Page 19 of Love All
“I’ve got it.”
“Astor—”
“You raised four hundred dollars with a sign and a smile. I have raised, to date, eleven dollars and a migraine. I am not going to also let you buy me fries. A woman has limits. This is one of mine.”
He sits back, hands up, conceding the field. “Eleven dollars.”
“Don’t.”
“How. Genuinely, how. How does Charlotte Astor raiseeleven dollarsin a week? You could sell a paperclip to a billionaire.”
“I could sell anAstorpaperclip.” I hear how it sounds and hate it. “I’ll work it out. I always work it out. I simply haven’t yet — which is a sentence I have had occasion to say approximately never in my life, and I do not care for the taste.”
He doesn’t gloat. That’s the thing about him I keep tripping over. He has every right — he is beating me, at the one discipline I was certain was mine to lose — and instead he looks at me with something dangerously close to recognition and says, “You’ll work it out. And it’s going to be terrifying when you do, and I’m going to lose this bet by a hair, and it’ll still be the best money either of us ever made.” He steals a fry. “For the kids.”
“For the kids,” I say, and let him pay for nothing, and take the one win available.
I let him keep the crown, though. That’s the first thing I let him keep. I see the danger clearly and walk into it anyway, because somewhere between the dawn serves and the second straw I’ve stopped being able to tell the difference between a plan I’m running and a thing I’m falling into.
And the worst part — the part I drive home turning over in the dark — is that for the first night in a long time, I haven’t thought about the bet, or my mother, or the column-three sentence, even once.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Benedict
THERE’S A MOMENT in a match, you don’t pick it— where the thing you’ve been doing turns into a different thing without anybody calling it. You’re rallying, trading, feeling each other out, and then one ball comes through that you both know is the real start, and everything before it was just two people deciding whether to play. I’ve had that moment a thousand times across a net from Charlotte Astor.
I get it again the morning after the diner. Except this time we’re on the same side, and I can’t find the net anywhere.
She texts me at 6:01 a.m. — I know the time because I lie there looking at it like a man who has never received a text before, and it says, in full:Brief Julian today. He hears NOTHING about phase 2B. If he asks your motives, lie. You’re good at that.
No greeting. No punctuation she doesn’t mean. I grin at my ceiling for a full minute, because it’s the most romantic thing anyone has said to me in a year, and she would rather die than know I read it that way.
This is the new normal, and it arrived so fast I keep missing its edges. A week ago, a text from Charlotte meant something had gone catastrophically wrong. Now she sends me logistics at dawn, signs nothing, and assumes, correctly, that I’m alreadyawake worrying the same problem from the other end. As of the diner, we’re a two-person organization with a mission and an enemy, the enemy being the cowardice of our own best friends. And I have never in my life belonged to a single thing I wasn’t handed the membership to. This one I talked my way into.
It sits different in the hand. Heavier. Mine.
So. Julian.
I catch him in the dining hall, because some conversations you have over institutional eggs so the other person can’t make them a big deal, and I lay it out: the operation, his role, the part where the most trusted mouth on the men’s team needs to let one true sentence fall within Cole’s hearing at exactly the right moment,Indie Roy can’t stop asking about him, delivered like a man who has no idea he’s holding a lit match.
Julian listens the whole way through without touching his food, which is how you know he’s taking something seriously. The man treats breakfast like a sacrament.
“No,” he says.
“You haven’t heard the—”
“I heard all of it. The answer’s still no, and then it’s going to be yes, but you have to sit through the part in between.” He sets his fork down. “You spent two years telling me Charlotte Astor was the most exhausting human being on this campus. You once described her, verbatim, as ‘a beautiful migraine in tennis whites.’ I have it written down. I write the good ones down.”
“That’s flattering, actually. She’d like ‘beautiful migraine.’ Don’t tell her. She’ll use it.”
“And now.” He spreads his hands at me, all of me, like an exhibit. “Now you’ve built a two-week covert operation that requires you to spend every spare hour at her side, planning a wedding for two other people, and you’re sitting here at seven in the morningglowing.You’re doing the glow, Ben. I’ve known you a long time. I’ve seen the glow exactly twice, and both timesit ended in a spectacular romantic wreck that somehow became my problem at two in the morning.”
“It’s for Cole.”
“It’spartlyfor Cole. Which is exactly what’s going to get you in trouble — that it’s genuinely, beautifully, partly for Cole, and you’re going to hide everything else behind him, because Cole’s a good enough reason that nobody will look further. Including you.” He picks the fork back up. “That’s the lecture. Eat your eggs. I’m in.”
“You’re in.”
