He’s alone now, leaning a shoulder against the kitchen doorway, drink loose in his hand. He sees me see him, and his mouth tilts, barely. The pull is immediate and unwelcome, and I look away fast. Then my gaze shifts right onto Mason’s face, and I can tell he saw.
Because the smile is still there, but his eyes have gone ice cold.
“Friend of yours?” Mason says.
I take a sip of the wine. “Who?”
“Hale.”
“He’s on your team, Mason.”
“Yeah.” He lifts his drink. “Tell me about your school — Hotchkiss — again.”
“What about it?”
“Senior year.” His thumb is doing circles. “I keep trying to figure out who you ran with.”
“Nobody you’ve heard of.”
“Try me.”
I give him five names — three girls, two boys, all from families that would operate in the same circles as his. He nods through them all. Then, easy, like an aside, he responds.
“Small world, that crowd. I probably know half the people you went to school with.”
I keep my glass steady, because I have practiced this. “Probably,” I say.
“I’m good with names.” He smiles. “Yours has come up once or twice.”
“Mm,” I say, giving him nothing.
He takes a sip, easy and satisfied, and the conversation moves on without us. Then he steers me into the next pocket of it with a firm hand at my lower back, and I let myself be guided.
The party gets thicker. Someone breaks something in the kitchen and a cheer goes up. Someone asks whether Gavinshowed and nobody answers. And through it all, Luca conducts and the music gets louder.
At some point, Ivy catches my eye from across the room and mouthsyou good, and I flash her a thumbs-up with a grin that must be convincing, because she goes right back to her conversation.
Mason’s drinking stops hiding. The easy charm sharpens into something louder and less calibrated, and the more he drinks, the bigger he gets. Bigger gestures, longer stories, and an edge under the polish that wasn’t there an hour ago.
Then he acquires a second wreath from somewhere and stacks them both on his head, and it gets a big laugh, and the laugh feeds him. His arm goes from my waist to my shoulder to the back of my neck, pulling me in close to underscore a point.
By this point, my smile starts arriving late every time it’s called upon.
I catch Rowan in my peripheral vision. He’s talking to Seb and Niko near the kitchen, leaning against the wall. Then Theo says something that makes Rowan smile, and I can’t look away.
Mason notices where my eyes went, and — this time — he retaliates.
It starts with Ivy. She’s back on the coffee table, both hands in the air, and this time nobody pulls her down. The slit in her toga is doing overtime, and she’s laughing and spinning and looking like the most alive person in the room.
Whit tips his head toward her and whistles low. “Your boy’s sister knows how to throw down.”
Mason grins. The setup is in the way his eyes slide from Ivy to me, then — just a flicker — to Rowan at the kitchen doorway. Then he runs his gaze down my body, slow, public, making sure the circle is looking at me before he speaks.
“That’sa toga,” he says, gesturing at Ivy with his cup. “Sister Sloane, on the other hand, do I need to consult the convent before touching you?”
The laughter starts before he finishes. His hand slides from my hip down to my ass, and then he squeezes. Whit howls, a shorter Pi Sigma boy barks out a laugh, and the rest of the circle obliges.
What I want in this moment is to take my wine and pour it over his head in front of the room and say something smart and threatening. But I don’t, because I know what happens if I do.
