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are you okay?
SLOANE where are you, answer the group chat you menace we’re worried.
She doesn’t answer the group chat. I notice that too, later, when it matters — that she opens Margo’s name specifically, just Margo, and types something short, and I see it over her shoulder without meaning to:
I’m fine. Stayed at Beau’s. Talk later.
That’s it. Nothing else. Not the group, not the details, not I’m okay with the reassurance the others are clearly asking for — just Margo, just the facts, just the door closing gently on the conversation.
I think, a beat late, that it’s a strange way to answer people who are worried about you. That you’d pick the one person and give her the minimum and leave the rest on read. But I’m twenty-one and stupid and happy and I file it under Sloane’s private, she’s always private, because that’s true, and because the other thing I could file it under is one I don’t want to look at this morning.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“Roommates,” she says. “I didn’t come home. They noticed.” A small dry twist. “I’m a grown woman who got a flurry of welfare checks for sleeping somewhere. It’s very dignified.”
“They care about you.”
“They do.” She says it like it’s complicated. Like being cared about is a thing she has to brace for, the way she braced for the thank-you at the party. I don’t push, because the not-pushing is the thing I’m good at, the thing that keeps the door open.
Theo’s already rinsing his plate. Cash is hunting for his other shoe. Practice in forty minutes and the morning’s tipping from soft into logistics the way mornings do.
“I’ll drive you home,” I tell her. “Before practice. It’s on the way, sort of, and you’re not walking across campus in my hoodie and last night’s boots in the cold.”
“I can walk.”
“I know you can. I’m offering anyway.” I hold her eyes. “Let me do the easy thing, Sloane. It’s just a ride.”
She looks at me a second — that calculation again, the one that runs every time someone offers her something with no invoice attached — and then she nods. “Okay. A ride.”
“A ride.”
“Don’t read into the ride.”
“I would never read into a ride.”
“You read into everything. You’ve been reading into a hoodie for ten minutes.”
“That’s different. The hoodie’s special.”
“HA,” Cash shouts, from somewhere near the door, with his shoe.
We leave him to it. I grab my keys off the hook and my bag from the bottom of the stairs and hold the front door for her, and the cold comes in hard off the porch, the real first-week-of-the-season cold, and she pulls the hoodie sleeves down over her hands and steps out into it in her bare legs and last night's boots like she's daring it to say something. The truck's parked crooked in the drive where I left it last night, frost gone white across the windshield. I get the doors unlocked and the engine turned over and the heat going before I let her in, because she's not sitting in a cold truck on my watch, and then I come around and she's already there, one hand on the door, looking up at the height of the step the way short people do at my truck.
“It's a climb,” I say.
“I'm aware it's a climb. I have eyes.”
“You want a—”
“If you offer me a boost I'm walking to campus.” But she takes the hand I hold out anyway, and uses it, and hauls herself up into the cab with her boots in her lap, and I shut the door on her and the cold both and jog around to my side.
I drive her home in the cold morning with the heat blasting and her in my hoodie with her boots in her lap, and it's quiet in the truck, but it's a good quiet, mostly — her watching the town go by, me watching the road and stealing looks at her watching the town go by. Haven's grey and waking up, the maples bare now, frost on the windshields of the parked cars, the diner lights on and steam coming off something on the corner.
“Thanks,” she says, at a red light. “For the ride. And the hoodie. And—” she stops, and I let her not finish it, the way she lets me. “For not making it weird this morning.”
“It wasn’t weird.”
“It could have been. The guys could have made it weird.”
