Page 71 of Love All
“And this is still the best day I’ve had in a year.” I lift my head to look at him. “That’s the thing I could never let myself find out. That you can lose the thing you planned your life around and still have the best day — because the day was never really about the thing. Tennis keeps score with a number that starts at nothing. Love, zero, all of it. I always thought that was the point. That love was the word for nothing. The score before anyone’s earned a thing.” I put my head back down, over his heartbeat. “It’s not nothing. It was never nothing. It’s just the only thing on the whole board they don’t make you earn first. You just have to be brave enough to stop keeping score.”
He’s quiet for a moment, his hand moving slow through my hair.
“You know what got me?” he says. “At the fence. You lost, and you walked straight at me. Not away. I’d have bet everything I own that you’d give me the polite nod and vanish, and I’d have to chase you for a week. You walked right at me with your guard on the ground. That’s the bravest thing I’ve ever watched anybodydo — and there was a whole match of brave things right before it.”
“I’m out of practice at being seen,” I say. “I was planning to hide from you for at least a month. Possibly two.”
“I know. I’d cleared my schedule for the chase.”
“Disappointed?”
“Charlotte.” He tips my chin up. “You did the one thing I didn’t know how to make you do. You went first. I’d have waited years for it. You gave it to me in a doorway two hours after the worst loss of your life.” He shakes his head. “Don’t ever apologize for being out of practice. You did it perfectly the first time it counted.”
“You’re going to win that title next year,” he says, after a while.
“Probably. I’m very good.” I feel him laugh under my cheek. “But if I don’t, I’ll survive it. I’ve got recent evidence.” I close my eyes. “Stay. It’s late. The world can wait. We’ll do nothing, on purpose, which I’m told is a thing people do.”
He tightens his arm around me, the not-leaving, the being kept, the thing I had no defense against and have finally stopped defending against.
I fall asleep before I mean to, on his chest, the way I did exactly once before and spent the next morning insisting had never happened. This time I’m not going to insist. This time, if he brings it up, the drooling, the Saint Bernard, the dossier — I’m going to let him have it. I’ll add the entry myself.Sleeps, all the way through, only on him.
The dossier is never going to be complete. That’s the point of it now. You don’t finish learning a person you’ve decided to keep. You just keep going, forever, with your eyes open, and the score you stopped bothering to keep.
We do nothing, on purpose, all the way till morning.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Benedict
ONE YEAR LATER
The department runs a mixed-doubles charity exhibition every spring. It’s the same event that paired me with Charlotte in the first place, back when the draw felt like a sentence and she looked at me across the net like something she’d scrape off her shoe. A year later, they’re running it again — and this time nobody has to force the pairing. We signed up together, on purpose, one name under the other, and Coach Leon looked at the sheet and then at us and said, “Well. That’ll sell tickets,” and wandered off to worry about a net.
Here’s the thing about me you’d have needed a year to believe: I trained for it. A charity exhibition. A glorified fundraiser with a bouncy castle for the donors’ kids. And I put in real hours, because I’m playing it next to her, and I am not going to be the weak half of anything with Charlotte Astor’s name over mine. The old me played every match half-asleep, let the gallery laugh, called it charm. I don’t do that anymore. I found out what it feels like to actually try at something, and I can’t go back. It’s like tasting salt. Julian says he misses the lazy genius. He’s lying. He watched me run down a ball last week that the old me wouldhave waved at, and he had a look on his face I’d have paid money for.
The first chapter of all this, if you’d been watching, was me winning a match without breaking a sweat while a gallery of people who didn’t know me clapped for a guy who wasn’t really there. I remember that version. He was very charming and very hollow, and he’d have told you he was the happiest man alive, because he never once let anything get close enough to test the claim. If you’d told him that a year later he’d be nervous, actually nervous, palms damp — before a charity exhibition, because he cared about the outcome and cared more about the person he was playing beside, he’d have laughed and found somewhere better to be.
I don’t miss him. I understand him, which is different. He was doing the only thing he knew how to do with a life nobody ever made him pay for. It took getting gutted in a doorway and a debt at an equipment desk to teach him the trick nobody’s born knowing: the things you don’t earn, you can’t feel. And a life you can’t feel isn’t the prize. It’s just a very comfortable way to miss your whole one.
Julian had a line about us, back at the start. One of us earned everything and couldn’t enjoy it; the other enjoyed everything and earned none of it. He said it like a diagnosis of two separate diseases. Turns out it was one disease with two faces. And turns out the cure for both was standing next to the other one long enough to catch what you were missing. She taught me to earn. I taught her to enjoy. We met in the middle, a place I didn’t know existed, because I’d only ever lived at the easy end, and she’d only ever lived at the hard one.
The middle, it turns out, is the only part of the court where you can actually reach the ball.
***
The stands are the good kind of full, students, boosters, a knot of little kids who’ve escaped the bouncy castle. Our people are down front, restored and rearranged. Cole and Indie, together again, Cole’s arm around her and both of them a little disgusting about it, which they’ve earned, because he spent two months proving he’d choose faith over doubt every single day until she believed him, and she made him prove it, and now she lets him hold her at a tennis match like a man who knows exactly what he almost lost. Margo, with the coffee order written on her hand. Tess, running a betting pool on our match, loudly, which I’ve stopped trying to stop. Julian, arms crossed, pretending he isn’t proud.
Before the match, Indie comes down to the fence to wish me luck, which is a sentence I could not have written six months ago, when she was eating under a hood because of a fire I helped light. It took time. I didn’t rush it, and I didn’t perform my way toward it. I told her the truth once, that she’d been wronged by our mess and cleared by our mess and owed us nothing either way — and then I let her decide the pace. She decided it slowly.
And here she is, at the fence.
“She went first, you know,” Indie says, watching Charlotte stretch at the net. “At your apartment. The doorway thing. Told me after. Charlotte Astor said it out loud before you did.” She grins at me, mischief in it, and something softer under the mischief. “I’ve been waiting three years to see her hand somebody the ball and not snatch it back. You did that. Not by chasing her. By finally being someone she could stop guarding against. So.” She knocks the fence twice with her knuckles. “Don’t fumble it, Prescott-Hawthorne. I gave a very good speech to get her to your door. I’m not doing it twice.”
“Wouldn’t dream of making you.”
Cole, behind her, gives me the nod, the whole-thing nod,we’re good, we’re better— and puts his arm back around Indie,and we’re whole again. Rebuilt in a slightly different shape. Which is the only way anything worth keeping ever survives.
Jack isn’t here. Jack’s across town most weekends now, coaching juniors. Good at it. Lighter. I hear it secondhand, which is the correct way for me to hear things about Jack now. Coach wrote him the reference. I wrote my part, the ugly version, in full — and copied him on it like I promised, and he sent back two words.Got it.That’s the whole friendship now: two words, once, and a paper trail that finally tells the truth about who folded. It’s not what we were. It’s honest, which we never actually were.
