“You’re thinking of Switzerland.” Tia doesn’t look away from the TV.
“Really?” Talon blinks.
“Yes.” She finally breaks away, smiling widely at us. “Congratulations, boys.”
“Huh.” Talon considers, stepping back from Jay and shoving my shoulder harder than necessary. “This calls for celebration.”
I feel Sloan nod against my shoulder before she pulls back, looking up at me so brightly, with this adorable wrinkle to her nose that doesn’t seem like it is, but maybe it’s hiding disappointment.
Talon’s version of celebrating hasn’t changed since the day I met him, so the night goes the way it always does: He invites our entire team over, fills our house with more people than the fire code allows, and plays music so loud you can’t hear yourself think.
I’m pretty good at reading Sloan—I’ve learned a lot over the last two years, and I try to notice cues before maybe even she does, and I spend a disproportionate amount of the night watching her grip a red plastic cup, waiting for her fingers to tell me something.
But she speaks before they can.
Her hand finds mine; she pulls me up the stairs into the quieter hallway, pushes back against the doorframe where I was banging my head earlier, and takes the little noise cancelling loop earplugs out that Tia bought her. “Why do you keep looking at my hands?”
“I’m sorry.” I scrub my face.
“You’re sorry?” Sloan furrows her brow, tapping her cup to the Cupid’s bow of her lip. “Bohdan, your dreams are coming true.”
“Yours aren’t.”
She pulls her head back, and I see it then—the sharp inhale and the way her eyes go wide, fingers tightening against the red plastic.
“You wanted to go home,” I clarify, words slow and measured, and I take the cup from her, emptying it before tossing it on theground with all the others that Talon won’t bother to clean up, even though the mess is his fault. “Go to grad school in Toronto or Vancouver.”
Sloan blinks with a slow breath, a tiny nod of understanding. “Anthropology programs don’t only exist in Canadian universities, you know. I can apply to UW, I can apply—”
“It’s not what you wanted.” I sound pathetic, voice all hoarse. I am pathetic, as far as she’s concerned. In all the best ways and all the worst ways and I have been since she walked down those steps from her dorm two years ago.
She considers, scrunching her nose, and her voice cracks. “I didn’t always ... I’ve never felt like enough there. My head’s always worse and it’s all too loud but it’s always quieter and ... I feel like enough with you.”
The idea that she feels quiet with me, enough with me, to want this so badly—that’ll become the only thing I ever really remember about this day when I look back years later.
The best day of my life, but not for the reason anyone else would think.
“You’d follow a boy?” I ask dryly.
Sloan gives a shrug of one shoulder with a roll of her eyes. “You’re not a boy. I don’t think you ever were. Did you come out of the womb all sharp lines and seriousness?”
“Okay.” I give her a flat look, but there’s a stupid grin fighting at the corners of my mouth. “You’d follow a man, then? That might be even worse.”
Sloan angles her head, all of her going soft and beautiful and not at all disappointed in me when she whispers, “Only ever you.”
Sloan
Knowing Bohdan again feels a bit like waking up in your own bed after a long, long trip. Sunlight you haven’t seen in months streaming through the window, sheets freshly washed, crisp and soft against your skin, head on a pillow that’s meant to hold all the worries of the brain that lives in it.
Trying to forget him was like wearing around a second skin—one that was never touched by him, and never really fit right.
I spend a lot of time not liking the skin I’m in—metaphorically, and literally.
Metaphorically, because I have this brain that worries all the time about things I’ve only ever been brave enough to speak out loud to Bohdan, that wants to tear me down so I never escape its cycle, that thrives on its obsession with hating me.
Literally, because sometimes my brain tricks me and I feel like my skin’s crawling.
Nothing sits right against it.
