Page 13 of Love All
Benedict turns and looks at me like I’ve handed him something he’s been trying to win all afternoon. “Was that ateamsentence? Astor. Did you just take my—”
“Serve the ball.”
Coach Leon has drifted up from behind the baseline, coaches migrate toward whatever’s working, the way cats find the one guest with an allergy. He stands there now with his arms crossedand an expression I like even less than his clipboard face. The pleased one.
“Huh,” he says, enlightened.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
“I didn’t say anything. I saidhuh.” He pushes off the fence. “You two have played together — what, never? In your lives?” He looks between us, and whatever he sees makes the corner of his mouth do something unforgivable. “Because you don’t look like never. You look like a couple of years, minimum. The boosters are going to lose their minds. Keep it.”
And he wanders off toward the next court to ruin someone else’s afternoon, leaving the wordcouplehanging in the air where I have to keep breathing it.
It’s a disorienting thing, being good at something next to a person you’ve formally decided to hate. It scrambles the wiring. Your body keeps casting votes against your conclusions. Every clean exchange we just played is a piece of evidence I’ll have to suppress; every easy cross is a data point I don’t want entered into the record. And now Coach has said the quiet part with his whole chest,couple,like we’re one unit, like the two of us were built to stand on the same side of a line. The trouble with a thing said out loud is that you can’t pretend you didn’t hear it. I heard it. My traitor of a nervous system took it somewhere warm, and when I go looking for it, refuses to hand it back.
We take water. I drink mine standing as far from the bench as the bench allows, which puts me, too late, directly beside the coffee. Still faintly warm. Still exactly right. I drink it. He has the grace not to comment, which is somehow worse than commenting, and I resent him freshly for the restraint.
“How’s the great fundraiser going?” I ask, to relocate the conversation somewhere I can win. “Let me guess. You sent one email and a wink and the money’s just arriving.”
“I made four hundred and twelve dollars and eighty cents standing outside the dining hall with a sign,” he says.
I turn to look at him. I don’t mean to.
“Eighty cents,” he repeats, enjoying my face. “Some kid gave me a handful of change. I counted it.” He says it lightly, the way he says everything, but there’s something underneath it I’m not prepared for — something that does not match the man I’ve spent a year assembling, the one labeledcoasts, charms, never tries.“No name. No check. Just a sign and a few hundred people who didn’t care who my grandfather was. I’m probably going to lose this bet to you, Astor. By a mile. But I’ve made every dollar of it with my own two hands so far, and I can’t tell you how strange and good that is. And I have nobody to tell who’d understand it, which is the genuinely tragic part — because the one person on this campus who’d understand exactly is the one I’m not allowed to admit it to.”
He takes a drink. I stand there with my heart doing something arrhythmic and disqualifying.
Because I do understand. Completely. I stood in my own kitchen last night feeling the same impossible, idiotic pride over a children’s fund agreeing torefusemy name, and I had nobody to tell either, and now he’s standing here describing the inside of my own chest back to me using a sign and eighty cents in change. And the worst part, the part that makes me genuinely angry, is that for one unguarded second I think:me too. I’d understand. I do.
I have spent a year building a very specific man out of the pieces he shows the world. The grin. The trust. The forehand that arrived gift-wrapped. The boy who never wanted anything badly enough to look foolish reaching for it. The problem with the boy in front of me, sweat-damp, unguarded, quietly stunned by eighty cents — is that he doesn’t fit inside it. And I built my whole life on reading people correctly the first time. Thealternative is so inconvenient that I do the only responsible thing.
I refuse to consider it.
“You’re going to lose by more than a mile,” I say, because retreat is a tactic and I am a tactician. “But it’s good for you. Effort. Builds character, I’m told, in people who don’t have any.”
“There she is.” He smiles at me, and it isn’t the grin — not the public one, the one he wears like a tie. It’s quieter, and it reaches his eyes, and it is, frankly, a problem. “I missed her. You went human for a second. It was alarming.”
“It won’t happen again.”
“It will, though.” He pushes off the bench. “We’ve got two weeks. You can’t be terrifying for all of it. Even you have to sleep.” He picks up his racquet, heads for the baseline, and turns, walking backward, gone suddenly serious underneath the ease. “Hey. When we’re done. There’s something I actually want to ask you. Not a bit. A real thing.”
“If it’s about my coffee order, you already have it.”
“It’s not about coffee.” He holds my eyes a second too long, holding that door in my head I keep failing to shut. “Finish the drill. I’ll tell you after.”
I should push. I push everything; it’s the engine of me.What thing, what do you want, name it now so I can decline it on schedule.But I don’t, and the reason I don’t is the reason I’ll spend two weeks pretending not to notice: some part of me wants to know what he’ll ask badly enough to wait for it.A real thing,he said. Not a bit. I have spent my entire life being asked for things, the name, the money, the introduction, the version of me that’s useful to somebody’s purposes. I cannot work out what Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne, who has everything I have and a forehand besides, could possibly want from me that he’d bother to callreal.
He jogs back to the line. And I’m left standing there with a warm cup I swore I wouldn’t touch, a heartbeat I can’t account for, and the dawning, unwelcome certainty that these two weeks are going to cost me a great deal more than the gate.
CHAPTER SIX
Benedict
REYES AND THE freshman clear out the second Coach turns them loose, the way sophomores always do, like staying one minute past the whistle might get them volunteered for something. Coach goes with them. And then it’s the two of us and the long gold end of the afternoon and a basket of balls neither of us is pretending to pick up, and I have about ninety seconds to attempt the single hardest thing I’ve ever tried on a tennis court.
Telling Charlotte Astor the truth. On purpose. And surviving it.
The light is doing what it does on the good courts at the end of a day, long, gold, forgiving. The whole place still has the last two hours hanging in it like smoke. The rhythm we fell into without permission. The point where she left her own back undefended on my word. Coach sayingcouplelike a scouting report. None of it cleared out with the sophomores. And honestly, that makes the ask harder, not easier. It’s one thing to pitch a scheme to your enemy. It’s another to pitch it to a person you’ve just spent an afternoon being unreasonably good beside, while your whole nervous system keeps sending up the same cheerful bulletin,that went well, didn’t it? shall we do it again?, and you have to talk over it.
