Page 1

Chapter 1

Margo

There’s a right way to leave a room, and I know every step of it. You move on the count. You don’t look back at the thing you’re leaving. You walk like you’ve got somewhere better to be, because nobody in the recorded history of the world has ever stopped a girl who looks like she has a plan.

I have no plan. What I have is a strapless dress I zipped myself into eleven hours ago, a pair of heels hooked over two fingers, and a man the approximate dimensions of a vending machine asleep in the bed behind me.

And I break the foundational rule — the one I’d needlepoint onto a throw pillow for an incoming freshman if I thought she’d listen — because I look back.

I know. I know. But I look, and here’s the honest part, the part I’d never say out loud: I look because I want to. Theo takes up the whole bed the way he takes up everything — no apology, all of it at once. He’s sprawled on his stomach, one heavy arm thrown across the warm dent where I was a minute ago, the sheet shoved down to the base of his spine. The tattoos run the length of both arms and disappear under the cotton like a sentence somebody started and didn’t finish. The broad back. The shoulders that are, frankly, a personal attack. That absurd unfair stretch of him, and I have firsthand knowledge now of exactly how much of it there is, and my whole body remembers in high, unhelpful definition.

His face is turned to the wall. The scowl’s off duty. He looks younger. He looks like something he’d never hand anyone on purpose. And the fact that I got to see it — that I’m apparently the exception to a rule he’s spent three months enforcing on me specifically — sits in my chest, tender and complicated and exactly as inconvenient as it sounds.

Don’t, I tell myself, and for once I listen.

I pick my way across the floor on the balls of my feet. Flyer’s feet — quiet feet, the kind that spent four years learning how to come down out of the air without making a sound. Past his desk, past the window where the streetlight’s gone gray with morning. And I do not think about the fact that twelve hours ago I stood right here and asked this exact man to take me upstairs — before I changed my mind and reorganized his pantry instead.

The latch gives under my hand with a click that goes straight through me.

Same click that went through me last night, when he shut us in. Except last night it meant finally, and this morning it means every day for the rest of the school year — because he lives here. In my best friend’s boyfriend’s house. In the middle of the found family I got folded into without anyone asking me. There’s no arrangement of the universe where I don’t have to look at him again, and my stomach does a slow, cold roll at the size of that.

My underwear is in his top drawer. I’m not going back for it. That’s a problem for a braver girl.

The third floor is freezing. The party drained out overnight and took all the body heat with it, so the house is back to being what it actually is — an old house in western Massachusetts in the first dark hour of January, holding its breath. I go down the first flight with one hand on a banister that’s tacky with something I’ve decided not to identify. The lower I get, the more last night comes up the stairs to meet me. The red-cup graveyard. A folding table tipped on its side. Somebody’s coat slumped over the newel post, one lonely shoe abandoned on the third step like a fairy tale that ended badly.

I hang the coat square on the post before I’ve decided to. Smooth the shoulders. Some reflexes don’t ask permission, and mine are wide awake even when the rest of me would trade a kidney to still be asleep. I know exactly what the tidying is — I’ve had enough therapy to have the whole footnote. And I do it anyway. Fixing the small things I can fix is the only thing that ever quiets my head.

The kitchen light is on.

I catch it half a second too late to do anything about it. By then I’m on the landing — heels in one hand, last night’s dress on my body, my hair doing something it was structurally never meant to do — and Sloane Beckett is at the counter in one of Beau’s flannels with a chipped mug in both hands, two sips into her morning, looking up at me.

She sees me. The dress. The heels. The third floor I came down from, which has exactly one bedroom on it.

I stop like I’ve walked face-first into glass. My heart’s going and my face is hot, and I hate that she can see all of it, because Sloane reads a room like it owes her money.

Her whole face starts to do the thing — the soft one, the careful one, the look she gets in the half-second before she says something true — and I can’t. Not on four hours of sleep. My chest goes tight at the mere threat of being handled, so I get there first.

“Don’t.” It’s out before I’ve okayed it. “Whatever you’re about to do — don’t.”

“I was going to offer you coffee.”

I come down the rest of the stairs at a pace I’m choosing to call dignified. It fools no one in this kitchen, me included. I set my heels on the counter, and Sloane pours me a mug without asking and slides it across the marble, and I take it the way you take surrender terms. Both hands. No sudden movements.

“It’s not a thing,” I tell the coffee.

“Okay.”

“It’s the opposite of a thing. It’s New Year’s, people do things, it’s practically tradition, and honestly it means nothing.” I hear myself doing it — the bright thing climbing up over the tired thing before the tired thing can get its mouth open — and I keep going anyway, because the second I stop she’s going to say something I’ll feel. “It’s Theo. You understand. Nothing happens with Theo. Theo’s a wall with tattoos. Last night was a clerical error.” My mouth has staged a coup and will not be reasoned with. “A one-time, isolated, fully clerical error.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re saying it with your entire face.”

“This is my regular face.”

She doesn’t push. She just lets it sit. That’s the thing about Sloane, the thing that makes her dangerous in a way the people who love-bomb me never will be. She knows the whole choreography — coming down a staircase you don’t want witnessed, leaving a room before it can curdle into meaning something. She’s danced every step herself. So instead of chasing me, she hands me the one thing I’m already reaching for without knowing it.

“There’s a back way,” she says. “Through the mudroom, out by the side gate. Nobody’s up to see.”