Page 123 of Nowhere to Hide
He scoffs.
I tilt my chin half an inch toward Sloane. “And her complaint against your son is true. I’m behind it, all the way, and I am not going to be the reason she’s quiet about it anymore.”
Then I take my hand off her back, and I step six inches to her side.
Sloane looks at me. Her eyes are bright and wet and furious and steady, and the look lasts maybe a second before she turns it back on him — and I feel both things at once: how grateful she is and how much she doesn’t need me to handle this.
That’s when Mason appears at his father’s shoulder.
He’s drawn over by the noise, like everyone else. Now he’s here as the dutiful son, the family investment on display in a suit that matches his father’s, the boy a man was willing to ruin others to protect.
He has the smirk he always has, but his eyes give it away. They’re moving fast, reading the room, reading his father, reading her. And I see how much the boy imitates the father. I’m not the only one who notices.
Sloane looks at the two of them and scoffs. “Mason, you took something that happened to me and dug it back up because you wanted to hurt me and someone else I love.”
Mason doesn’t move, but the smirk dims.
Then she does something I don’t think any of us sees coming. She drops the anger half a register, and she looks back at Mason, the way you’d look at someone you’re a little sorry for, like she’s just figured it all out.
“You learned it from him, and he does it to you too,” she says, almost gently. “You do know that, right?”
Mason swallows, and he glances at his father, one flick, fast and involuntary, and there’s something young in it, something that hasn’t been fully trained out of him yet. Then he looks at the floor, because he knows the whole room is watching.
And Patrick’s smirk — the one he wears exactly like his son does, or his son wears exactly like him — finally falls. There’s no slur, no shout, just a father and a son standing in a ring of people with nowhere to hide.
Patrick’s eyes move from me to Sloane and back. “We’ll see how you both feel when the hormones wear off and you realize what you’ve thrown away. I’ve got some calls to make.”
Then he puts a hand on Mason’s shoulder and steers him back toward the doors, and the crowd opens to let them through. Then they’re gone, and the noise comes back, and the gala goes on.
“Thank you,” Sloane says, turning to me. “For not coming in over the top.”
“I wanted to,” I tell her, because she should know it’s true. “Every second.”
“I know.” She’s still shaking, a little. “That’s the whole point, Rowan.”
And it’s that — her saying it, the small wrecked honesty of it — that finally does it.
All the carrying just lets go, and I don’t reach to catch it.
“You’re sure, though?” she says, lower now, just for me. “I don’t want to be the thing you gave your future up for.”
“Maybe I gave something up.” I make her look at me. “Maybe some of those calls already landed and the path to the league is harder now than it was, or gone entirely. I’m not going to pretend it costs nothing. I’d just rather have this — and deal with the rest later if I need to — than chase the life that others picked for me and that others can hold over me.”
Ivy leans in. “He doesn’t want to leave because of me,” she says, wrapping her arms around both of our waists. “It’s kind of obvious.”
“No offense, Ives,” I say, laughing, “but it’s less about you and more about the girl I love.”
Sloane’s face does three things at once — lips part, chin dips, eyes go to liquid — and then it breaks open into a smile, wide and helpless and completely ridiculous. It’s the smile from the pool, the one she spent a whole year refusing to let anyone see in public.
I kiss her, both hands on her face, thumbs along her jaw. She kisses me back, her fingers curling into the lapels of my jacket. Somewhere behind us somebody — Theo, it’s always Theo — whoops, and somebody shushes him.
Then the room goes. The whoop, the band, the thirty feet of carpet I’ve been performing across all night — gone. There’s just the warm press of her mouth and the lapels of my jacket fisted in her hands like she’s done having her path dictated too.
When she pulls back, she keeps her forehead against my chin. “You’re shaking, Rowan,” she says.
“I know.”
“Is it the public declaration or the emotional vulnerability?” she says. “Or the burning need to line up every glass on that bar top?”
