Page 38 of Love All
I text back:in.
It is the single worst tactical decision I have ever made. I make it on purpose. To feel safe.
Which tells you everything you need to know about how good my judgment had gotten by the middle of that week.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Benedict
I AM, AS a rule, a chill person. It’s bedrock, not vanity, just a plain fact about me. I am the chillest person in any room I have ever walked into. I don’t get rattled, I don’t get angry, and I have never, in twenty-two years, been jealous of a single thing, for the simple structural reason that nothing has ever been mine in a way I could lose. Everything comes to me. Everything stays or leaves without my permission, and I shrug either way, because shrugging is free and caring costs. Jealousy is for people who think they own something. I have owned nothing. I have been, for twenty-two magnificent years, enviably, bulletproofly chill.
This holds up beautifully right until a man named Connor puts his hand on the small of Charlotte Astor’s back.
***
She comes late, and I feel it the instant she does, because over the past three weeks I’ve developed a kind of Charlotte-radar that pings whenever she enters a structure, and I’ve been not-watching the door for an hour with the dedicated focus of a man absolutely not watching a door. She comes in the way she does everything, like she’s decided the room is lucky to have her and is prepared to be proven wrong — in a burgundy thing I will not attempt to describe, because there are no words for it that leave a man any dignity.
She wears it like a weapon, clearly chosen to make her feel like a woman in command of a room. It’s working on every man in the building except the one she came here to avoid, who happens to be the only one who knows exactly what it’s for.
We haven’t spoken since the court. Since I put my hand over her hand and started loosening her fingers and told her the truest thing I had, and she looked at me like I’d handed her a live grenade and walked off without looking back. Three days. The eighteen inches has become a canyon. She rebuilt the whole wall overnight, brick by brick.
So I do the mature thing. I don’t go to her. I station myself across the room with Julian and a drink I’m not drinking, and I give her exactly the distance she asked for.
“You’re doing the thing,” Julian says, not looking at me, watching the same door I’m not watching.
“I’m not doing a thing. I’m at a party. I’m relaxed. I’m a lake.”
“Sure, man.” He takes a sip. “You’ve checked that door forty times in an hour. I counted, because I love you and I have nothing else going on.”
“That’s a you problem.”
“Mm.” He tips his head across the room. “There she is, by the way. Forty-one.”
I do not turn to look. I want that on the record. I hold out a full three seconds.
Then I look.
Connor plays club something, lacrosse, maybe. He has the shoulders and the untroubled eyes of a man who has never once been the smartest person in a room and has never noticed. He lights up the second Charlotte walks in; every man in the house did. Her dress is short and ruffled at the bottom; long legs in a heel taller than I thought the economical Charlotte would ever wear. A low neckline, the gentle curve of her chest and her waist cinched in. It ignites my attention and imagination immediately.Almost, it seems, at the same time as Connor. A man with the particular confidence of a guy who’s never been told no by a girl out of his league, because he’s never correctly identified one. He crosses the room to her with a beer in each hand like an offering. She takes it. She’s being polite. She came to this party specifically to talk to people who aren’t me, and Connor is, undeniably, not me.
He leans in to say something over the music.
He puts his hand on the small of her back.
The exact spot.Myspot, the one I had my hand on in a kitchen and a hallway and on my own court three nights ago while I loosened her grip finger by finger. And some lacrosse Adonis just puts his hand there. Casually. Like it’s unclaimed.
Something goes through my chest that I have no filing system for. Hot, total, no off-switch. I’ve spent twenty-two years never feeling it, which means it takes me a humiliating second to place, and the instant I place it, I clamp down so hard my jaw aches, because the one thing I have never done, the one move I don’t make, is let a room see me want something.
Too late for the room. Not too late for her, if I’m careful.
I’m already moving. I was never going to be careful.
“Hey, man.” I arrive, clap Connor on the shoulder with an alarming amount of warmth. “Good to see you. Matt, right?”
“It’s Connor.”
“Right. Sorry.” I do not look sorry. I lean down toward Charlotte’s ear — toward the exact territory the music gives me an excuse to enter — and with one hand I ease her a courteous half-step out of Connor’s orbit and into the gap beside me, and I say it low, just for her, deniable as anything: “Leave room for Jesus.”
She turns her head and looks at me.
