Page 26 of Love All
I nod.True.
Ease. I feel it the whole length of the hallway.
I’ve been touched by a great many people in my life. I’m a toucher’s dream, huggable, handsome, harmless. None of it ever cost the toucher anything. Charlotte bumping her shoulder into mine in a training-room hallway cost her something, a rule, a wall, a year of standing policy — and that’s the difference nobody ever explains to you: the touch that matters is the one the other person had todecideto give. I’d trade every easy embrace I’ve ever collected for that one deliberate two inches of contact.
I’m fairly sure I already have.
We’ve done it. Both halves. Cole has his proof, Indie has hers, and somewhere across campus two terrified, decent people are lying awake doing corrected math. All that’s left is to put them in one more loud room and get out of the way.
***
Cole finds me that night. Of course he does. He knocks on my door at eleven with the wild eyes of a man who’s paced a hole in a rug.
“I talked to her. At the mixer. For like forty minutes. About everything — books, her sister, the away-meet bus.” He saysbuslike a sacrament. “And I think — Ben, I think she might actually—” He can’t finish. Cole can never finish the hopeful ones; his voice gives out under the weight of needing them to be true. “Is that insane? Tell me if that’s insane.”
And here’s where the rules turn cruel. Because the honest answer,it’s not insane, it’s true, I know it’s true, I’ve spent two weeks and a small criminal conspiracy making sure you’d find out it’s true— is the one answer I can never hand him. So I give him the next-truest one. The one I’d give him anyway, conspiracy or no conspiracy.
“It’s not insane. I’ve watched her watch you, man. It’s not pity, and it’s not in your head.” I lean in the doorway. “The only insane part is you standing in my hall at eleven o’clock instead of asking her to the next thing.”
“What if I’m wrong?”
“You’re not wrong.” I say it with my whole chest — because I know, because I built the knowing. And because some part of me, the part Julian keeps trying to make me look at, is learning something off Cole right now that I don’t have language for yet: he’s about to do the brave, unscripted, terrifying thing I’ve spent two weeks arranging for everyone except myself. Cole is going to reach. And I’m going to spend three more days helping twoof my friends reach for each other while I stand in the identical dark with the identical math, too much of a coward to take my own advice.
“Ask her,” I say. “Just ask her.”
He nods, terrified, luminous, already gone somewhere in his head to rehearse it in a mirror. He’ll do it. I shut the door and stand in my room thinkingphysician, heal thyself,followed by several things considerably less dignified, and I don’t sleep much.
I should be thinking about the finish line. The good deed, nearly done.
Instead I’m thinking about a shoulder bump in a training-room hallway, and how it landed harder than anything either of us has ever said across a net. Three days left of the operation that has become the only place I’m allowed to stand next to her. And no idea, none, what I’m going to do when the room goes quiet, and there’s nothing left to plan, and no script for the only true thing I have left to say.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Charlotte
THE PROBLEM WITH Cole Whitman is that he is too decent to be brave on schedule.
We did everything right. He has his proof, Indie has hers, they spent the second exhibition orbiting each other at a polite and agonizing four-foot radius, and now, at the after-party, in some lacrosse player’s enormous, regrettable house, they have achieved a new and excruciating equilibrium: wedged in a corner, secretly in love, publicly discussing, I am not exaggerating, the parking situation.
For thirty-five minutes. I timed it. I time everything.
It would be funny if it weren’t so familiar. Two people in a crowded room, each certain the other’s politeness is a verdict. I know the whole grammar of it; I’ve watched Indie speak it her entire life. I just never expected to catch myself speaking it too, across a kitchen island, with a boy I decided to hate.
“He’s not going to do it,” I say to Benedict, the two of us posted against that island like generals losing a war. “He’s going to discuss visitor parking with her until graduation and then write her a very nice email.”
“A very nice email,” Benedict repeats, mournful. “Subject line:Re: Us, Possibly.He’ll spend a week on the subject line.”
“He’ll BCC himself. To have a record.”
“He’ll attach a calendar invite. Markedtentative.” He shakes his head at his best friend across the room with the specific despair of a man watching another man fumble the only thing that matters. “I can’t keep watching. I’ve tried to be patient. I have run out of patience.”
“He needs a push.” Benedict watches the two of them in their corner, eighteen inches apart and a thousand miles from doing anything about it. “Something with a clock on it. Right now he thinks he has all the time in the world, because nothing’s threatening to take her away. Cole doesn’t movetowarda thing. Cole moves toprotectone.” He turns his head, and I watch the idea arrive on his face, and I know it’s mine before he says it, because it’s the ugly clever one. “Phase two-B.”
“Phase two-B,” I agree, and feel the specific guilt of a woman about to enjoy her work too much.
Here’s the part I’m not proud of and will defend anyway: there is, in fact, a real boy across the room who’s been looking at Indie all night. I didn’t invent him. I don’t invent people, that’s the rule, that’s the one wall I keep. His name is Ryan, he plays club lacrosse, he has the friendly uncomplicated handsomeness of ‘the-boy-next-door’, and he has genuinely, observably been assembling the nerve to talk to my best friend for an hour. We’re not going to lie to anyone. We’re going to point at a true thing and turn the lights up on it.
It is, even by the elastic standards I’ve been setting all month, a step closer to the line. The overhears were clean, true things, true voices. This isusinga boy. Dangling a girl’s attention like bait. Choreographing jealousy on purpose. I know it, and I tell myself the distinction that lets a person sleep: Ryan will survive, and the only heart we’re actually gambling with is Cole’s, and Cole’s heart is the one we’re trying to save.
