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I don’t know why I say it. I don’t say things. But the room is dark and his shoulder is wrapped in ice and he’s not looking at me, he’s looking at the muted TV, giving me the side of his face so I don’t have to do this to his eyes, and the words come out before I can file them.

“He does that. When I’ve slipped out of reach. He gets — quieter and meaner.” I pull my knees up. “Tonight’s was about you. About how a guy like you doesn’t keep a girl like me past Christmas.”

Beau goes very still beside me.

“He’s wrong,” he says. Simple. Soft. Certain in the way he is about things on the ice, the way that doesn’t leave room. “I want to be clear that he’s wrong, and I want to be clear it’s not the fake-boyfriend talking, because there’s no one here. There’s no one to perform that for. So when I say he’s wrong, I’m just saying a true thing in an empty room.”

The wall is going. I can feel it going.

“That’s against the rules,” I say, and my voice doesn’t come out right.

“I know what the rules are.” He turns his head and looks at me now, finally, the ice forgotten in his hand. “I broke rule seven a week ago and I’ve been breaking it every Tuesday and Thursday with a chai latte since. I’m not great at rule seven, Sloane. I never have been. I keep being kind to you when no one’s watching because there’s no version of me that can manage not to.”

I should leave. That’s the read. When the wall starts going down this is exactly when a person like me finds the door.

I don’t leave.

I look at Beau Sorensen on his couch with his wrecked hair and his iced shoulder and the true thing he just said sitting in the air between us, and I think about Evan’s a girl like you, and I think about every three-in-the-morning where I told myself the same thing in my own voice, and I think about how I have spent my entire life being the one who decides — who decides not to need, not to want, not to reach, who decides where the exits are and keeps her hand near the door — and I am so tired of deciding to want nothing.

For once, I want to decide to want something.

On purpose. Clear-eyed. Not because Evan made me feel small and Beau is here and warm and convenient. Because I have looked at it from every angle, the way I look at everything, and I want this, and for one night I would like to be a person who reaches for the thing she wants instead of cataloging the reasons she shouldn’t.

“Beau.”

“Yeah?”

I move across the careful feet of air between us until there’s none of it left, until I’m close enough that the ice bag slides off his shoulder onto the floor and neither of us looks at it, and I put my hand against the side of his face the way he put his against mine in the studio, and I watch him understand what I’m doing a beat before I do it.

“This isn’t the plan,” I say. “There’s no one here. Nothing about this is strategic. I want to be very clear about what this is, because I’m only going to be brave enough to be this clear once.” I hold his eyes. “I want you. Not for cover. Not for Evan. Just — you. Tonight. And I need you to tell me if that’s not⁠—”

He kisses me.

He kisses me like he’s been waiting weeks to be allowed, which he has, which I have, and it’s nothing like the studio because the studio was for an audience and this is for no one. This is just us, and his hand comes up into my hair and the other one finds my waist and pulls me into him and the kiss goes deep and unhurried and certain, and I make a sound into his mouth that I don’t authorize and don’t care about, because the part of me that authorizes things has finally, blessedly, gone quiet.

“Yeah,” he says against my mouth, ragged, when we break for air. “That’s — yeah. God, yeah.”

We don’t make it through anything gracefully and I don’t want graceful.

He gets us up off the couch and I get my hands under the soft black shirt and he goes still when I touch the warm bare skin of his stomach, a sharp inhale, and I file it — the way his breath catches, the way this enormous controlled person comes undone at a single touch — and then I stop filing things entirely, because his mouth is on my throat and his hands are sliding the coat off my shoulders and I’m walking him backward toward the stairs.

“Shoulder,” I manage, because some idiot administrative corner of my brain is still online.

“Don’t care about the shoulder.”

“You’ll care tomorrow⁠—”

“Sloane.” He pulls back just far enough to look at me, and his eyes are dark and wrecked and there’s a smile in them, the surprised one, the real one. “I have wanted you since a dark studio and I am not going to let a bad shoulder be the reason this doesn’t happen. Stop managing. Just once. Let me have you not managing.”

And something in my chest cracks all the way open, because that’s the thing, isn’t it — let me have you not managing — he’s seen the whole architecture of me, the performance that doesn’t stop in my own head, and he’s asking for the one version of me nobody gets, and I want to give it to him so badly it frightens me.

So I stop managing.

I let him walk me up the stairs. I let him press me against the wall of his room and take his time with the buttons of my sweater like he’s unwrapping something he’s not sure he’s allowed to have, and I let him look at me when the sweater comes off, let him take in the sight of me with an expression so undisguised it makes heat bloom up my neck. He runs a thumb along my collarbone, down, traces the edge of my bra, and his hand is shaking slightly, this huge steady athlete’s hand, and I have never in my life felt as wanted as I feel watching him be undone by the simple fact of me half-undressed against his wall.

“You’re staring,” I say, and it comes out unsteady.

“I’m allowed to stare. You said tonight. You didn’t put a no-staring clause in.” His mouth quirks. “I checked. There’s no list for this.”