Hang out till you’ve got class,” I say instead, checking my phone, swearing under my breath at the time. “I’ve gotta go or I’m late for the first one and O’Grady already gave me the morning, I can’t push it. Get settled. Eat something. The kitchen’s yours, just don’t let Cash tell you the loud hot sauce is mild, it’s a trap.”

“I can manage a kitchen, Beau.”

“I know you can.” I cross to her, and I kiss her — soft, unhurried, my hand at her jaw, the morning still in it somewhere — and she leans into it for a second before she remembers to be careful, and I file that too. “Get settled, Beckett. I’ll be back this afternoon.”

I leave her standing in my room in front of an open empty drawer, holding the photo she still hasn’t put down, and I drive to class feeling like I’ve done one entirely right thing today.

I hold onto that feeling for about six hours.

I come home in a mood.

I know I’m in a mood and I can’t get out of it, which makes the mood worse. It rode home with me from the humanities building and it’s sitting in my chest like a swallowed stone, and I come through the door already braced to go straight upstairs and be alone with it, the way I deal with everything that costs me — go quiet, go up, ice it, don’t make it anyone’s problem.

Except the house smells incredible.

And there’s noise — the good kind, the Raven House kind — and when I come into the kitchen Sloane’s at the stove and Cash is setting the table wrong and Wyatt’s leaning in the doorway and Theo’s actually talking, and there’s a dinner happening, a real one, and Sloane turns from the stove with a wooden spoon and takes one look at my face and clocks the mood in about half a second, because she clocks everything.

She doesn’t say anything in front of the guys. That’s the thing. She just registers it, files it, and turns back to the stove.

“Sit,” Cash tells me, oblivious, delighted. “Beckett can cook. Beckett can actually cook. We told her she’s staying and she said and I quote ‘then I’m not eating whatever you three call food’ and she made — Beau, there’s a vegetable. A cooked one. With intention.”

“It’s a sheet-pan thing,” Sloane says. “It’s not hard. You people have a kitchen and you treat it like a crime scene.”

“She’s going to fix us,” Cash says, reverent. “She’s going to fix the whole house.”

I sit. I eat. It’s good — of course it’s good, she’s good at everything she decides to be good at — and the guys are loud and happy and Sloane’s folded into it the way she’s been getting folded into everything, and I should feel the good thing I felt this morning, the right thing, the her-in-my-house thing.

I can’t get to it. The stone’s in the way.

She gets me alone after.

I don’t know how she does it — some maneuver with the dishes and a look at the guys that sends them scattering — but suddenly it’s just us in the kitchen with the water running and the others gone to the living room, and she dries her hands and leans against the counter and looks at me, and doesn’t ask if I’m okay, because she knows I’m not and asking would just make me perform a no.

“What is it,” she says instead. Flat. Not a question I can deflect.

“It’s nothing.”

“It rode home with you. You’ve been carrying it since you walked in. Your jaw’s been set since the door.” She tips her head. “I’m not asking you to make it a thing. I’m asking you what it is.”

And the thing about Sloane — the thing that’s been undoing me for weeks — is that she doesn’t push the way other people push. She doesn’t want to fix it or be part of it or make my hard thing about her. She just wants to know what it is, plainly, so it’s not sitting in me alone. And I’m tired, and the stone’s heavy, and the kitchen’s warm and it’s just us, and before I’ve decided to, I’m reaching into my bag and pulling out the letter and setting it on the counter between us.

She reads it. I watch her read it. Mandatory academic support, it says. Required tutoring. Our records indicate you are at risk of failing — the humanities requirement, the one with the reading, the essays, the wall of text that’s a different sport for me than it is for everyone else.

“I’m failing a class,” I say, because she’s read it anyway, so. “The reading one. Comp lit. I’ve been —” the back of my neck’s hot, my jaw won’t relax, this is the thing I don’t say, the thing I’ve spent thirteen years not saying to anyone outside my family “— I’ve been getting by. Audio, mostly. Getting the gist. But the essays, the close-reading stuff, you can’t fake your way through and I —”

I stop.

I don’t know how to say the next part. I’ve never said the next part. Even in my own head I don’t say it; I say the page is doing the thing, I say I’m taking my time, I say anything but the word, because the word makes it real and the word makes people look at me different.

“Beau.” Her voice is careful. “Are you dyslexic?”