Page 59

And just like that she’s in. I don’t know exactly how it happened — somewhere between the whiskey order and the eyebrow, it stopped being four guys and a stranger and became the booth, the usual booth, the usual noise, with three extra people in it who are keeping up fine. Better than fine. Wyatt likes Sloane, I can tell, in the easy way Wyatt likes people he’s decided are okay. Cash is delighted by her because she gives it back, and Cash respects nothing so much as a person who gives it back.

Theo hasn’t said a word.

Theo doesn’t say words to people he’s still deciding about. I know this. It took him a month to say a full sentence to Wyatt freshman year and Wyatt is the most likeable human alive.

Marco brings the drinks. Sloane's whiskey, the good one, because Marco doesn't get orders wrong. Margo's got something pink with a sugared rim that she ordered without looking at a menu, like she's ordered it in this booth a hundred times before. Wren's water, plus the beer she didn't order, because Marco's learned by now that she'll drink half of whoever's closest. June's tea, the same one every time, and Marco sets it down in front of her without asking, which gets him the same small real smile she gave me at the door. My beer. Cash's thing that is, in fact, loud and slightly on fire-adjacent, which Sloane looks at, then looks at Cash, and says nothing, and the nothing is the funniest thing she could have done, and Cash knows it, and drinks it anyway out of spite.

The booth talks over itself. The win gets relitigated. Wyatt talks through his own third-period shift like he's coaching it. Cash tells the traffic cone story again, differently, in a version where he's more heroic and the cone is more sentient. Margo heckles him on a detail from a version she heard in September, which means this story has a history, which means Cash has been telling it wrong on purpose for months. Wren doesn't say much, but she's watching the table the way she watches a rink, clocking who's fast, who's stalling, who's about to say something that costs them. June laughs at the parts that are actually funny and lets the rest go by, and every so often her eyes go somewhere past the booth, somewhere I don't follow, and then come back.

I keep half an ear on all of it and the other half on the fact that Sloane's leg is still against mine under the table and that she hasn't moved away from it, which I'm aware of in a low constant way, like a sound you can't stop hearing once you've heard it.

I put my arm along the back of the booth behind her.

It’s a thing you do. It’s a public thing, a we’re-together thing, the exact kind of move the whole arrangement requires, and I do it smoothly, like it’s nothing, and then I leave it there about four seconds longer than the move requires, and I’m aware of leaving it there, and I notice — late, the way I notice everything — that I don’t actually want to take it back.

She doesn’t lean into it. She doesn’t move away from it either.

We’re both pretending the arm is a strategy.

“So,” Cash says, leaning across the table at Sloane with the air of a man opening an investigation. “How’d this happen? You two. Because I’ve known this guy three years and I’ve never once seen him —” he gestures at the general situation, the booth, the arm, her “— do a single thing he didn’t have to do, and now he’s reserving seats and buying whiskey, and I want the story.”

This is the part we did not rehearse.

This is the part we did not rehearse at all, because we sealed the whole thing in a parking lot forty minutes ago and have discussed exactly zero of the logistics, and I feel the half-second of it open up — the place where two people who actually had a story would just tell it, smooth, overlapping, the way couples finish each other’s —

“The bookshop,” Sloane says.

And I say, at the same time, “My grandmother,” and we both stop, and Cash’s eyebrows go up, and I think here it goes, and then Sloane picks it up without missing a beat.

“His grandmother owns the shop I manage.” She turns the whiskey glass a quarter turn on the table, unhurried. “I’ve worked there two years. He came in to see her. We’d never actually met — he’s never around, he’s always off being —” she flicks a glance at me “— Captainy. And then we both ended up at the same party last week, and he turned out to be less insufferable than his reputation, which is a low bar, but he cleared it.”

“That’s it?” Cash looks between us. “That’s the whole story? That’s so boring.”

“It’s not boring,” Wyatt says. “It’s nice.”

“It’s boring as shit, Wyatt, there’s no — was there a moment? There has to be a moment. When did you know?” He’s looking at me now. “When’d you know, Cap?”

And the thing is, I open my mouth to deliver the rehearsed nothing, the deflection, the come on, Cash — and what comes out instead, before the lag in my own awareness can catch it, is the truth.

“When she told me no one would buy it.”

The table goes quiet for a second. Sloane’s gone still beside me.

“She told me, straight out, that nobody would believe it.” I’m looking at the beer now, not at her, because I can feel her not looking at me either. “Said I had a type and she wasn’t it. Said people would think I lost a bet.” I turn the glass. “And I thought — that’s the first person in a long time who’s looked at me and told me the truth about what they see instead of what they think I want to hear.”

It’s quiet.

It is, I realize a beat too late, much more than the question asked for.

“Okay,” Cash says, subdued, blinking. “Okay, that’s — yeah. That’s a moment. That’s actually a moment, that’s not boring, I take it back.”

Wyatt’s looking at me with something careful. Theo’s looking at me with something flatter and harder to read. And Sloane, beside me, leg still against mine, says nothing at all, which from Sloane I’m learning is its own kind of loud.

It recovers. Cash can't sit in a serious moment longer than ten seconds, so he pivots to Wren, demands she tell her own embarrassing story, and she holds out a second too long, like she's deciding whether the story's worth the currency, then gives up the one about checking a ref by accident during a scrimmage and getting benched for it, and the booth roars and we're back to noise, thank God.

Under the table, Sloane’s foot taps mine. Once. On purpose.

I look at her.