Page 46 of Love All
They are the best four days of my life, but a person built like me cannot have the best four days of her life without the back of her brain quietly starting to calculate the bill.
And they are good. Concretely, specifically good. He shows up to my dawn practice, once, exactly once, bleary and appalled and clutching two cups — and stands at the fence heckling my serve until I hit him with one, on purpose, and he declares it the finest morning of his entire life. Indie and Cole start folding us into things, the four of us, and I learn the particular vertigo of being half of a couple at a table of couples: Ben’s hand on the back of my chair. Me being, for once, a person things happenwithinstead of a person who arranges them for others from a safe distance. Margo cries. Tess opens a second betting pool, ona different question this time, whose terms I decline to learn. And one afternoon I catch myself in the dining-hall window laughing with my whole face, the real one, the one I save for Indie — aimed at a boy, in public. And I don’t immediately take it back.
That, more than anything, should warn me how far gone I already am.
It creeps in slow. A Tuesday-morning sort of dread, low and patient. I’ll be sitting across from him in the dining hall watching him be effortlessly, infuriatingly delighted by a bad joke, and instead of being happy I’ll feel the floor go thin under me, and the old voice, my mother’s voice, the cold-house voice — will start its quiet math.This is too much. You have handed this person every weapon. There is no exit. When it goes, and it will go; everything goes — it is going to take a piece of you that does not grow back, and you will have nobody to blame but the girl who let herself want it.
I know it’s fear. I am not stupid about myself; I’m just powerless against the parts I understand. I know the contentment is real and the dread is a lie my history keeps telling me. But knowing a thing and being free of it are different sports. And by the fourth day I’ve started doing the thing I do. The small terrible thing. The bracing, pulling back an inch at a time, going quiet, holding a little of myself in reserve, getting ready, the way you tense before a fall you’ve decided is coming.
I’d like to say I fight it. I don’t, really. Fighting it would mean telling someone, Indie, or him — and telling someone would mean saying the fear out loud, where it could be looked at and found ridiculous. I’m not ready to be talked out of it. The fear is the only thing holding the exits open. So I feed it instead, quietly, the way you feed a thing you’ve decided to keep. I notice every small gap between us and count it as proof. I clock the half-second his attention drifts at dinner and enter it into evidence.He is, by every honest measure, exactly as warm and present as he was the first morning. The retreat is entirely mine.
I just need it to look like his. So that when I run, I can call it self-defense.
He notices. He notices everything about me. He doesn’t push. He just gets a little careful, a little watchful, the way you get around a thing you can feel pulling away and can’t think how to hold.
On the fourth night he catches my wrist, gentle, as I’m inventing a reason to leave early. “Hey. Where’d you go?” Not the room. He means me. He felt me leaving the way you feel a draft come in under a door.
“I’m right here,” I say. Which is a lie. And he looks at me a long moment and decides, kindly, wrongly, to let me have it. He keeps letting me have things. That’s the trap of him: he hands me every out and trusts me not to take them.
I’m about to take all of them at once.
Because on the fifth day, the cost I’ve been bracing for walks up to me at the athletic complex and introduces itself.
His name is Jack.
***
I’ve seen him before, like a person only once you’re told to look, around the edges of the men’s program, never quite in it. A tall guy with a wound in his posture I remembered once and forgot. Dark hair and a severe jaw line. I’m waiting for Benedict outside the men’s locker rooms, in the loud chlorine-and-rubber hum of the complex, already half-retreated, already rehearsing tonight’s reason for leaving early, and into that exact frame of mind, into a girl who has spent five days hunting for the cost. He walks up, unhurried, like he’s been waiting just as long. People like that find each other. A girl looking for proof and a man carrying it around like a wound were always going to collide.
He stops in front of me.
“You’re the Astor girl,” he says. “The tennis one. The one he’s—” He doesn’t finish it. He doesn’t have to; the whole campus finished it a week ago. “Huh.”
“And you are?”
“Jack.” He watches my face for recognition and doesn’t get any, and something flickers — bitterness, old and worn smooth. “He hasn’t mentioned me. Course he hasn’t. Why would he.” He smiles, and it doesn’t reach anything. “We were best friends. Doubles partners. You’d think it’d come up.”
Every instinct I have goes quiet and alert at once, the way it does when a match turns live. “What happened?”
“Ask him.” Jack shrugs, but the shrug costs him something. “Ask him what he was doing the week of conference finals, sophomore year. Ask him real careful, and watch his face. Because the thing about Ben—” he leans in, not unkindly, which is somehow worse “—is that nothing’s ever his fault. It just lands on whoever’s standing next to him. He floats. Everybody around him pays the bill.” He glances toward the locker room door. “I lost my ranking. Then my scholarship. Then years of a friendship I’d have died for — because he couldn’t be bothered to try the one week it counted, and then he apologized with agrinand went back to being golden. I’m just the guy it landed on.” His eyes come back to me, and there’s something in them I recognize, because I was raised by people who have it: the specific pity of someone who’s already seen the ending of your movie. “You seem smart. You seem like you keep your eyes open. So keep them open. People who stand too close to Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne tend to be the ones who pay for him. Ask him about that week. Ask him about me. See if he can do it without smiling.”
The locker room door opens. Ben comes out, and I watch something happen to his face that I have never once seen happento it. The easy gold drains out. The grin goes somewhere. A flinch he can’t charm over. And he says, low, careful, in a voice with no joke anywhere in it:
“Jack.”
“Benny.” Jack doesn’t smile. “Just meeting the girlfriend. She’s out of your league. Tell her I said so.”
And he walks off, that wound in his posture, and leaves the cost sitting in the air exactly where I’ve been bracing for it to land.
I have never seen Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne not know what to do. That’s the thing that sticks, more than anything Jack said. The most fluent, unbothered, gracefully-handled man I have ever met stands there beside me with his hands useless at his sides, no charm, no save, no line — watching the back of a man he has plainly wronged, and looking, for the first time since I’ve known him, like someone with a cost he cannot talk his way out of.
A less frightened version of me would read it correctly. Would see guilt thatmeanssomething, a man who knows exactly what he did and hates himself for it, which is the precise opposite of a man who floats. But I am not the less frightened version. I am the one with the wall half-built and a fistful of fresh bricks with Jack’s name on them.
***
Ben tries. On the walk back he tries — “that’s a long story, it’s old, it’s not what it sounded like, can we — can I tell you the whole thing, not here” — and the awful part, the part I’ll hate myself for later, is that I barely hear him. Because Jack didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already, in the cold-house part of me, believe. He just said it out loud, in a man’s bitter voice, with a lost scholarship for evidence:
People who stand too close to Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne are the ones who pay for him.
