Page 16 of Love All
“So,” he says.
“So.”
“She didn’t murder you. I had money on murdered. Reyes had grievous bodily harm. We’re both out the entry fee.”
“We talked.”
“Youtalked.” He falls into step beside me and takes the heavier strap off my shoulder without asking, which is the other thing Julian does. “About the traffic, presumably. The economy. Definitely not about a covert two-person operation to marry off Cole, which you have somehow — against the posted odds of every bookmaker on this roster — talked Charlotte Astor into joining.”
“She didn’t say yes.”
“Did she say no?”
I don’t answer, which is its own answer, and Julian makes a low sound like a man watching a building he personally condemned decline to fall down.
“Don’t start,” I say.
“I haven’t said anything. I’m saving it.” He walks a few steps. “I’m only noting that you’ve got the face. The corkboard one, the planning one — except there’s a second thing under it now that I haven’t seen on you in a couple of years, and I’m not going to name it, because the last time I named one of your feelings out loud you didn’t speak to me for a week.” He claps the back of my neck, warm and ruinous and correct. “Get Cole his girl. And try, purely as an experiment, to notice what you’re actually doing while you do it.”
“I’m doing a good deed.”
“You’re doing a good deed,” he agrees, handing my strap back at the foot of the dorm steps. “For three reasons. Same as ever.”
And he goes up whistling, leaving me to argue with an empty stairwell about exactly how many reasons a man is allowed to have before one of them gets a name.
Tomorrow. After practice. A plan that isn’t charming.
I have eighteen hours and exactly none of one, and I can’t remember the last time I looked forward to a deadline this much.Two engines,I told Julian. I gave him both honestly and meant them, Cole, and the bet. I’m only starting to suspect there’s a third I haven’t reported to anyone, least of all myself, idling somewhere under the other two and burning cleaner than either.
But the court is empty and the night is coming on, and some things you leave at the top of their arc, and let the morning decide which way they fall.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Charlotte
I TELL BENEDICT Prescott-Hawthorne I’ll think about it, which we both understand to be a yes, and then I go home and lie awake until three in the morning being a hypocrite about it.
Here’s the problem, laid out the way I lay everything out, in clean columns, so I can look at it and hate it properly.
Column one: two weeks ago, in our own lounge, Indie took my wrist and saiddon’tandleave itandit’s a nothing,and I squeezed her hand and let her believe I would. That is the closest thing Indira Roy has ever given me to a direct instruction. I do not break my word to Indie. It’s the one clause in my entire life with no exceptions printed underneath.
Column two: I am now, as of approximately four o’clock this afternoon, in a confirmed conspiracy to do the precise thing she asked me not to do.
And column three, the one I keep trying not to read, is a single sentence in my mother’s handwriting, metaphorically speaking. The family motto I flung at Benedict on the court like it proved I was different:deciding what’s best for someone and calling it love, so they’re not allowed to argue.I said it like an accusation. I said it like a thing I would never. And within the hour, I’d agreed to manage the romantic life of the person I love most on earth. Behind her back. Against her stated wishes.Because I have privately decided I know better than she does what will make her happy.
That is not a different thing from what my mother does. That is the identical thing, in a younger coat. I lie in the dark and look at it from every angle, and I cannot make it be anything else.
The only defense I can mount, and I mount it all night, is that Indie’sdon’twasn’t a real no. It was the reflexive flinch of a girl who decided in advance that the good thing isn’t available to her, and is protecting herself from the humiliation of reaching. I know that flinch. I watched it cross her face in the lounge, aimed at a boy laughing on court two, and I recognized it instantly, because I have one of my own. Shaped differently. Pointed at different things. Same animal underneath.
Don’t,when Indie says it about Cole, does not meanI don’t want this.It meansI’m too afraid to want it out loud.
Which is, of course, exactly the rationalization my mother would use. They always have a reason. The reason is always that they can see what you can’t. The reason is always love.
I get up at five-forty, because lying there has stopped being rest and started being penance, and I hit serves into the empty deuce court until the sky goes gray and I’ve made myself a deal I can live with. I’ll do this. But I’ll do it inside Indie’s own grain, never against it. I will not invent a single feeling. I will not forge a word. I’ll clear obstacles and engineer proximity and otherwise keep my hands where she could see them, and the second, thesecond,it costs her more than it gives her, I burn the whole operation down, tell her everything, and take whatever she hands me for it.
It’s a coward’s compromise, the kind you make at dawn to get yourself out of bed.
It gets me out of bed.
