SLOANE
The kitchen light caught the faint sheen of sweat on his upper lip. His breathing had gone shallow—short, uneven pulls that betrayed how badly he wanted to look away and how badly he couldn’t.
“Sixteen,” I repeated, softer now, the word almost gentle. “He was eighteen. Varsity starter. Everyone said we were ‘cute.’ Everyone said we’d be that high-school power couple who’d make it through college and then some. Everyone except me, apparently.”
“He waited six months. Six. Months. Of hand-holding in hallways, of me saying ‘not yet,’ of him smiling like it was no big deal while his friends called me ‘the ice queen’ behind my back. Then one night at a bonfire—same kind of bonfire we had, actually—he got drunk. Told me I was being childish. That ‘real girlfriends’ didn’t make their boy
