Page 78 of Nowhere to Hide
“He went to school with a Pi Sigma brother of mine.” Mason picks up a glass from the counter, turns it in his hand, sets it back down. “Boys like that talk, you know?”
My hands are in the water, and the water is too hot, but it’s nowhere near as painful as the words he’s speaking. “Okay,” I say.
“I heard about you a long time before I met you, but I didn’t put it together at first. Avery is a common enough name, right?” He’s speaking as if we’re talking about the weather. “But, you know, the whole—” He waves a hand, vague, like the word isn’t worth finding. “—storythat got around.”
The hot water is burning my fingers, so I finally take my hands out of the sink. Soap suds slide down my wrist. Then Imake myself laugh — low, bored, the sound of someone whose evening is being wasted.
“A story.” I dry my hand on the towel like he’s the least interesting thing in the room. “Somebody at a party said a name, and you built a whole thing on it. That’s hearsay, Mason.”
For half a second, it works. The grin slips.
Then he picks the glass back up.
“I mean, who knew you had a birthmark?” he says.
The room narrows.
“Inside of the thigh.” He’s not looking at me. “It’s a cute shape, actually.”
And there it is — proof.
My parents, my doctor, Rowan, and Harrison know about that birthmark, plus whoever saw the photos. And that means Mason has them, and the thing I crossed three states to outrun is sitting on his phone.
I grab the edge of the sink.
He holds his hands up. “Hey, I’m not threatening you. I’m just saying I heard things.”
I know this move. I know it from a boy back in Rye who had just been told what he’d done and was already reframing it as something I’d misunderstood.Sloane, slow down. I’m just saying.Same hands up. Same little laugh.
“What do you want?” It comes out steady, but my hands are shaking, and I hope like hell he doesn’t notice.
“I don’t want anything.” He picks up a dish towel from the counter and folds it in his hands. “I just thought you should know what I know. Seems fair.”
I look at him then. He’s leaning against the counter with the dish towel in his hands, his shoulders loose, his face almost kind. It’s the same Mason who’s been cool for weeks now, slowly getting the rest of us to lower our guard.
“You know what’s funny, though?” he says.
I say nothing.
“Rowan took the captaincy from me.” His voice is conversational. “And then you.”
He sets the towel down on the counter and smooths it flat with his palm. Then he picks up a glass, runs it under the tap, and sets it upside down on the drying rack like he’s helping. Then he walks out of the kitchen and says something to Rowan that has him laughing.
The faucet is still running, and when I turn it off, the silence is worse.
I press my hands flat on the counter to keep them from shaking, breathing through my nose, slow and controlled, the way I taught myself when my father sat me down in his study and told me the damage was manageable if I stopped making it worse.
Through the doorway there’s a slice of the living room. I can see the back of Rowan’s head, his hair needing a cut, as it always does by week three. Luca is showing him something on his phone, and Rowan is laughing.
He looks like the guy from his kitchen at two in the morning, the one who put his forehead against my chest and let me hold him — the guy just starting to breathe again — and the sight of it has my mind talking loud and clear.
Don’t become evidence again. Don’t become a burden.
It’s the verdict that picks the gray coat over the red, that tells me to laugh quiet and sit straight, that tells me to edit texts before I send them. It’s the impulse in everything I do that has only just started to recede, thanks to Rowan and Professor Moreno and Ivy and the guys.
I feel the urge coming back stronger with every second.
I could tell him.
