Page 69 of Love All
I stand outside the library after he’s gone, and for the first time in weeks I’m not fixing anything, or owing anyone, or bracing for the next place the mess will open up. Indie’s clean. Cole’s home. Jack is walking toward something better without me in it, which is right. I’ve done every hard thing I could find, and none of them came with a prize, and I did them anyway, and I’m still standing.
I keep waiting for the reflex to kick in, the one that has run my whole life, the one that looks at any situation and immediately starts angling it toward the outcome I want. Itdoesn’t come. Jack walked off and I didn’t reach after him. Cole came home and I didn’t perform my way into it. Something in me has genuinely stopped grabbing. And I understand, standing there, that this is the only version of me that has any business anywhere near Charlotte Astor, because she has spent her whole life being grabbed at, wanted, angled toward, and the last thing on earth she needs is one more person with a plan for how to get her.
There is exactly one thing left in the world that I want, and it isn’t a thing I’ve earned or paid for or can scheme my way into. I told her the truth about that in the half-empty apartment, in her own words handed back: no prize. I do it for free now.
But wanting isn’t scheming. And standing on a cold library step, un-golden, light, finally honest — I let myself want it. All the way. With no plan attached, and no idea whether it will ever be mine.
I want Charlotte. Not the win of her. Not the chase, which was always the part I understood, the no that made her interesting, the wall that made her a project. I’m done with all of that. I just wanther.The actual her. At six in the morning, with a drooled-on shirt and a serve she’d hit at my head. And for the first time, I can think it without immediately reaching for how to get it, which means, I’m starting to understand, that I might finally be a person she could actually keep.
Whether she wants to keep me is hers to decide. I’m going to have to do the hardest thing left on the list. Harder than Jack. Harder than the gym. I’m going to have to want her, out loud, and then let her choose, and not touch the outcome.
I don’t know yet that I won’t have to wait long. That she is, at this very hour, doing a thing on a tennis court she has never once done in her life, and that it will bring her to me before I’ve worked up the nerve to go to her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Charlotte
I LOSE THE regional final on a Saturday, in three sets, and it is the best tennis I have ever played.
That’s the part nobody warns you about. I don’t choke. I don’t fall apart. I play the cleanest match of my life against a girl from the state school who is simply, on this day, better than me, faster to the ball, calmer on the big points, more willing to go for the line when it matters. I do everything right. I’ve chased this title for three years, lost it twice, built my whole spring around it. And on the day I finally play well enough to deserve it, I lose anyway.
Match point, I hit a backhand I’d bet my life on, and it catches the tape and drops on my side, and it’s over. The thing I organized a year around is just, gone. Cleanly. Fairly. Nothing to blame, no one to manage, no version where my grip could have held it.
I make myself walk to the net and shake her hand and mean it. She earned it. I tell her so, and watch her face do the thing winners’ faces do, the disbelief, the light — and I remember, dimly, from a long time ago, that I used to think that light was the whole reason to play. Somewhere in three years of chasing this, I stopped playing for the light and started playing to not feel the dark. Those are not the same sport. The girl across the netjust beat me at the first one while I was busy grinding away at the second.
And I stand at the baseline and wait for the sky to come down.
It doesn’t. That’s the whole story of the day, if I’m honest. I did everything right and lost the thing I wanted most, the exact catastrophe I have spent my entire life arranging my world to prevent — and I survived it. I’m still standing. My heart is still going. The scoreboard says I lost, and I am somehow, impossibly, still a person. Nobody ever told me you could do that. In the cold house they taught me the opposite. They taught me that loss is the end of you, that the only safe move is to never want anything you could lose, and I believed it so completely that I nearly threw away the one thing I actually wanted rather than risk finding out it was a lie.
It was a lie. I find out at the baseline of a court I just lost on.
You can want a thing with everything you have, and lose it, and live.
***
I look up into the small crowd, and Ben is at the fence.
He didn’t tell me he was coming. He’s just there, alone, in the spot along the chain-link where he stood once at dawn with two coffees, heckling my serve until I hit him with one. No coffees this time. No grin, either. He’s watching me with his whole face open, the way he looked in my doorway with the terrible flowers, and I understand that he came to watch me chase the biggest thing I wanted, and stayed to watch me lose it, and isn’t going anywhere.
For my entire life, losing has been the thing I do alone. Behind a wall. Where no one gets to see the wreckage. Every instinct I own says: give him the composed nod and the flat eyes,shake the winner’s hand, disappear into your own grace, fall apart later, in private, on schedule, controlled.
I don’t. I walk off the court, and I walk straight to the fence, and I let him see it, the loss, the wet eyes I don’t blink away, the whole undefended thing. I don’t cry. I want to be clear: I don’t cry, even now. But I let my eyes go bright and stay bright, and I let him watch them do it, and for me that is more naked than sobbing would be for anyone else. I hand him the one thing I have never handed a soul: myself, in the exact moment of losing, with the guard flat on the ground.
“You played beautifully,” he says, low, through the chain-link. “I’ve never seen you play like that.”
“I lost.”
“I know. You played beautifully, and you lost.” He says it plainly. No fixing in it. No bright side. He isn’t trying to manage the loss away. He’s just standing in it with me — which is a thing I did not know I was starving for until he did it. “Both of those are true. You don’t have to pick one.”
And I put my fingers through the fence, and he puts his through the other side, and we stand there hooked together through the chain-link while the crowd trickles out around us, and I stop performing being okay, and he lets me, and neither of us says the big thing yet.
It doesn’t need saying yet. It’s already in the fence.
***
We end up at my apartment. In my doorway, the one where I gutted him, the one where I stood with my hand on the cold knob and let him go — I stop, and I make myself say it there, in that exact spot. Because that’s where I did the worst thing, and it seems right to do the best thing in the same square of floor.
“I have a bad history in this doorway,” I say. “I stood right here and used everything I knew about you to make you leave,because I was so sure I was going to lose you that I decided to lose you on purpose. On my terms. I’ve spent my whole life doing versions of that. Leaving first. Never wanting anything I couldn’t survive losing.” I look at him. “I lost the biggest match of my life two hours ago, and I’m still standing here. So I’ve run out of the excuse. I don’t get to say I can’t survive losing you, because I just proved I can survive losing things. Which means the only reason left not to want you all the way is cowardice. And I’m done being a coward about the one thing that was ever worth it.”
