Page 5 of Love All
“Cole. Buddy. The shoe.”
He surfaces, looks at the shoe like they’ve never met, sets it down with the careful guilt of a man hiding evidence. “I was thinking.”
“You weretransmitting.On every frequency. It’s Indie. Don’t bother denying it — your face just confessed and lawyered up at the same time.”
“It’s not—” He stops, because Cole can’t finish a lie. Two words in, his conscience tackles him. “She’s friends with all those people. Astor. The whole—” He gestures at a category that apparently includes me. “She’s out of my—”
“If you sayleague,I’ll make you run lines.”
“She’s a full ride and a perfect GPA and she reads books for fun, Ben. And I’m—” he spreads his hands at the whole earnest six-foot expanse of himself “—this.”
“Right. Tragic. She’d never go for a kind, loyal, top-twenty doubles player with a face like a cereal mascot. Hopeless. Pack it in.”
“You’re not funny.”
“I’m extremely funny. Have you talked to her? Words, out loud, in a row?”
“We talked.” He says it to his lap. “At the mixer. About the bus schedule.” A pause. “It was a really good conversation about the bus schedule.” He looks wrecked. “She laughed. I think she was being nice.”
“What was the joke?”
He goes red to the ears. “I said the early bus is for people who hate themselves. Because it leaves at six.” He puts his face in his hands. “It’s barely a joke.”
“And she laughed.”
“She was being—”
“Cole.” I let it sit. “That crowd is the toughest room on campus. I’ve watched grown men break themselves trying to get a real laugh out of Charlotte Astor and walk away with nothing. Those girls don’t hand it out. And Indie Roy spent some of it on your sad little bus joke. They don’t do that for just anybody.”
“She wouldn’t—”
“She might. People do.” Something pulls in my chest, the way it does around him. The tax on being the guy everything comes easy to is watching it come hard to the people you love. “You won’t know unless somebody finds out for you.”
He goes still, hopeful and terrified at once. “What does that mean.Finds out for you.”
It means nothing. Yet. It’s a loose thread, Indira Roy, the one person Charlotte Astor would walk through fire for. And Charlotte and I are about to spend two weeks locked in each other’s orbit anyway.
“Nothing,” I say. Which is true, and won’t stay true. “Get dressed. You’re holding the shoe again.”
He is, too.
I change slow, after everyone clears out, and let myself have the empty locker room and the thing I’ve been keeping off my face since the courts.
Here’s what I didn’t tell Julian, or Cole, or anyone: I have no idea how to win this.
Charlotte thinks the rule I invented is a cage I built for her. It is. I also locked myself inside it, and at least she showed up with tools. She’s spent twenty-one years learning how to make things happen, run a committee, write a grant, scare a room of donors into their checkbooks. Me, I have a good swing and a smile. I’ve never organized anything that wasn’t a party or earned a dollar without my grandfather’s fingerprints on it. So naturally I built something heavy on purpose, in front of the one person who’ll clock the exact half-second I start faking.
Brilliant. No notes, Hawthorne.
And the deranged part, the part I’ll admit in this locker room and nowhere else, is that I wouldn’t take it back. It scares me. It also feels like the first real thing in years. An actual opponent across the net, after a lifetime of hitting against a wall and calling the quiet a win.
I go out the back, which is how I see them.
The women’s team is done, but Charlotte and Indie are still on court four in the long gold light. Not drilling. Just standing close, Indie talking fast with both hands, Charlotte listening. And here’s the thing I’ll take to my grave: Charlotte issmiling.Not the sharp one. A real one, loose and unguarded, aimed at her best friend and some story I’ll never get to hear. She reaches out and tucks a picks a piece of lint off Indie without pausing the conversation, the gesture of a person with exactly one place on earth she’s allowed to be gentle, who decided this is it.
I stand in the doorway like an idiot and feel the whole bet rearrange itself in my chest.
I want to beat her. But for half a second, long enough to spook me, I think I’d hand her the win just to stand close enough to earn that smile once. The thought wanders in, has a look around, and leaves before I can ask it anything.
