Page 20
The new urgency to find my friends is not subtle.
I turn away from the door and scan the living room.
Margo is on the makeshift dance floor with June, which is — I’ll admit, reluctantly — a good visual. Margo dances the way she does everything, with complete physical commitment and zero self-consciousness, her blonde hair loose, laughing at something June said. June is doing the thing where she’s half-dancing and half-conducting a conversation, which is June’s version of letting herself have fun, and it is genuinely very sweet, and I will appreciate it later when I’m not trying to use them as a human shield.
Wren is near the far wall with a small cluster of guys I recognize from the hockey team, and her body language is the kind of upright that means she’s not having a pleasant exchange. Arms crossed. Weight shifted back. The expression she wears when she’s deciding how many words it’s going to take to make her point. One of the guys is gesturing in the loose, imprecise way of someone who’s had three drinks and thinks volume is a substitute for reasoning.
I make a note to circle back to that.
Margo and June first — they’re closer, and they’re not in an argument.
I’m three steps into the living room when a hand closes around my bicep.
I don’t have to look.
The grip is familiar in the way of something your body remembers before your brain catches up — the pressure of it, the angle, the way it always landed like a question that assumed the answer would be yes.
I stop.
“Sloane.”
I turn around.
Evan is looking at me with the expression he uses when he wants to seem reasonable, which involves a kind of careful openness around the eyes that I used to read as sincerity and now read correctly. He’s not drunk. That’s the first thing I notice. Drunk Evan is loud and sloppy and easy to navigate. Sober Evan has a plan.
“Let go of my arm,” I say.
“I just want to talk.”
“Let go of my arm, and then I’ll tell you what I have to say.”
He lets go. Barely. His fingers loosen but his hand stays close, hovering at the edge of my space in the way he has of maintaining proximity without technically making contact, which is a distinction I’ve thought about more than I’d like to admit.
“I’ve been trying to reach you.” The hovering hand drifts an inch closer.
“I know.”
“You haven’t responded.”
“Also something I’m aware of.”
His jaw tightens. Not drunk, and not calm either — there’s something running underneath the reasonable expression that I recognize as the thing that comes before the reasonable expression stops working. I’ve seen it before. I know the sequence.
“What you saw today—” he starts.
“Evan.” I keep my voice even. “I don’t have anything left to say to you. We’re not together anymore.”
“You didn’t give me a chance to explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain.”
“Sloane—”
“There is genuinely,” I say, with the precision I use when I mean every word of a sentence, “nothing you can say to me that I need to hear.”
He steps closer.
The music is loud enough that the people immediately around us probably can’t hear us, but they can see us, and I’m aware of that, and Evan is aware that I’m aware of it, which is the part that makes my shoulders go tight. He’s always known that I don’t make scenes. He’s always known that I’ll manage my own composure before I’ll let a situation become public, and he has used that knowledge before, and I can see him using it now.
