Page 20 of Love All
“Cole’s my friend too. And I’ve wanted those two to stop circling each other since the bus to the Stanford meet, where they sat one seat apart for nine hours and discussed theair conditioning.” He shakes his head at the memory. “I’ll drop the sentence. I’ll drop it so clean he’ll think God put it there.”
“When?”
“The mixer. By the drinks, where every true thing gets said.” He thinks. “And I’m not going totellhim. You can’t tell Cole he’s wanted — he’ll decide you’re being nice and hand it right back. He has to overhear it. In the wild, off people who don’t know he’s standing there. So I get a conversation going next to him and let the truth land where he is, and I don’t look at him once while it does.”
“Overheard off who? It can’t be you or me, he’d smell us a mile out—”
“Reyes.” He smiles, slow. “That’s the whole beauty of it. I don’t tell Reyes anything. Reyes can’t keep a secret because he never knows he’s holding one. I just get him going on the single most obvious fact in the building — that Indie Roy’s been mooning at Cole for a month — and he does what he does, which is announce it tipsy and with feeling. Cole hears his own best evidence off a man who has no idea he’s delivering it. There is no cleaner plant on earth.” He points the fork. “You just keepeveryone else off that patch of carpet for ninety seconds. The girls especially. Margo gets within earshot, the whole thing’s a press release by sunrise.”
“Sheepdog. I’m already on herding duty for the night. I contain multitudes.”
“You contain one multitude and it iswant.Eat your eggs.” Then he looks at me, and the teasing goes out of it, which is the only thing about Julian that ever scares me. “But Ben. When this is over — when Cole’s got his girl and the bet’s settled and there’s no operation left to hide inside — you’re going to be standing in a room with Charlotte Astor and no reason on the books to be there. And you’re going to have to figure out what you actually want. I just want you to know that day’s coming. So it doesn’t bite you in the ass.”
I tell him he’s been reading too much. He lets me. That’s the whole machine of Julian and me: he says the true thing once, plainly, then lets me pretend I didn’t hear it, and never charges me the difference. I’d die for him. I’d just rather not discuss it over eggs.
***
I check on Cole that night, the way you check on a man whose future you’re secretly building and can’t tell him about.
He’s in the common room not studying, which for Cole is a four-alarm emergency, staring at the same page of a kinesiology textbook he was staring at two hours ago.
“The exhibition,” he says, before I’ve even sat down. “Indie’s coming. To watch. The whole team’s coming, but she’ll — she’ll be there.”
“I’m aware. There’s a sign. Margo’s laminating.”
“There’s a mixer after.” He lays the textbook over his face, briefly, a man taking shelter under the only roof available. “What do I say to her at a mixer, Ben? ‘Nice match’? I’m not evenplaying a real match. I’m at number three. I’ll play one set against a sophomore and shake hands. I have no material. I haveno material.”
And here’s the thing about being the guy who always has material: you forget it isn’t something you earned. It’s just there, the way the forehand’s there, issued in the crib with everything else. Cole has to build his from nothing, in real time, terrified. And the unfairness of it, the best man I know walking into that room dead certain he has nothing to offer a girl who has already, quietly, picked him — sits in my chest like a swallowed stone.
I can’t tell him it’s handled. That’s the brutal architecture of the whole thing. So I give him the only piece the rules allow.
“You don’t need material. You need to ask her one true question and actually listen to the answer. That’s the entire trick, and you already do it better than any man on this roster, because you’re the only one of us who genuinely wants to know what people say back.” I knock the textbook off his face. “Ask her something real. She’ll do the rest. I promise.”
“Why would I trust you? You lie for sport.”
“I lierecreationally.About this, never.” Which is itself a lie — I am deceiving him with my whole chest in this exact moment — but only about the means. The end is the truest thing I’ve held in years, and I’d sign it in blood. “Trust me on this one, Cole. Just this one.”
He looks at me a second, then nods, because Cole trusts people. It’s the best and most dangerous thing about him. I go up to bed carrying the swallowed stone and the absolute certainty that if I get this wrong, if any of us get it wrong, it lands on the one person at this whole school who never once deserved it.
***
Nobody warns you howquietit is on the other side of a rivalry.
For a year, Charlotte Astor was a sound I made. A bit I performed. A war I showed up for. Now she’s a partner in a crime, and partners don’t perform at each other. They work. We work. We meet in the corner of the library nobody uses, behind the bound periodicals where the light’s bad and the chairs are worse, and we build the thing out piece by piece, and somewhere in the second session, she stops guarding every sentence. She still insults me. God, constantly. But the insults have changed register. They’re not keeping me out anymore. They’re just how she talks to someone she’s decided to let in. She doesn’t know she’s started doing it, and I would walk into traffic before pointing it out.
We have rhythms now. That’s what I keep turning over in the bad light. After a year of two-shot rallies, insult, counter, exit — we have exchanges that take longer than ten seconds. She thinks out loud and I catch the thread three steps ahead and finish it, and she lets me, and then tells me my version is worse, and then quietly uses it. I learn that she chews the cap of her pen when a plan has a hole she hasn’t found yet. She learns, I think, that I’m smarter than I let rooms believe, that she stopped underestimating me somewhere around the second straw, and that I caught her noticing.
We don’t talk about any of that. We talk about seating charts. It is astonishing what two people can hide inside a seating chart.
The trouble starts, the way trouble with Charlotte always starts, at the mouth.
She’s reading me something about sightlines and the drinks table, and I lost the actual words a sentence and a half ago, because she’s started chewing the pen cap, the tell, and her mouth has gone soft around it, that full, unfair mouth, and my brain walks straight out of the library and into territory it has no business in at four in the afternoon.
I want that mouth. Plainly. Specifically. With my whole body. I want to close the foot of bad library air between us, take her jaw in my hand, and find out what she tastes like. I want to know whether Charlotte kisses the way she argues, all precision and control, or whether she’d come apart the second somebody finally got past the guard. Whether she’d be quiet about it, or whether I could get her breath to go ragged against my throat. Whether I could work my hand into that severe ponytail, pull it loose, and make her say my name in a register that isn’t a weapon. I think about her climbing into my lap on this terrible wooden chair, her knees bracketing my hips, the exact noise she’d make the instant she stopped thinking for once in her life, and what patient, two-week campaign it would take to put that noise there.
I think about all of it, very fast, in considerable detail. None of it is strategic. All of it is disqualifying.
I catch myself. Eventually. A good few seconds after I should.
