“Can you be serious?”
I breathe in the cool night air, embracing the way it burns. “Hand me that.” I reach toward the joint, taking a brief hit. “Fine,” I confirm, blowing the smoke out in a long stream.
“Okay,” she says, sighing. “Tell me something real.”
“Too vague.” Parameters. I need parameters so I know how to avoid tripping a wire.
I hear her shift on the roof. “Fine. Why were you talking to Ian at the warehouse?”
Well shit.
“Watching me, Fielder?” I ask, hiding my dread.
“Serious, Andrew.”
“He was just trying to get a quote.” I can sense Sloane deciding if she believes me, so I move on. “My turn.”
She hums, and I can see the moment she decides to move on. “Fine. Go ahead.”
I look into the night, my nerves newly rattled by the line it feels we’ve crossed, the curtain we’ve started to lift.
I should ask. Just ask, without committing to telling anyone what I know.
“Why’d you really leave California?” Gravity presses into my chest, shoves any sense of calm away as I watch her mull over the question.
“Sloane!” Jean’s voice comes from below, and I can imagine him roaming the dark tree line, thinking to look anywhere but up.
Neither of us move, like we know leaving the roof will shatter the moment—our first real one, I think. Sloane’s teeth rake her bottom lip as a smile teases at the corners of her mouth, and the moonlight cuts across her cheekbones, highlighting the freckles that fall across the bridge of her nose—the ones I suddenly want to count. Trace.
A breath whooshes out of her and her smile falters, turns serious. “I left my art program and am hiding out here while I take care of my birth mom who’s sick and probably dying.”
“Jesus, Sloane.” I sit up and face her, shaking my head, feeling like shit for dragging that out of her. “Are you…okay?” Real concern courses through me because I get the sense she hasn’t shared this. That for whatever reason, she’s leaving this with me.
“Oh my god, yeah,” she forces a laugh. “Just high. Sorry I told you that.”
“No, don’t be. You can…” I wet my lips, rolling them together as I dread the words begging to leave my mouth. “You can tell me anything.”
“Are we secretly friends, Andrew?” she smirks, tilting her head at me.
I swallow hard. “Don’t tell Carmen. She’ll never let me hear the end of it.”
“See, now I have to tell her. She was my friend first,” she whispers playfully, leaning into me with all the subtlety of a rock. She rolls her lips, drops her gaze before flicking it back up, and suddenly, we’re closer than we should be.
“Sloane,” I mutter, hating myself.
“Andrew,” she mocks, the corner of her mouth tugging into a smile I want nothing more than to kiss off her. She looks at me, her confidence down-sliding into uncertainty, and I immediately reach for her.
“I just,” I start, throat bobbing. “I just think we should be friends.” The words might as well be acetone in my mouth, that’s how badly I want to wash them away, say something entirely new. Instead, I level my gaze at her, bringing all the surety I can find to the fore.
Her brows lift in surprise, amusement playing at her lips. “I agree,” she says, a dimple popping, a shoulder shrugging, a strand of her golden hair gently blown by the wind.
“Okay, so…” I chuckle, furrowing my brows. “What’s happening here, Sloane?”
“I just…felt like kissin’ you. But if that’s confusing?—”
“I mean, your brother?—”
“Right.” She looks down, pressing her lips into a tight line. “Forget it, Spellman. I’m like…very high.”
