Page 88 of Suite 7

Which means it has terms. Which means it has, somewhere, an end. We haven’t discussed an end date. We haven’t discussed what happens when the arrangement runs its course, when one of us decides the terms no longer serve, when the thing we’ve built reaches its natural conclusion and we go back to being Sloane’s brother and Sloane’s best friend who argue about architecture and pretend the whole thing never happened.

Arrangements end.

I don’t want it to end.

That thought arrives so clearly it stops everything. I don’t want it to end, which is not something you’re supposed to feel about an arrangement, which is precisely the kind of feeling that means maybe it already isn’t one. And that’s exactly the kind of thought I’m not ready to look at directly.

So I don’t.

But even setting that aside. Even if I knew what this was. Even if I were ready to say this is real, this is the person, I need you to know — what does that conversation actually look like?

Sloane, I’m seeing Kane.

Kane your brother.

We have a negotiated arrangement. Where he’s my Dom and I’m his submissive. And we scene at Eclipse, which is a BDSM club, or in a room in his penthouse that he built himself.

That’s the true version. The only honest version.

And I can’t tell it.

Eclipse is Kane’s — his membership, his history, his identity. That’s not information I get to hand to his sister without his knowledge, without his consent, without a conversation we haven’t had yet. The moment I tell Sloane, she asks how did you meet, how long has this been going on — and every answer leads somewhere that belongs to Kane first.

We haven’t agreed on what’s shareable. Haven’t even acknowledged out loud that this conversation is coming.

I can’t tell her until he and I have talked about telling her.

That’s not cowardice. That’s sequencing.

Except the sequencing argument is getting harder to make. Looking at Sloane’s face across this table, hearing the way her voice landed when she said I need to know the people I love are honest with me.

The logic gives a small, terrible lurch. Like a step that gives slightly more than you expected, and reminds you the ground isn’t as solid as it looked.

I’m lying to myself almost as fluently as I’m lying to her.

Almost.

Sloane picks up her wine glass. She’s smiling again. Genuinely. The Sidney pain packed away, inaccessible.

“Let’s toast to Gerald. May he continue to make you smile like an idiot.”

I clink my glass against hers. The lie tastes like ash. The justification too, if I’m honest, which I’m apparently not capable of being tonight.

When we hug goodbye outside, Sloane whispers into my hair: “I’m happy for you, Vee.”

I hold on a beat longer than usual.

You won’t be happy when you find out.

I sit in my car for a long time before starting the engine.

The rain has started, a mist, the kind that blurs the streetlights without quite falling. I watch it through the windshield and think about Sidney. About the fact that every day this continues, the thing I’m protecting gets a little smaller and the thing I’m risking gets a little larger, and at some point the math stops working.

I already know which direction it’s going.

I sit with that for a moment. Let it be true without doing anything about it.

Then I start the car, and drive home.