“Hey.” I reach for her again, sliding my hand across her stomach, but she catches my wrist. “Look at me.”
“I’m tired, Row, that’s all,” she says with a tight smile. “I just wanted to do that for you, okay?”
She kisses me on the cheek, then shifts out from under me and rolls onto her side, facing away. As she pulls the duvetup over her shoulder, I lie there in the dark, struggling to understand what happened.
It has never been like that before. The other times she’s gone down on me, there’s been a conversation in it — her teasing me, grinning, the easy and filthy back-and-forth of two people who have figured each other out.
But tonight was different, and I roll onto my back and think it before I can stop myself.
Mason at dinner, smiling at her when he handed her the bread. Mason in the kitchen later, helping to clear plates. And then, when Sloane had come back into the living room, his eyes lingering on her a half-second too long.
If the easy warmth and the lights-on intimacy and all those smiles were the before, and tonight’s distance in the living room and the lights off in the bedroom are the after, then the in-between is Mason and that moment in the kitchen.
She’d come back from that kitchen a little too quiet, laughing at the right beats but too careful, like she’d found the Halden Girl all over again. And since then, that’s the only version of Sloane I’ve seen, no matter how much I try to find the other one.
I don’t know what happened, but I don’t think I’m inventing it. I know I could ask her. She’s right here, a foot away on the other side of the mattress, breathing slow like she’s asleep when she isn’t. I’d just have to ask seven words.
What happened with Mason in the kitchen?
I know exactly why I don’t.
They dated, and she ended it, and I let myself believe ending it meant choosing me. But if I ask about that kitchen, she’ll answer, and the answer I’m afraid of isn’the did something.It’sI felt somethingorwe did something.
There are kinder explanations, and I’ve run them all — her mother, midterms, something I did to upset her without noticing. None of them survive that kitchen. Or maybe they alldo, and I just can’t see it, because it’s late and I’m wrung out and my brain keeps reaching past every kind explanation for the one that hurts the most.
For the first time ever, I don’t want to solve the problem in front of me, so I don’t ask.
My phone buzzes and I reach for it.
It’s the team chat. Niko has flagged something on the third-line tape, and wants me to point it out in my chat with Franklin tomorrow. So I type back one word, then open the file he linked and watch ten seconds of a play.
The whole time, Sloane is watching me. She rolled over at some point, and now her cheek is on her hand. Her eyes are open and very calm and very far away. I look back down at the phone so she can’t see my face.
“Work,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
She holds my eyes, then smiles at me the way she smiled at people in the first week. It feels like this moment, more than any other, is when I lose her or get her back. So I try what has always worked between us.
“You realize,” I say, propping myself up on one elbow, “you’re in my bed and not completely naked. That’s a hostile act.”
She laughs. It’s short, polite, and doesn’t reach her eyes.
“I need to go,” she says. “I’ve got an early class tomorrow, and I don’t want to wake you up in the morning.”
“Fair.”
That’s what I say.
She blinks once, a little shocked at my response, then climbs out of bed and picks up her sweater. She pulls it over her head, and when her face comes back through the collar, she’s wearing that small, polite smile again.
She sits on the edge of the bed to pull her shoes on, and she glances at my hands where they rest on the mattress, not reaching for her. I know she’s expecting me to, but I can’t right now, so she just gets ready and picks up her phone.
It lights up in her hand, and something I haven’t seen in three days breaks through. A small startle, then a real grin, then a snort of laughter — loud and ugly and real, the laugh from the kitchen at two in the morning and from the courtyard.
