Page 35

“Right,” I say. “Speaking of which. The girl in the white dress, last night, the one who made a scene in your hallway and stormed out trailing enough perfume to fumigate a small building. How's that going for you?”

He winces. It's a good wince — genuine, the wince of a person who knows he's been caught out. “That's — yeah. Fair.”

“She seemed very chill about the breakup.”

“I could've handled it better,” he admits, and to his credit he doesn't dress it up. “But in my defense, I was clear from the start. I told her it was just fun. Casual. Hockey's my life right now, I don't have room for anything serious, and I said that to her before anything happened, and she said she was good with it.” He exhales. “She was not, it turns out, good with it.”

“They usually aren't,” I say. “When you tell someone you have no room for them and they hear it as a challenge.”

He looks at me sideways. “You sound like you're speaking from experience.”

“I'm speaking from observation.” I sip my chai. “I observe a lot.”

We reach the campus gates and pass through them onto the top of Main Street, where the town starts — the bakery, the antique store that's perpetually dying, the bookshop two blocks down with its windows catching the late light. The street's busy with the first-week energy of students rediscovering the town, and I slow down because I am increasingly certain this conversation is building toward something I'm not going to like, and I'd rather find out before I'm standing in front of Margaret.

I stop walking. He stops too.

“Is there a point to all this,” I say, with a sigh. Not unkind. Just tired. “Because I have a shift in—” I check my phone “—fifteen minutes, and you've now bought me a coffee, complimented your own sexual magnetism, and admitted you handled a breakup badly. I'm not sure what the throughline is.”

“There's a point.”

“Get to it.”

He's quiet for a second. Then: “Are you still having trouble with Evan?”

I don't answer right away.

The thing is, I don't want to answer. Evan is mine to manage. I have been managing him for eight months, and it's exhausting in a way I've gotten very good at hiding, and the last thing I want is for the captain of the hockey team to have a window into how much real estate one mediocre football player occupies in my week.

But he's looking at me with the steady, patient attention of someone who already knows the answer and is just waiting to see if I'll be honest, and I'm tired, and the chai is good.

“He texted me last night,” I say. “And again this morning. Asking if we could talk.”

Something moves in Beau's jaw. It's subtle — there and gone — but I catch it, because I catch things, and it's the same thing his face did last night when he saw Evan's hand on my arm. He's not happy about it. I don't know what to do with the fact that he's not happy about it, so I don't do anything with it.

“After last night,” he says.

“After last night.”

“After you broke up with him.”

“He doesn't consider it broken up. He considers it a misunderstanding that I'm being dramatic about.” I roll the cup between my hands. “Which is its own kind of impressive, given that the misunderstanding was him being inside another person.”

Beau is quiet for a moment, and we start walking again, slower now, down Main Street toward the shop.

“I think we can help each other,” he says.

I almost laugh. “You think I can help you.”

“Yeah.”

“With what? Do you need someone to proofread your econ papers? Block a scene? I'm not sure what skills I have that would be of use to the campus golden boy.”

“I'm being serious.”

“So am I. I genuinely can't construct a scenario where I'm useful to you.” I gesture with the cup, encompassing him, the jacket, the general phenomenon of him. “You have — everything. You're the captain. People reorganize themselves when you walk into a room. I work in a bookshop and audition for things. What could I possibly⁠—”

“I think we should be seen together.”