Page 24 of Love All
Across the room, they did it themselves. Four inches away, he’s still looking.
I drink the club soda I swore I wouldn’t, just to occupy the hand that wants, very much, to find out what the looking is the easy partof.
CHAPTER TEN
Benedict
BY THE SECOND week of being chained to Charlotte Astor, we’ve stopped being two players and started being a problem.
That’s the technical term, in doubles, for a team nobody wants to draw.They’re a problem.You say it low, the way you’d talk about a bad knee, something to plan around. And we’re getting there fast. Fast enough that Coach Leon has started importing actual ranked pairs to practice against us, just to see. Fast enough that we’ve beaten two of them, which should be impossible for a team two weeks old held together by a charity bet and a private matchmaking conspiracy, and isn’t, because the thing that makes a doubles team isn’t talent. It’s knowing, without looking, where the other person is going to be.
I always know where she’s going to be.
That’s the trouble. That has become the trouble with my entire life.
It’s a strange skill, knowing where a person will land. On a court, it wins matches. Off one, it just means you’ve started tracking somebody without anyone’s permission. I know she takes the deuce side because her backhand is a guillotine. I know she goes silent for exactly one point after missing an easy ball and comes back meaner. I know she touches her strings twice before a big serve, like a guitarist checking the tune of theirinstrument. I know her tells now the way I know my own. I learned her in two weeks the way I’ve never bothered learning anything, because everything else in my life arrived without the learning. She’s the first thing I’ve ever had to actually pay attention to just to keep up with.
I’d pay more. That’s the part I’m not telling anyone, least of all her. I’d pay whatever they asked.
“You’re poaching too early,” she says, mid-drill, in the tone of a woman who has caught you committing a small federal crime.
“I’m poaching at theperfecttime. I’m poaching with vision.”
“You’re poaching withoptimism,which is different, and it leaves the whole alley open behind you, which is where a competent team puts the ball, which is where I then have to be, which is across the entire court. Because you got excited.”
“I got excited because we were winning.”
“We were winning because I was covering your optimism.”
“See, this is teamwork. You complete me.”
“You’re dumb,” she says.
I stop. Put a hand to my hip. “What are we, five?You’re dumb?That’s the comeback? Charlotte Astor. Pre-law. Four-point-oh. Dismantler of grown men.You’re dumb?”
“You’reextradumb,” she says, with enormous dignity, “and now you’re dumbandtalking,” and she serves a ball directly at my stomach, which I have to fold around like a deck chair. Behind us, Reyes makes the noise a man trying not to laugh and failing. Utterly.
That’s the level of discourse we’ve reached by week two: two of the most verbally lethal people on this campus reduced toyou’re dumb / no, you’re dumb.Because somewhere under the strategy and the insults, the thing has gotten, and I want to be precise here —fun.Not charming-fun. Not performance-fun, not the kind I do for a room. The other kind. The kind you can’t fake, can’t schedule, and can’t, it turns out, walk back.
We win the drill. She tells me my footwork is a hate crime. I tell her I love her too. She throws a towel at my head. Standard.
Reyes has started keeping a tally on the locker-room whiteboard —INSULTS TRADED, with our initials and little hash marks, like we’re a nature documentary he’s appointed himself to narrate. He’s up over forty and has stopped pretending to find it annoying. “I used to think you two would kill each other,” he tells me, surveying his work with pride. “Now I think you’ll get married, and the best-man toast is going to be ninety straight minutes of this, and I’ll have to sit through all of it.”
I tell him there’s nothing to it. It’s a class project with a deadline.
He draws one more hash mark and labels it, in careful capitals,DENIAL.
The man is a menace. He isn’t wrong about much.
***
The harder job that week is Indie.
Cole had the easy disease. It lives all over your face, sometimes you catch it in the wild off a loud teammate at a drinks table. Indie’s is quieter and meaner and buried deeper, because Indie decided, sometime before any of us met her, that the good things are for other people. She’s built a whole gentle life around not reaching. You don’t undo that with one overheard sentence. She needs proof that holds. She needs to catch Cole’s feelings the way Cole caught hers, sideways, unsupervised, off a mouth that doesn’t know she’s there.
And there is exactly one mouth on earth that can deliver the truth about Cole Whitman’s heart with total authority and zero suspicion.
Unfortunately, it’s mine.
