Page 21 of Love All
“You’re staring,” she says, not looking up from the exhibition seating map she has somehow obtained.
“I’m strategizing.”
“You’re staring while strategizing. Multitask silently.” She taps the diagram. “Here. The mixer after the first exhibition. That’s our window. Everyone’s loose, nobody’s watching them, music loud enough to talk under. Julian drops his sentence to Cole by the drinks. I get Indie within ten feet and then I leave, because the one thing that kills it is a chaperone. You keep the rest of the team off them. Can you do that without making it a performance?”
“I contain multitudes. One of them is subtle.”
“I’ve met your multitudes. None of them is subtle.” But the corner of her mouth does the thing — the involuntary thing, the half-second brightening I spent a year collecting from across a net, and now get to sit four feet from in bad library light, onpurpose, as often as I can invent a reason. “Just keep them apart enough that it’s their idea. Both of them have to believe they crossed the room on their own. If either of them ever finds out we built the room, it’s not a love story anymore. And if you mess it up I will end you.”
“Her over the plan. Every time. I remember.”
She looks at me then — really looks, the live-match look — and something crosses her face that I don’t have a name for and am scared to learn. “Yeah,” she says, quieter. “Her over the plan.”
And she goes back to the map, and I go back to staring, and neither of us calls the net, because there isn’t one anymore. We both know it and we are both pretending the not-knowing is strategy.
***
The team notices before either of us does. Of course they do. A locker room is the most observant institution on earth; it just expresses everything through abuse.
“I liked it better when you hated her,” Reyes informs me, lacing up. “It was simpler. There were sides. Now you two finish a drill and look at each other one second too long and the whole court has to stand in it. It’s like watching your parents not fight. Honestly? I’d rather they fought.”
“We don’t look at each other.”
“Hawthorne. Yesterday she called your backhand, quote,a documented war crime,and you saidthank you.And you meant it.” He stands. “A year ago that would’ve ended you. Now you collect them. She’s got a whole drawer of insults with your name on it and you’re out here framing them, hanging them in the hall.” He claps my shoulder on his way past, gentler than the words. “I’m happy for you, man. Genuinely. It’s justdeeply upsetting to watch. Like a dog walking on its hind legs. Impressive. Wrong.”
I tell him there’s nothing to be happy about, it’s a charity event and a class project with a deadline. He gives me the look the whole team gives me lately, the one that says they’ve all quietly placed bets whose terms I’m not allowed to know, and goes off to be unbearable somewhere with better acoustics.
The trouble is, he’s not wrong. I do collect them. Every barb she’s handed me in two weeks is lined up somewhere I can reach it, and I take each one out and turn it over like something she gave me on purpose.
Which she didn’t. Which is the entire reason it counts.
***
Here’s the honest part. The part I’m not saying out loud to anyone, not Julian, not Cole, not the inside of my own head if I can help it.
I know what I’ve crossed. Julian named it over eggs and I waved it off, but I’m not actually stupid; charm isn’t the same as not knowing. Somewhere between a bet on an empty court and a milkshake with two straws and a girl textingyou’re good at thatat 6:01 in the morning, the war I’d been fighting for a year quietly ended. I lost track of the exact moment it happened. And the thing that moved into the space where the war used to live is bigger, and worse, and a great deal harder to survive than losing ever was.
I just can’t do anything about it yet. That’s the trap of the whole beautiful arrangement. The operation hands me eight more reasons a day to be near her and not one single way to tell her why I want them, because the deal, the iron deal, isfor Indie, not for you,and the second I make it about me, I prove every conclusion she’s ever drawn and lose the court entirely. So I do the only thing available to a man in my position.
I shut up. I show up. I get very, very good at being her partner, and I letgood at itstand in for everything I’m not allowed to say.
The first exhibition is in four days. Cole and Indie in the same loud room. A sentence loaded into the most trustworthy mouth on campus. A seating chart memorized, a sheepdog at the ready. Operation Hero, live.
I should be thinking about Cole.
I walk out of the bad-lit corner of the library beside Charlotte, the two of us arguing about font sizes on a document that does not need fonts, and I think:the war’s over, and I never even noticed who won, and I have never been less interested in going back.
Across a net, you always know where you stand. That’s the mercy of a net. Same side, four feet apart, nothing between you, that’s where it gets dangerous.
I wanted something I’d have to earn.
I’m starting to understand that I picked the one prize on this entire campus that doesn’t come with a scoreboard, no clean way to know, ever, whether I’m winning.
CHAPTER NINE
Charlotte
THE SIGN SAYSENEMIES TO TEAMMATES: A LOVE STORY, in Margo’s best laminated capitals, with a glitter-pen asterisk afterLOVEleading to a footnote at the bottom:terms and conditions apply.Tess is holding one end. Indie is holding the other. They made me a sign. I told them, explicitly, in writing, not to make me a sign.
