“Oh.” I nod, like he’s asking me if I want something simple and mundane. “I’ve never really thought about it.”
“You should get one, Sloany,” Talon calls, and I imagine him nodding exuberantly, eyes coming alive and a deep brown curl flopping over his forehead. “Mr. Choi and Mr. Solorzano already paid.”
“Yeah, go nuts.” I glance over my shoulder at Jay, who nods along and stretches his leg out to admire the artist’s handiwork. “I paid for the time. Not for the three pieces.”
Tia purses her lips, pointing at Jay. “Another colossal waste of your fathers’ hard-earned money.”
“Do you want one?” Bohdan’s voice, low and rough and still the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard two years later, cuts across everything else.
I flick my eyes back to him with a small shake of my head and pout of my lips. “I honestly wouldn’t know what to get.”
He nods, thoughtful, before offering me a gentle smile. “That’s fine, Zlatícko. Just thought I’d ask.”
“What would you get? If you were going to get a second one?” I tip my head back and forth, examining the new piece of him, this thing about his body I’m not intimately familiar with, blurred slightly now under a clear plastic bandage.
Bohdan’s eyes rove across my face, a crease scores between his brows, and he never looks away from me when he says, “Get Sloan a pen and a piece of paper.”
“Why?” I frown, but his hand squeezes mine.
Tia does get me a black marker and piece of paper, clearly ripped out of the first notebook she could find on Jay’s desk, and she shoves them at me, brown eyes wide and sparkling with interest, flicking back and forth between Bohdan and me.
“Draw anS,” he says, words firm and quiet.
“Why?” I ask, even though I do it anyway, and I’m a bit nervous now because there are all these horrible, worst-case scenarios running through my head.
He’s leaving me. It’s something to remember me by.
He’s dying, actually. A terminal illness and you didn’t see the signs and now it’s much too late.
It’s not for you, idiot. It’s an S for Seattle.
I almost breathe a sigh of relief when that particularly rude thought strolls across the expanse of my brain, but Bohdan sits up, legs swinging over the edge of the table, and he stretches his left arm out again. He takes the piece of paper between two fingers, hands it to the artist, and without looking away from me, he taps his left forearm, right where the muscle sits, just beyond the precipice of his elbow. “I’d get you. On me forever. Where you belong.”
Everything goes so, so quiet. It’s wonderful and it reminds me so much of this one night when I was in Lake Huron with my grandparents and it snowed. These giant, fluffy flakes floating down from the sky, all cloudy and grey, and everything was sostill when I watched them fall to the earth under the glow of a streetlight.
Talon mutters somewhere behind me, “I think I could have pulled off a better line. Bit cheesy.”
“Tracks. This makes more sense for him than the numbers.” Jay would be nodding, I think.
“You can’t pull anything off, Talon. Shut up.” Tia rolls her eyes again I’m sure, folding her arms across her chest.
But I don’t see any of that when I drop down beside Bohdan on the table, and ask softly—maybe as quiet as my world is right now—but our best friends hear me anyway, because I do think they’re always listening, “Can someone get Bohdan a piece of paper, too?”
Sloan
My wish to be far, far away from Bohdan doesn’t come true.
“I hate it here,” I hiss, watching Tia file her nails in the reflection of the mirror that stretches the entire length of the bathroom, propped up on the edge of a freestanding clawfoot tub.
Brown eyes flick up, meeting mine in the mirror. She pauses, pointing the file around the bathroom. “Here?” She waves it in the air. “Or here, as in, this giant suite we’re all staying in together that my brother booked and didn’t tell anyone about on this ship that’s definitely not a riverboat?”
“No. Here. In the figurative sense. Where he is.” I widen my eyes towards the door, fingers gripping tighter on the porcelain of the sink. “Do you think we could get another room?”
She ignores me, before her features soften with an exhale. “Once upon a time, you loved being where he was.”
“That was . . . before.”
The truth is—I don’t know why he did it. I have no idea why he left.
