When we finally stop, I cross the kitchen.
I put my hand flat on his chest, over his heart. His skin is warm and the knock under my palm is steady, and I don’t say anything, and neither does he. His eyes close, his hand comes up and covers mine, and he breathes out slowly.
nineteen
ROWAN
Luca’s ideaof a dinner table is three tables shoved end to end, a grimy drop cloth over the seams, and a handful of candles jammed into empty beer bottles that are now burning crooked in their own wax.
But it works.
Every chair around the table is full; there’s music playing from somebody’s phone, and the conversation is in full swing. As I sit back and soak it all in, I realize this is Ironwood House at full power, when the team closes around itself like a hug and it’s just us.
The food is half-homemade, half-salvaged: Luca’s pasta, the only thing he can cook without anyone holding it against him, plus garlic bread from June’s, a salad Niko assembled, and a tray of frozen mini apple pies that Luca swore he could handle.
Sloane is next to me, her hand on my thigh under the table, thumb tracing slow circles. We’re out, and people are getting more comfortable with the idea, because when we showed up tonight, Luca made a great show of us being seated together.
And I’m getting more comfortable with the idea, too.
It’s been four days since the kitchen, since I told Sloane the thing I’ve never known how to say cleanly — that without thesteadying and the fixing I don’t know what’s underneath — and she didn’t leave.
I keep waiting for the cost of having said it out loud.
But, so far, it’s only made things easier.
Practice has gone smoother, my interactions with the guys have been calmer, and I’ve even managed to hold the line on my old man badgering me to meet this scout or that scout in any available moment of the day.
Last night, Coach even said, “Good week, Hale,” and then told me why Gavin left — not because he couldn’t do the job, but because he woke up one morning knowing he’d spent his whole life inside a plan somebody picked for him when he was twelve, and he was done.
I nodded like I understood, but I don’t.
How could anyone not want this? The guys? The dream of the NHL?
But most of all, I’ve stopped sweating about Mason.
At the far end of the table, he’s telling a story about a Pi Sigma formal I’ve heard before, but this time there are new details: a stolen portrait, a campus security golf cart commandeered at two a.m., and a girl named Brenda.
He’s been good tonight — warm, easy, present — in a way that makes it hard to remember why I was braced for him in the first place. The toga party’s old news now. Even Sloane keeps it civil with him for the team’s sake, and the guys have folded him back in.
I shift my focus down to the middle of the long table, where Ivy is in her element, needling Seb about something like usual while others get pulled into her orbit whether they like it or not.
Seb grins into his beer, which is as rare as spotting a shooting star. While I’m not following the bit, I am watching the two of them, and suddenly the text I saw on Seb’s phone makes more sense.
They need watching, those two, whether or not Seb realizes what Ivy is up to.
A few minutes later, Ivy catches Sloane’s eye and makes a face, bottom lip out, brows scrunched, so specific it has to be a reference to something between them I’ll never be part of. Sloane cracks up, fast and unguarded, and it’s a sound I love every time I hear it.
Under the table, Sloane’s grip tightens. When I glance at her, she’s still looking at Ivy, still smiling, but her weight shifts toward me. It’s been like this all night: her as part of my world, not hiding herself, just comfortable in her own skin.
Sloane tips her head toward the wreckage of Luca’s pasta. “Be honest. Score from 1–10?”
I laugh. “Different scale entirely.”
“That bad?”
“That good.” I think about how to put it. “At my parents’ table, the food’s flawless and the whole thing is a performance. Here, half of it is burned and nobody cares.”
“I had three pieces of that garlic bread.” She grins. “Turns out not giving a fuck what people think is way tastier.”
