Page 35 of Love All
“Astor. I have never told a single person a true thing about you in my life. It’s the most loyal thing about me, and you’ll never get to brag about it.”
She looks at me then, really looks, a moment too long — and I hold it, and don’t reach for a joke, and watch her try to work out what to do with a man who has just handed her the truest thing he owns and meant it. For one second the whole bench tips toward something with no name and no exit—
—and then Cole says something across the courtyard that makes Indie shriek, and the spell breaks, and we both laugh, grateful and furious in exactly equal measure, and go back to watching the safer thing.
We sit there in the gold light, eighteen inches apart, watching the best thing either of us has ever done love each other on a low stone wall. It is, I’m fairly sure, the happiest I have ever been in my life.
***
We stay until the light goes orange and Cole and Indie wander off, oblivious, wrapped up, gone into the warm ordinary future we handed them without a receipt. And then there’s no excuse left at all. No couple to watch, no scheme to run, no bet to argue. Nothing in the entire world keeping Charlotte Astor on a bench beside me except the one thing I’m not allowed to name.
Neither of us moves.
That’s the part I’ll keep. Not the Cupid’s-bow line, though I’m taking that to my grave too. The part where the show ended and the courtyard emptied and the streetlights came on, and she did not stand up, and I did not stand up. The eighteen inches between us sat there full of every single thing we weren’t saying. And for once, for once in my whole guarded, careful, held-at-arm’s-length life — I don’t reach across it with a joke to make the silence easier. I let it be hard. I let it be eighteen inches of the realest thing I’ve ever felt, and I let her feel me letting it.
“I should go,” she says, finally. Not going.
“You should,” I agree. Not moving.
“I have a containment strategy.”
“How’s it holding up?”
She’s quiet a long moment. The streetlight catches the side of her face.
For a second I think she might say it, whateveritis, the true thing, the thing the whole bench has been full of all evening. I watch her almost do it. Watch her get all the way to the lip of it, the way she got me all the way to the edge of a kiss in a stranger’s kitchen and then shoved me off, except now there’s no audience to perform the shove for and no lesson to hide behind. Just the two of us and the streetlight and the want. And I think:please. Just this once, be braver than me. Because I cannot for the life of me seem to manage it first—
“It’s the worst plan I’ve ever made,” she says instead, almost to herself.
Then she stands, shoulders her bag, and looks down at me with something in her eyes I have no category for and am terrified to learn — and the wall comes up, brick by brick, right in front of me, and she gets her face back under management and says, “Concede the bet by Friday, Hawthorne. Save us both the suspense.”
“Never. I’m going to lose it by about two thousand dollars and savor every single one of them.”
It gets a real laugh out of her, small, surprised, gone before she can recall it — and she walks off into the orange dark, and I sit on the bench a long time after, in the place where she was, knowing exactly three things.
That I am, beyond any further pretending, completely gone.
That she feels it too. The bench told me. The not-standing told me. Theworst plan I’ve ever madetold me.
And that knowing both of those things and doing nothing about them makes me precisely the coward I’ve spent a month curing in everybody else.
There’s a reason, and I make myself look at it, alone on the emptied bench in the dark. It isn’t that I don’t know how, I wrote the manual. It’s that Cole, when he reached, was risking ano.A bad night. A bruised heart. A story he’d tell ruefully at thirty. I’m risking something else entirely. Charlotte Astor is the first thing in my whole gift-wrapped life I could not charm my way back from losing. If I reach and get it wrong, there’s no recovering the rivalry. No retreating to the comfortable war. No version of the two of us left at all. I’d have spent the one thing I’ve never been able to replace.
So I sit there, the most decorated teacher of bravery on this campus, and I don’t move. Because the boy who never had to risk anything has finally found the thing too big to risk, anddiscovered he has no idea, none whatsoever, how to be brave on his own behalf.
Ask her,I told Cole.Just ask her. That’s the whole thing.
I sit in the dark and cannot, for the life of me, take my own advice.
The streetlights hum. Somewhere across campus, two people I handed a whole future are probably arguing, happily, about where to get dinner. And I sit alone in the place where she was, practicing under my breath like a fraud, a man holding a manual he can’t make himself follow, the four words I swore to everyone else were the entire thing.
Just ask her, Ben.
Tomorrow, I tell the empty courtyard.
I do not, the empty courtyard correctly suspects, mean it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
