Page 47 of Love All
There it is. The cost. The one I’ve been waiting for since the first good morning. Finally, mercifully: a name, a face, a number. A man who loved Ben and stood too close and lost everything, walking around campus as a broody cautionary tale.
I should let Ben tell me the whole thing. I know it now; I knew it then. I should do for him the exact thing Indie taught me, the thing I lectured a whole campus about,give him the chance, hear the truth, don’t let the fear write the ending.But fear doesn’t wait for the truth. Fear has been packed and ready by the door for four days, just waiting for a reason.
Jack handed it one with a bow on it.
“Charlotte.” He’s stopped walking, there on the path. He makes me stop too, and there’s something in his face I’ve never had aimed at me. Not the grin. Not the charm. Something stripped and urgent. “Whatever he told you, I will tell you all of it. The parts that make me look bad and the parts that make me look worse. Tonight, for as long as you want. I’m not going to defend it. I just need you not to decide the ending before I’ve said a single word.Please.”
And it’s thepleasethat does it, the same word he dragged out of me four nights ago, handed back now — and I cannot afford to hear it. Because hearing it means staying. And staying means the fall.
“I have to go,” I say. Which is the thing I say. “I have a — I’ll call you.”
I don’t call him. I go home, and I sit on my kitchen floor. I do not tell Indie, because telling Indie would mean hearing her be right. And I start, quietly, methodically, with the terrible competence I bring to everything — to build the wall back up. Brick by brick. Higher this time. Because now I have proof. Now I have aJack.And the proof says exactly what I’ve alwaysknown: the people who let themselves want him are the ones left standing in the wreckage, paying his gravity bill, holding nothing.
He texts. Of course he texts, twice that night, once the next morning, every one of them careful and kind and trying.Can we talk. It isn’t what Jack made it sound like. Please, Charlotte. Let me tell you the whole thing.I read every single one and answer none, which is a specific cruelty I am not proud of. I tell myself I need time to think. I do not need time to think. I need time toretreat, to get the wall high enough that whatever he says next can’t clear it. Because some animal part of me has decided that the only way to survive losing him is to leave first, on my own terms, while I still hold the wheel.
It is the worst logic in the world. It is the logic of a girl who would rather author the wreck than sit and wait for it. I have it in my bones. I was raised on it, in a cold house, by experts.
Indie knows something’s wrong by the next morning, she always knows, and she doesn’t push either. She just leaves a coffee outside my door and a text that sayshere when you want to talk, no rush, love you,and I look at it and feel the specific shame of being loved well by people while you’re hard at work proving you don’t deserve it. I don’t answer her either. I’m very busy.
A wall is a great deal of work when you’re determined to build it alone.
The bet’s reckoning is in two days. The gala. The whole school. And I go into it already retreating, already braced, already turning the best thing that has ever happened to me into a cost I can get out ahead of, which is the thing about being raised to find the cost first.
You find it whether it’s there or not.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Benedict
THE FOUNDERS’ DRIVE gala is the kind of event where men who own boats pretend they don’t, and the athletic department puts out shrimp it can’t afford, and everyone agrees not to mention that the entire glittering evening exists to wring money out of guilt. I have attended a hundred of them.
I have never once attended one where the girl I’m in love with won’t look at me from across the room.
She went dark after Jack. Four days of silence, every careful text I sent dropping into a void,can we talk, it isn’t what he made it sound like, please— and now here she is in a black dress accepting congratulations on the obscene amount of money she raised, being flawless and gracious and a thousand miles away. She’s built the wall back up. I can see it from the door, the same way I saw it the morning after the lake house, except higher this time. Reinforced. And I know exactly which mason handed her the bricks.
Four days is not a long time. Four days is nothing; I’ve spent four days on a flight delay. But four days of Charlotte going dark, after a week of waking up to her actually asleep on my chest, is the longest stretch of my life, and I have handled it with the grace of a man on fire. I texted too much, then not enough. I showed up at her dawn court and found it empty — whichmeans she moved her practice to avoid me, which means she rearranged the one fixed religion of her entire life around the goal of not seeing my face. I asked Indie, who gave me the look that meansI love you both and I can’t fix this one,and said only, “Give her room. She runs when she’s scared. It’s not about you. It’s so much about you.”
Jack is here. Of course Jack is here; he works the equipment desk now, and they make him do the events. He doesn’t approach me. He doesn’t have to. He just stands at the edge of the room with a drink he isn’t drinking and watches his work hold, and every time Charlotte’s eyes slide past me like I’m furniture, I can feel him not-smiling about it. And the old thing stirs in my chest, the thing I keep under everything, the thing with his name on it, the thing I’ve spent two years not looking at:
He’s not wrong. That’s the worst part. He has never once been wrong.
I can’t even work up the anger. That’s the trap of a debt you genuinely owe: you don’t get to resent the collector. You just get to pay.
I wronged Jack. Badly. The whole story is true, every ugly inch of it, and the version Charlotte got was the kind one. And now it’s costing me the only thing I’ve ever actually wanted, which is, I am aware, perfectly deserved math. The gravity bill comes due. It always comes due. I’ve just never been the one standing under it before.
The whole story is Jack’s as much as mine, and he’s earned the right to be the one who tells it. But the shape of it is this: there was a week, sophomore year, the most important week of his life and the least important of mine — when I had a choice between showing up for my best friend and coasting. I coasted. The way I coasted through everything. Because nothing had ever cost me anything, and I did not believe, on a cellular level, that anything ever could. It cost Jack his ranking. Thenhis scholarship. Then a friendship he’d have bled for. And I apologized the easy way, a grin, a round of drinks, awe’re good?— and moved on, because moving on was free. For me, it always had been.
Standing in this gala watching Charlotte’s eyes skate past me like I’m coat-check, I finally understand the bill I handed Jack. Because I’m holding the same one now. And it is heavier from this side. A great deal heavier.
And then Coach Leon takes the microphone, taps it, and says he has the final fundraising numbers, and I forget, for about four minutes, that my life is coming apart.
***
“Now,” Coach says, with the showman’s relish of a man who has been sitting on a good thing all night, “some of you know our two team captains turned the Founders’ Drive into a personal blood feud this year. No family money, they said. Earn every dollar. Loser owes the winner a humiliation to be named later.” The room laughs. Charlotte, across the floor, goes very still — the stillness she does right before match point — and for one second her eyes finally find me, and there’s something in them under the wall. Fear. Fury. The thing we’re not saying. Then it’s gone. “So. The results.”
“First — and I want every single person in this room to hear this number — for the children’s wing, Charlotte Astor raised forty-eight thousand, six hundred and twelve dollars—” the room gasps; she inclines her head with that lethal grace “—and six cents.”
She’s won. Of course she’s won. She’s Charlotte Astor; she could fundraise the tide back out. And I am, I’ll admit it, completely at peace with losing, because I never once cared about the bet. The bet was only ever an excuse to stand next toher. I’d take the loss and the dawn courts and all of it, just to keep standing there.
