Page 37 of Love All
—and then I feel it. The sense I always get with him; the floor going out from under the part of me that has kept me alive my whole life:
I am not in control of this.
I step away. Hard. I put the whole width of the court between us before I’ve decided to, racket up like a shield, breathing like I’ve run a third set.
“Can we not,” I say.
He doesn’t move toward me. He’s good like that, too good; it’s its own kind of cruelty, the way he always lets me run. He just stands there on my side of the net with his hands open at his sides, the place where my hand was still warm on the air between us, and he says, very quietly, no joke anywhere in it:
“Charlotte. We can’t keep doing this.”
“Doing what? We’re hitting. It’s a Tuesday.”
“You know what.” And then, because he is braver than me in the only way that has ever mattered, the only way I can’t manufacture or out-plan or win: “It’s not a Tuesday. It hasn’t been a Tuesday in three weeks. And we both keep showing up to the same empty courts at eleven at night to not-say it, and I’m tired, Charlotte. I’m tired of the eighteen inches. Aren’t you tired?”
I am so tired. That’s the unbearable part. I am bone-tired in a way no amount of winning has ever fixed, tired the way you get when you’ve spent years holding a door shut against your own house.
I could say it now. This is the opening. He’s cracked the door, done the brave thing, laid it on the net between us and stepped back and left me room to come meet him there. All I have to do is offer one true sentence and the eighteen inches close. I know precisely which sentence. I am never at a loss for the sentence. I stand on my own court, under the ugly lights, with the realest thing in my life held out to me on an open hand—
—and I feel the floor go, and I do the thing I have always done when the floor goes. The thing that has kept me upright, and alone, for twenty-one years.
“I have to go,” I say.
I don’t run. I have some pride left. I walk, chin up, racket in hand, my whole body screaming — off my own court, past the man who has just offered me the one thing I’ve ever wanted thatI can’t earn. I don’t look back. Because I know that if I look back and see his face, the open, undefended thing he only ever shows me — I will not make it to the gate. So I keep my eyes forward, and I leave him standing alone under the sodium lights on the court that used to be mine alone. Holding nothing. Having done everything right. Having been brave, having reached, and been left there for it.
By me.
Because I am the part of this story that doesn’t work.
***
The truth about control. The one I’d never say out loud.
It isn’t about being a tyrant. People think it’s about being a tyrant. It’s about safety. When you control a thing, it can’t surprise you, and when it can’t surprise you, it can’t hurt you, and I learned very young, in a very large and very cold house, that the people who got hurt were the ones who let themselves want something they couldn’t guarantee. My mother has never lost control of anything in her life. She has also never, as far as I can tell, been genuinely happy. And somewhere around the age of nine, I did the math wrong on purpose and decided the first thing was worth the second.
I could name the specific night, if it mattered. It doesn’t. A dinner. A dress. A thing I wanted so badly I let it show on my face, and the precise, surgical way that wanting was used against me before the soup was even cleared. By people who loved me. Which was the entire lesson. Which was the whole curriculum.Wanting is a door you leave open, and the cold gets in through open doors.
So I taught myself to want nothing I couldn’t provide myself, and I got very, very good at it. For twelve years I have wanted, exclusively, the things that come when you work for them, rankings, grades, the clean cold approval of a scoreboard —because those can’t be taken from you out of spite. You earn them, and they’re yours. People are the other kind. People, you can do everything right for and lose anyway. And I decided, at nine, in a dress I never wore again, that I would simply never find out.
Safe is better than happy. You can plan safe. You can earn safe. Safe shows up at five a.m. and does the work and never once lets the floor go out from under it.
I built an entire self on that math. The girl who needs no one. The girl who can’t be ambushed because she’s already run every scenario twice. The girl alone in the empty box at every match, winning, untouchable, safe. It’s a very good fortress. I designed it myself, at nine, and I have maintained it ruthlessly every day since. And it has kept out exactly everything.
Which is the problem with a fortress. The thing nobody mentions to the cold nine-year-old laying the first stone: it doesn’t only keep the bad things out. It keepseverythingout. You end up perfectly safe in a room by yourself, which is just the long way of spellingalone, and you don’t notice for about twelve years.
And then a boy puts his hand over your hand under the sodium lights and starts, gently, undoing the stonework, and I understand, with the clean horror of a true thing arriving all at once, that wanting him is the one event in my entire engineered life whose outcome I cannot control. I can’t plan it. I can’t earn it, he’ll want me or he won’t, and no number of dawn courts will move that needle a millimeter. I can’t measure it, audit it, or win it. To have it, I’d have to do the one thing I have spent twenty-one years building a fortress against: hand another person the power to hurt me, and trust them not to use it. No guarantee. No spreadsheet. No exit. No control.
I would rather play that man for the championship of the world with my wrong hand. I am not being dramatic. I have run the comparison, and I stand by it.
And here’s the genuinely frightening part, the part I can’t get past at one in the morning with my pulse still wrong: I’m no longer certain I’m right. The math held for twelve years. Safe over happy. Control over the floor going out. Then I spent three weeks watching Indie get loved correctly in the daylight, and sitting eighteen inches from a boy on a bench being the happiest I have ever been, and somewhere in there the math sprang a hairline leak. And through it keeps coming the one question I have never once permitted myself to ask:
What if the people who get hurt are also the only ones who ever get anything at all?
So I drive home, and I don’t sleep, and at one in the morning Margo texts the group chat that there’s a thing Friday, a real party, somebody’s lake house, the whole team, the new couple, half the campus — and would I come, because I never come. And I lie there in the dark with my pulse still wrong and the ghost of his hand still loosening my fingers, and I think: yes. Yes, I’ll come. I’ll come and I’ll drink something blue and I’ll talk to people who aren’t him, and I will get this,whatever this is, back under management. Where it belongs. Where everything in my life belongs. Where I can see all the exits.
It is exactly the wrong instinct. The instinct of a woman trying to outrun a feeling by walking faster, when the feeling isn’t behind her at all. It’s inside her. Has been for weeks. Has packed its own bag and moved in and started rearranging the furniture. You cannot get a thing back under control by surrounding it with a lake house and a hundred drunk undergraduates. You can only give it a larger room to get loose in.
But I don’t know that yet, or I know it and refuse it, which is the same thing in a better coat. So I make my plan, and feel thecold clean click of having a plan, and mistake it, the way I always do, the way I was raised to, for safety.
