I couldn’t let her watch me drown, couldn’t let her try to keep me above water while she sank, too.
I pinch my eyes closed and shake my head. “Tia has my number.”
“We don’t talk much.” Sloan shrugs.
“We talk every day.” Tia drums her fingers across her cheek.
Sloan exhales, lips tugging into a taut line. “Not helping.”
It’s silent again, but not for long because Talon can’t keep his mouth shut.
He knocks a fist against the table, grinning, like the carnage I created doesn’t sit across from him. “You ready for your big move, Sloany? Back to the old Great White North.”
The idea that she’s going to leave the place we made a life together makes me feel like tossing myself overboard. “You’re moving?”
“Yes. Back home.” Sloan whispers the last word, barely audible, and I think it’s more for her than it is for anyone else. “Finally.”
“What are you going to do with the ring?” Talon asks, nodding as he considers. “Seattle’s only cup run. Never been close since Bohdan. Might be worth something.”
“Pawn it for gas money.” Jay leans back in his chair, and I know they’re trying to deflect, to carry some of the weight for me.
But she looks at me and I can see her a bit like I did all those years ago—little gold, under those arena lights.
The way she looked after I got the stupid ring—back in the hotel with me, tangled up in sheets and the stars painting her skin under the moonlight.
I think she sees it, too, can hear it the way I can.
Our favourite three words whispered over and over again. I love you. I love you. I love you. The only count of three that mattered.
Tears pool along her lash line, one slips down her cheek, and I wish they’d drown me. It’s what I’d deserve.
So I whisper something, just for her, and I hope she knows I’m talking about more than just the ring. “Keep it.”
Even though there are twelve bars on this ship, Sloan finds me right away.
You could write it off as coincidence, and if it were Talon, Jay, or Tia pulling out the chair across from me, I’d say you might be right.
But it’s Sloan, still in that fucking yellow dress, who carefully climbs up, the breeze from the ocean lifting her hair, heels sitting neatly on the rung of the chair.
She doesn’t say anything, but she tilts her head, studying me, and there’s a tiny scrunch of her nose that looks something like confirmation, and I wonder if she’s thinking what I’m thinking.
That she found me right away because she still knows me. She knows I don’t like crowded rooms, and that being on this ship would already be suffocating—that I’d pick the one bar stretching out across the deck, and I’d pick the table furthest away, closest to the open air and the ocean.
That we’d never be able to carve the other out of our own bodies because we met when we were too young and fell too in love and even though we aren’t together, I’ll always be hers and she’ll always be mine because when my twenty-year-old hands were busy sculpting her, her eighteen-year-old hands were busy sculpting me.
“You trying to kill me?” I jerk my chin towards her and the yellow silk dress wrapping around her, clavicle and collarbone dusted with something that shimmers, on display under the setting sun.
“Maybe,” she says simply. “It’s what you’d deserve.”
I exhale a laugh, raise a brow, and take a sip of scotch. “You look beautiful, Sloan.”
She says nothing, but her eyes find my hairline, her features soften, and she closes her eyes for a bit too long before she speaks. “Should you be drinking?”
My fingers tense on the glass. “I’m okay. My head feels okay. I’ve got my meds, everything I need back in the room. Besides, someone made sure I kept out of the sun today.”
She doesn’t bite.
I drop the glass to the table with a shake of my head. “Sloan ... if you’re not going to speak to me ... if you’re uncomfortable around me ... I can’t be here, this close to you, without being able to ...”
