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The blond guy’s eyes drop to where Evan’s hand is on my arm, and then come back up, and something in the neutral expression shifts by approximately two degrees.
“Last time,” he says, and his voice has dropped further, which is somehow worse than if it had gotten louder. “Let go of her arm.”
Evan lets go.
Not gracefully. He releases me with the energy of someone who wants it to read as a choice rather than a concession, fingers peeling back slowly, chin coming up. He’s five-ten, maybe five-eleven on a generous day, and standing next to the blond guy he looks like a different species — not just the height, but the sheer physical presence of someone who has been training seriously since he could walk versus someone who lifts three times a week because it’s part of the package.
Evan knows this. I can see him knowing it.
“We were having a private conversation,” Evan says, with the careful dignity of a man who understands he has already lost the room and is now performing for a different audience — himself, maybe, or the football guys who have drifted closer, drawn by the gravity of something about to happen.
“You were hurting her arm,” the blond guy says.
“I wasn’t—”
“I watched you do it.”
The flatness of it lands harder than an accusation would have. No heat, no challenge. Just a statement of fact from a person who was standing close enough to see and has no particular investment in Evan’s version of events.
Evan looks at me. It’s the look he uses when he wants me to be the one who smooths things over, who says it’s fine, he didn’t mean it, who makes the room comfortable again. I have made rooms comfortable for him before. I have apologized for scenes he created. I have done this more times than I’m going to count right now, in this living room, in front of people I have to see for the next two years.
I don’t say anything.
I straighten my spine instead, which is not a conscious decision, just the thing my body does when it has finished being managed.
Evan reads it. Something in his face shifts.
“This is between us,” he says to the blond guy, with the edge of someone who has run out of reasonable and is working with what’s left. “She’s my girlfriend.”
“I’m not your girlfriend.” I keep my eyes on Evan, not the blond guy. “We broke up this afternoon.”
“You walked out—”
“After I found you in bed with someone else.” I keep my voice exactly where it is. Level. Precise. The kind of sentence that doesn’t need volume to land. “Which is the generally understood as the endpoint of a relationship.”
A beat of silence in the immediate radius.
Someone nearby makes a sound that is half-laugh, half-wince, and gets shushed by the person next to them.
Evan’s jaw goes tight. “You’re going to do this here?”
“You started it here.”
“Sloane—”
“You grabbed my arm in front of fifty people.” My voice stays exactly where it is. “You don’t get to tell me where we do this.”
He stares at me. There are two versions of Evan when he’s losing an argument — the one who retreats and regroups, and the one who doubles down. I’ve seen both. I know which one the jaw means.
He looks at the blond guy. Then back at me.
“Fine,” he says, with the clipping of a word that means the opposite of fine. “We’ll talk later.”
“We won’t.” I don’t soften it.
He holds my gaze for another second — long enough to make a point, not long enough to make another scene — and then he turns and moves back toward his teammates, who rearrange themselves around him with the practiced ease of people who have been his audience before.
I watch him go.
