Page 11 of Love All
I’ve been rehearsing between donations, under my breath, like a man losing his mind in a dinner line. The pitch. How do you walk up to a girl who has publicly ruled that you’ve never earned anything and ask her to trust you with the happiness of the person she loves most on this earth?Hey, Astor, I know you’d rather eat the net, but, no.Astor, hear me out before you say the thing that ends my career, worse. Every version that starts with me sounds like exactly what it is: a trap with good manners. She’s spent a year learning to smell those off me from across a quad.
The only version that doesn’t curdle on the way out is the one that isn’t about me at all.Indie’s in love with Cole. Cole’s in love with Indie. You and I are the only two people standing close enough to fix it.Every word true. No angle anywhere in it. And that’s the whole impossible trick: with Charlotte, the scheme cannot be a scheme. I’ll have to mean it, out loud, to her face, nothing up my sleeve — which I have never once attempted on Charlotte Astor, and I genuinely don’t know if I’ll survive the attempt.
Four o’clock tomorrow. Court four. I make a note to find out.
I pack up the card reader a little after nine, four hundred and twelve dollars heavier and stupidly, disproportionately happy. Tomorrow the two weeks start. Two weeks chained to the only person who ever made me work for anything, with a fundraiser to lose, a best friend’s whole future to smuggle into position, and no plan whatsoever for how to convince the girl who diagnosed me with earning nothing that I’m worth standing next to.
I should go home and sleep.
Instead I sit on the dining-hall steps in the cold, counting fives into stacks, grinning at nothing, more awake than I’ve been in years.
I wanted something I’d have to earn.
I’m getting a great deal more than I bargained for, and I cannot, for the life of me, stop looking forward to it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Charlotte
I ARRIVE AT court four twenty minutes early, because being early is a form of control and I take my control where I can get it.
I have a plan. I always have a plan. The plan is: treat the next two weeks like a deposition. Show up, be flawless, give the man nothing he can use, log the hours, win the gate for the children, and exit having revealed exactly as much of myself as a hostile witness reveals to opposing counsel, nothing that isn’t already in the transcript. Doubles with Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne is a thing happeningtome, like taxes, like bad weather. You don’t befriend cold rain you didn’t choose. You dress for it, you endure it, and you do not, under any circumstances, let it see you shiver.
So I warm up the way I always warm up: alone, against the back fence, hitting into an empty court, listening to the particular silence of a facility before anyone arrives to fill it. Except it isn’t going to stay empty. That’s the whole problem. For eleven years the empty court has been the one place I answer for nobody but myself, no partner to carry, no rhythm to match, no second set of mistakes to absorb as my own. In twenty minutes, the athletic department is going to walk a six-foot liability onto my side of the net and call it a marquee event.
I hit harder. The fence takes it without comment, which is one of the things I like best about fences.
He shows up at four exactly, which is the first thing that goes wrong. I’d budgeted for him being late. I had a whole speech drafted about respect and other people’s time, and instead he comes through the gate on the hour, carrying two coffees, wearing the unbothered ease of a man arriving at a party he already knows likes him.
“Astor.” He holds one out. “Oat milk, one sugar, scandalously hot. I asked Indie.”
I do not take it. “You interrogated my best friend about my coffee order.”
“I asked a friendly question of a friendly person. She volunteered it. She also told me you’d refuse it on principle and then resent it for the rest of practice, so.” He sets it on the bench beside my bag, where it sits, steaming, being exactly correct. “It’ll be there when your principles get tired.”
“I don’t have principles about coffee. I have principles about you.”
“Name one. I’ll violate it immediately, just to watch.”
“My principle is that I don’t accept gifts from men about to lose to me in front of a paying crowd. It would be like taking a sandwich from someone on his way to the gallows. Bad manners. Confusing for the children.”
“And yet.” He nods at the cup, serene. “Still warm. Principles run cold, Astor. Coffee doesn’t.”
I hate that he did it. I hate more that Indie handed him my entire instruction manual. And most of all I hate the small treacherous warmth of being known well enough to be predicted, secondhand, even, and even by him.
I leave the coffee where it sits. I last, if anyone is counting, eleven minutes.
Coach Leon runs the session himself, which tells me everything about how badly the department needs this exhibition to print money. Leon does not personally supervisea practice unless there’s a budget riding on it. He’s planted two of the men’s squad across the net to give us live bodies, Reyes, plus a freshman whose name I never get around to acquiring — with orders to hit at us like they mean it, because you can’t learn a partner against a ball machine. So that’s the afternoon: the brand-new and deeply unwilling pairing of Astor and Prescott-Hawthorne learning to share a court in real time, two sophomores doing their honest best to expose us, and Coach watching from behind the baseline with the weary patience of a man who has refereed worse marriages.
“Formation,” I tell Benedict, snapping into the only register I trust, the one with a clipboard in it. “I serve, you poach. I call the side, you cover what I tell you to cover, and we do not improvise. Improvisation is a word for two people making separate mistakes at the same time.”
“Good morning to you too.”
“It’s four in the afternoon.”
“I know. I was matching your energy. You greeted me with a drill.” He spins his racquet, loose, that golden-boy looseness that has certainly cost lesser women their better judgment. “Lead on, Captain. Tell me where to stand. I live to be told where to stand by you. It’s the highlight of my season.”
What I have never realized about playing doubles with a person you’ve spent a year fighting across the net is that the net is the entire relationship. The net is what makes it bearable. Take it away, put him onmyside, four feet to my left, breathing the same point I’m breathing and the hostility has nowhere to travel. No net to cross. It just sits between us on the same square of court, unemployed, looking for work.
