“Who’s a hell of a room?” Luca arrives, as subtle as ever. He follows my eyeline before I can correct it, finds Sloane, and makes a small, wounded sound. “Oh, no. Hale. No.”
“Ivy’s roommate,” Seb says, as if that’s reason enough not to fool around with her, and he’s not entirely wrong.
“And Cross’s project,” Luca adds, cheerful. “And the kind of girl who irons her opinions before she lets them leave the house.”
“I know,” I say.
It comes out too fast and too flat, and the grin slips off Luca’s face.
“Oh,” he says. “I was joking, but you actually like her?—”
“I don’t have room for it.” I drink the warm beer. “My father texts me a to-do list for my life, and there’s no line on it for her. And she’s with Mason, so just drop it, okay?”
Nobody says anything for a second.
Even Luca.
Then Niko, who hasn’t appeared to be listening to a word, says, “You’ve looked at her forty times.”
“Forty-one,” Seb says.
He’s right, because I’m looking right at Sloane yet again.
And, this time, her eyes find mine.
It happens the way it happened at the Lantern — a held beat, neither of us pulling away, the smallest possible exchange — but I feel it in my stomach and in my groin, and then Mason notices.
She’s already tense, holding her wine, smiling that fake smile, and not moving. But when Mason catches her looking, it gets worse. He gestures at Ivy on the coffee table and says something, which causes the Pi Sigma circle to start laughing.
Then his hand slides from the linen at her hip to her ass, squeezing.
She flinches.
It’s small enough that anyone not watching her would miss it, but I’m watching, and a second after the flinch, the smile falters just a little. Her face composes itself over the damage, and I feel my whole body go cold.
I move.
I set the beer down and cross the room in just a handful of strides. Other students part for me, and for once I’m glad I look like the kind of guy people move for. I reach her at the same moment her smile goes back into place, and my hand lands on her arm.
She’s warm.
I knew she would be warm, but I did not know it would feel like this, her pulse fast where my thumb landed by accident. Her whole body goes stiff, but then she seems to register that it is me, and something in her loosens.
“You good, Hale?” Mason’s eyes track up my arm to my face.
“Walk it off,” I say.
His smile arrives a beat late. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re drunk,” I say, voice firmer. “Take your hand off her and walk it off.”
The Pi Sigma circle stops laughing in stages. Whit first, then the rest when they realize the situation has changed shape. And through it all, Sloane has not moved, her arm still in my hand and her eyes staring at the floor.
Mason doesn’t move his hand. Instead, he looks at me like he is deciding something, and my body is making the small adjustments it makes when somebody on the ice is about to drop the gloves: weight back, hands loose. I am ready for him to swing and part of me wants him to.
Then Seb is at my elbow.
He’s just there — he’s always just there — broad and unbothered, looking at Mason the way he looks at a winger he’s about to put through the boards. He’s the enforcer on the ice, and there’s not a single guy on the team who wouldn’t listen when he speaks, or move when he says.
