Page 36 of Love All
Charlotte
MY CONTAINMENT STRATEGY survives the courtyard by about thirty-six hours, which I consider, all things considered, a respectable showing.
It dies on a Tuesday night, at 10:40 p.m., on court three, under the bad sodium lights they leave on for the insomniacs, where I’ve gone alone, I tell myself, purely to hit, purely because I can’t sleep — and where Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne is already hitting serves into an empty deuce court. Because he also can’t sleep. Because neither of us can sleep anymore. Because that is what happens when you build a containment strategy with a hole in the bottom exactly the size and shape of one specific person.
I’ll show my work. I’m a person who shows her work even when the work is humiliating. After the courtyard, I went home and reinstated the protocol with extra clauses.No initiating contact:held.No accepting invitations:held, technically, because he stopped sending them. He started doing something far worse instead, which was nothing at all. He simply existed, in the same finite campus as me, and let the finite campus do the work. We’d end up in the same dining hall. The same wing of the same library. The same coffee line, where he’d order my drink before I reached the counter, without looking up from hisphone, and set it down in front of me, and not say anything, and not need to. By Thursday I understood the thing nobody warns you about: you cannot contain a man who has stopped chasing you and simply startedwaiting, patiently, with your coffee order memorized, on the far side of every door you walk through.
We don’t discuss it. That’s the new tacit agreement, the unsigned treaty: we do not discuss why two people with no remaining reason to be near each other keep turning up at the same empty places at the same impossible hours, hitting balls neither of us needs to hit, pretending it’s about staying sharp for a season that, in my case, doesn’t even overlap with his. We just play. He feeds; I hit; we rally until our arms give out and the conversation gets dangerous, and then one of us invents a reason to leave, and we both go home and don’t sleep, and do it again the next night.
It is, I see now, the single most romantic thing I have ever participated in. At the time I’d have had you killed for saying so.
“Your toss is drifting left,” I tell him, because criticism is the only language I trust myself to speak after eleven p.m.
“My toss is perfect. My toss is a Renaissance fresco.”
“Your toss is a cry for help, and it’s drifting left.”
“You watch my toss very closely for a woman who’s contractually contained.”
“I watch it the way you watch a man juggling fire. Out of a sense of impending liability.”
“You’d miss me if I dropped one.”
“I’d write up the incident report and feel nothing.”
“You’d writehe was the smartest, best-looking fire-juggler I ever knew,and you’d weep onto the form.”
“I’d writedeceased: as predicted,and I’d sleep like a baby.” I send a backhand at his feet, hard, just to watch him deal with it — which he does, gracefully, the way he deals with everything,the way that makes me want to throw a chair. “Serve. You’re stalling because you’re losing.”
“There’s no score. It’s eleven at night.”
“There’s always a score. I taught you that.”
It’s out before I hear the trap in it.I taught you that, the thing I keep saying, with the admission buried inside it: that I’ve taught him things. That there’s a him-shaped hoard of things I’ve taught and learned and noticed. That we have a history now, made of small transferred pieces of each other. We both hear it land. Neither of us touches it. That’s the treaty.
He laughs, the real one, and it isn’t for an audience. A laugh I have started, to my horror, organizing entire sentences around producing — and he catches the next ball instead of serving it, and walks toward me, spinning his racket, and the air on the court changes the way it does right before a thing happens that you will spend a long time afterward thinking about.
***
“Come here,” he says. “Your grip’s wrong on the backhand return. You’re late on it because you’re late getting around.”
“My backhand return is the best on either team, and you know it.”
“It’s the second best.” And he comes around the net to my side — tomyside, which we do not do, which is a violation of the one geography that has kept this whole arrangement survivable — and stands behind me, and reaches around, and puts his hand over mine on the racket to adjust the grip. The way coaches do. The way it means nothing when coaches do it.
It does not mean nothing.
His chest is at my back. His hand is over my hand. His breath moves the hair at my temple, and he says, low, into the space behind my ear, ostensibly about tennis:
“You’re gripping it like it’s going to get away from you. You hold everything like it’s already leaving.”
He isn’t wrong. Benedict Prescott-Hawthorneseesyou. He has watched me hold the world too tight for three weeks, and now he’s said it out loud with his mouth against my ear like it’s a footwork correction. And the part that takes down the last wall I have left isn’t the closeness. It’s the tenderness in it. No line. No move. Just a true thing, handed gently to a person he has decided, for reasons I cannot begin to plan for, to be gentle with.
His fingers press mine, softly, loosening them one at a time off the death grip I keep on the handle, on the racket, on the ball, on the entire bright terrifying world. I feel my own pulse going in my throat and his going in his wrist where it rests against mine. For one long suspended second, under the ugly lights, on the one court in the world that has always been mine alone, I let him loosen my grip.
I don’t step away.
I want to turn around. I admit, alone in the dark where nobody can use it against me: I want, with a force that frightens me more than anything ever has, to turn around inside the circle of his arms and find out what the rest of it feels like. The thing the kitchen only sketched. I want his mouth. I want his hands to quit being so polite. I want to find out what happens to all that effortless control of his when it finally breaks, and whether I could be the thing that breaks it. I get as far as the first half-degree of the turn—
