Page 14 of Love All
I rehearsed. Every version has a seam she’d find. That’s the tax on charming your way through everything: you build the reflex, you reach for the angle the way other people reach for a railing, automatically, before you’ve decided to, and Charlotte has spent a year training herself to feel for exactly that. The spot where my hand goes to the rail. The only pitch she won’t dismantle is the one with no rail at all. No angle. No me. Just the true thing, said straight, which I have never once tried on her, and which I have no idea I can do.
I’m not doing this just for the excuse to stand near her, whatever it looks like later. Julian thinks I am. Julian is mostly right about me, which is the worst of his many fine qualities. But the realer reason has a name, and the name is Cole. Cole Whitman, who is the best of us. Who showed up to every single one of my matches sophomore year, when the rest of my life was quietly coming apart, when a friendship I’d assumed would hold turned out not to — and said nothing about any of it, just kept appearing with two coffees and a bad joke until I found my way back to myself. You don’t forget who stayed. And the picture of that guy, who held the line for me without being asked, spending his one clean shot at the good thing too scared to knock on the door?
I can’t carry it. I’ve carried worse. Not that.
She’s zipping her bag with the brisk efficiency of a woman who has already left in every way but the literal.
“So,” I say.
“If this is the real thing you wanted to ask, lead with whether it’s going to make me late.”
“It’s about Indie.”
Her hands stop on the zipper. Not long. Half a second. But I’ve spent a year studying the small involuntary things Charlotte does before she’s decided what to feel, and that’s one of them,and it tells me two things at once: she’s listening, and I’m not about to surprise her.
“No,” she says, before my next breath.
“You don’t even know what I’m—”
“I know it ends with me doing something for you. The answer is no.”
“It ends with you doing something forIndie.” I lean back against the net post, hands open, nothing up my sleeve, working hard to look like a man with nothing up his sleeve — which is the hardest possible thing to look like when it’s true. “She’s in love with Cole. Cole’s in love with Indie. They’ve been circling each other since September like two people allergic to their own happiness, and they’ll keep circling, politely, until they graduate and marry strangers and think about each other on long drives. Unless somebody standing close enough does something.”
She doesn’t saywho’s Cole.Doesn’t saythat’s absurd.Doesn’t do one single thing a person does when the news is new. She crosses her arms, which is what Charlotte does when she’s been hit somewhere true and intends to charge you for the privilege.
“You’ve noticed,” I say, a little stunned. “You already—”
“Of course I’ve noticed. I notice everything.” Her jaw is tight. “Which is exactly why I’m telling you to leave it alone. Engineering people’s feelings is manipulation, Hawthorne. I don’t do that to people I love.”
“That’s touching I didn’t know you were capable of any emotion other than contempt,” he says, wistfully. I swat at his forearm. Not hard. Just enough to sting a little. “It’s not manipulation,” he continues, “It’s a…nudge.”
“It’s a lie.” She slings the bag onto her shoulder. “You dress it up ashelping,and underneath it’s still you deciding you know better than two grown adults what’s good for them. My parents do things like that and I really don’t want to be apart of it.”
“This isn’t your family.”
“Everyone always says that.” She isn’t quite looking at me now. “You want to know the Astor house specialty? Deciding what’s best for someone and calling it love, so they’re not allowed to argue with it. My mother could fund the cure for a disease and never once ask the patient how he felt about being saved. That’s the water I learned to swim in. I’m not doing it to Indie. Indie gets to be the one who decides what Indie wants.”
“She’s already decided what she wants. She decided in September. The only thing she hasn’t decided is that she’s allowed to have it.”
“And you appointed yourself the man who tells her?”
“No. I appointedyou.”
It’s out before I’ve thought it all the way through, but I can see it burrowing into her brain.
“That’s the whole pitch, Astor. Not me managing anybody. You. Indie trusts you more than she trusts herself. At least as it relates to Cole. I’m not the one who can fix this. You are. I’m just the idiot who happened to be standing where he could see both of them aching at the same time, and now I can’t un-see it.”
And there it is, the real objection, under the principle, the thing the principle has been wearing as a coat. She isn’t afraid of manipulating Cole and Indie. She’s afraid of being the kind of person who manages the people she loves. Because she’s been managed, expertly, by professionals, since birth — and somewhere young she decided she’d rather lose people honestly than keep them by arranging the furniture.
It’s the most decent thing I’ve ever learned about her. She handed it to me by accident, trying to win an argument.
So I put my own rail down too. It’s the only fair play left.
“Okay. Then here’s the truth, no posture on it. Sometimes you do a bad thing to help good people. Especially people you love. You don’t lie to them, you don’t trick them — you clear theone obstacle they can’t clear themselves, which in this case is that each of them is convinced the other one couldn’t possibly. We won’t manufacture or puppeteer. We’ll simply turn on a light in a room two people are already standing in.” I hold her eyes. “Are you really going to let Indie spend another semester aching over a guy who aches back, because themethodoffends you?”
She huffs, her hands folded securely in front of her. Landing one on Charlotte is alarming, because she doesn’t flinch. She goes still, courtroom still, the stillness when the foreman stands and you get about three seconds to work out whether you’ve won or signed your own warrant.
She goes quiet.
