Page 33 of Love All
It feels like standing in a doorway with my hands open and nothing in them. It feels like something he taught me without either of us noticing there was a lesson running.
I hate how much better it works.
***
Here is what I do with all of it, the mostmething I have ever done.
I make a plan.
If I am, and I’m not, butif— feeling something inconvenient about Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne, the correct response is not to indulge it. The correct response is containment. The exhibition is over: good, that removes the proximity. The scheme is done: better, that removes the collaboration. All I have to do now is the simplest thing in the world, the thing I ambest at, the thing eleven years of dawn courts trained into my marrow.
I stop seeing him. No more reasons means no more occasions. I lose the bet by email, like he said. I send the man a polite concession at the gala. And I let the whole inconvenient business starve quietly to death for lack of oxygen, the way you’re supposed to. The way grown-ups do.
It’s a flawless plan. No soft edges. I’m rather proud of it.
I even draft the protocol, not the feelings, I don’t write down feelings, but the rules of disengagement, drawn up like a brief.No initiating contact. Concede the bet in writing. Decline any invitation that isn’t strictly necessary. Be cordial, at distance. Let it starve.I read it over twice. Airtight. Exactly the kind of plan I’d have bet my ranking on three weeks ago.
The single hairline flaw is that it assumes I am still a person who does what her plans tell her to. I have been, my whole life. I am the most disciplined person I know. I simply failed to account for the possibility that somewhere in the last three weeks I quietly became someone who, handed a flawless plan in one hand and a text from Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne in the other, would choose the text.
It lasts, if we’re being precise, until approximately four o’clock in the afternoon. My phone buzzes. It’s him.
the courtyard. 20 min. bring nothing, expect nothing, it’s not about the bet. just come.
I stand there inside my flawless containment strategy, looking at the screen, and feel the loud thing sit up, bright, awake, entirely beyond my jurisdiction — and I know, the way you know a serve is an ace before it clears the box, that I’m going to go.
Here’s the truth, the one I couldn’t say to Indie and can barely say to myself: I don’t go because I’m weak, and I don’t go because I’ve lost control, though I’d swear to both underoath. I go because somewhere underneath the protocol and the spreadsheet and the eleven years of dawn courts, a quieter and far more honest part of me has been waiting all day, all month, for exactly this. For him to make it easy. To hand me one small reason and let me close the rest of the distance myself.
‘You give him one small reason, and you let him close the rest of it himself.’
I taught that move to Indie. I half-taught it to him. And here it is, turned all the way around on me. And it works, because the best lessons always do.
I text back:this better be good, Hawthorne.
And I go.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Benedict
I SEND THE text from a bench in the courtyard at 3:58 and then spend the next twenty minutes conducting a full forensic review of my own sanity. There’s no operation behind it. No bet, no exhibition, no plausible deniability of any kind. There’s just me, on a bench, having decided I cannot get through one more hour of the silence she built overnight, reaching for the only thing I have left now that the universe has stripped away every legitimate excuse to be near her.
Julian warned me about this exact afternoon.You’re going to be standing in a room with her and no reason on the books to be there.He made it sound like a problem to solve. He did not mention that it would feel like standing at the end of a high board with the ladder pulled up behind you, that the absence of a reason wouldn’t free me, it would strand me. Leave me holding a want with no errand to disguise it as. For two weeks I got to be near her because a clipboard said I had to. Take the clipboard away, and what’s left is a man who wants to sit beside a woman in the sun, which is the most exposed thing a person can be, and which I have spent my entire life building elaborate machinery to make sure I’d never once be caught as.
The text.It’s not about the bet. Just come.
I have never sent a text like that in my life. I send charming texts. I send texts doing three things at once that let the other person believe they thought of all three. I do not sendjust come,becausejust comehas no angle in it. Nowhere to hide. No version of me that survives if she reads it and laughs. It’s the text equivalent of walking onto a court with no racket and your hands open.
I sent it anyway. And now I’ve sat here for twenty minutes certain she won’t come, because why would she, the mandate’s over, the wall’s up, she told me with a dress code and a coffee order exactly how this was going to go—
She comes.
She comes around the corner of the humanities building in the gold four-o’clock light with her bag on one shoulder and an expression engineered to communicate that she is extremely busy and this had better be worth her time, and she sits down on the far end of the bench — a careful, deliberate eighteen inches away — and says, “This better be good, Hawthorne. I had a containment strategy. It was airtight.”
“A containment strategy.”
“It doesn’t concern you.”
“It sounds like it concerns me a great deal, actually. It sounds like I’m the thing being contained. I’m flattered. I’ve never been a biohazard before.”
