Page 18 of Love All
“It is a code name. Do you have a plan, or did you bring vibes?”
He produces, from his jacket pocket, a single index card. On it, in handwriting far better than a man like him has any right to, are three words:
Make her brave.
I look at it longer than I mean to.
“That’s not a plan,” I say. “That’s a fortune cookie.”
“It’s the whole plan. Everything in your four pages is in service of that — you just buried it under a Gantt chart.” He taps the card. “Cole doesn’t need a strategy. Cole needs to find out, before he loses his nerve, that the worst thing won’t happen. That if he reaches, she reaches back. Same for Indie. They’re both standing in the dark with their hands behind their backs, waiting for proof. So we don’t manufacture anything. We don’t lie. We just keep arranging it so the proof is unavoidable. Make her brave. Make him brave. Get out of the way.”
And the genuinely infuriating thing, the thing I’ll be choking on for the rest of the season, is that his fortune cookie is better than my four pages.
It’s kinder, for one. My plan is a machine for producing an outcome. His is a plan for giving two people back to themselves. Mine would work. His would workandlet them keep their dignity, which is the part I skipped, because skipping the dignity is the family specialty, and apparently I’ve absorbed more of the house style than I like to admit.
“Fine,” I say, which costs me, and I pull the four pages back and uncap a pen. “Then we keep the structure and change the engine. Phase one is proximity — handled, the exhibition does it for us. They’ll be in the same room six times in two weeks with nobody watching them, because everyone will be watching us. Phase two is the proof. We don’t tell Cole that Indie likes him. We let himoverhearit, from someone he can’t suspect of stage-managing. Which is anyone but you or me.”
“Back up,” he says. “Phase two. Who overhears it for us? It can’t be you, it can’t be me, and it can’t be—” he watches me already nodding “—the girls. Right. Margo, Tess. Anything we hand them goes straight to Indie, or worse, they improvise, and Margo improvising is how people end up married or arrested.”
“Anyone in the fortress is out,” I confirm. “Margo can’t keep a secret to save her life and Tess can keep the secret perfectlybut will feel awful for the duplicity. Which is the problem — the proof has to come from a mouth Cole trusts and could never suspect of arranging anything. That’s a short list.”
“The fortress?” He asked.
I shrug. “Ask Margo, she named the group chat.”
“Julian,” he says after a moment of consideration.
I consider it. Julian Vega has precisely the two qualities the job requires: Cole would believe him without question, and he’s constitutionally incapable of getting caught, because he never once looks like he wants anything. “Can he keep his mouth shut?”
“Julian has kept every secret I’ve ever handed him. Including a couple I’m not proud of and one I’m actively ashamed of.” Something moves behind his face and is gone before I can read it. “The only hazard is that he’ll insist on lecturing me about my motives before he agrees.”
“Your motives aren’t relevant to the operation.”
“That’s exactly what I keep telling him.” He flips a page of my plan toward me. “What’s the jealousy angle?”
“I didn’t say anything about jealousy.”
“It’s in your chart. Phase two-B.” And there it is, in my own handwriting, because I am nothing if not thorough — a contingency, lightly sketched, for accelerating a reluctant party via the credible introduction of a rival. “You wrote a jealousy protocol, Astor. With sub-bullets.”
“It is acontingency.If proximity and proof don’t move them fast enough, a measured dose of competition sharpens a person’s sense of what they’d regret losing. It would not be a lie. It would be a—” I hear the next word coming and cannot stop it “—demonstration. We show Indie what attention looks like, so she recognizes it when Cole finally finds his nerve. Educational.”
“Educational.” He’s grinning. “And who, in this educational program, plays the attention?”
“We’ll cross that bridge in phase two-B.”
“Phase three—”
“You’re enjoying this,” he says quietly.
“I am not enjoying this.”
“You’ve got the milkshake. You’ve got a pen. You named it after a Shakespeare girl, you’re three phases deep, and your whole face is doing the thing it does on match point.” He isn’t teasing, exactly. He’s looking at me the way Coach looked at the two of us on court — like he’s caught sight of something he isn’t supposed to see yet. “It’s okay to be good at something with me, Astor. It’s allowed. I won’t tell anyone. I’ll take it to my grave with everything else.”
I should say something cutting. I have four ready. Instead I drink from the traitor milkshake, through my own straw, four inches from his, and look back down atOperation Heroso I don’t have to look at the rest of it, and say, “Phase three is the part where you do exactly what I tell you and we never speak of the Shakespeare again.”
“Never,” he agrees, lying, delighted, already drawing a tiny crown next to the wordHeroon my beautiful paperwork like the vandal he is.
The check comes, he ordered fries at some point I never clocked, because that’s how he does everything, without announcing it — and when he reaches for it, I put my hand flat on the thing first.
