Page 39 of Love All
Not startled. Not charmed. Reading, the way she reads a service motion, a balance sheet, a witness who’s just changedhis story. Whatever crossed my face when his hand landed, whatever’s still on it, she sees all of it. I watch her see it.
And then she does the worst possible thing. She says nothing about it.
If she called it what it is, I could deny it in my sleep; denial is my first language. But she doesn’t hand me the fight. She just lets me know she caught it, one beat too long on my eyes, and turns back to her drink like the whole thing bored her. She’s not going to spend it. She’s going to hold it, the way she holds everything she might need later.
“Matt’s going to get the wrong idea,” she says.
“Matt will recover.”
“It’s Connor,” says Connor.
“Nobody’s talking to you, Matt.”
Connor looks between the two of us, reads the air the way the whole campus has been reading it for three weeks while we insisted there was nothing to read, and, to his eternal and unexpected credit, removes himself to a less radioactive part of the party.
I have made a great many people feel welcome in my life. This is the first time I’ve made one feel the opposite on purpose, and I’m not proud of how good it feels. Like finding a muscle I didn’t know I had. One that exists for a single purpose.
The purpose is her.
And then it’s just the two of us, four feet from a speaker, in a room that has stopped containing anybody else.
***
Neither of us says anything.
That’s the whole scene, if you’re keeping score. Two people who could each talk a stadium into silence, standing four feet apart with the loudest thing either of us has ever felt sitting in the gap between us, and not one word for it.
I’m not going to say it. I want that noted, not because I don’t know it. I’ve known it since September. Saying it is just the one move I’ve never made in my life, the reach with no net under it, and even now, even here, with the whole thing already blown, I can feel myself doing exactly what I always do. Waiting. Holding her eyes and letting the silence be somebody else’s to break.
Which is the miscalculation of my life, because the somebody else is Charlotte Astor. And Charlotte Astor would rather do anything on this earth than talk about a feeling. She’d rather run a gala. She’d rather play a third set in the rain. There is exactly one thing available to a person in this moment that isn’t talking, and she is the most decisive human being I have ever met.
She kisses me.
She crosses the four feet and the eighteen inches and the three days and the wall she built that morning. She fists both hands in the front of my shirt, the way she did in a kitchen to teach a lesson, except there’s no lesson now, no audience, nothing to prove — and she pulls me down, and she kisses me. Hard. And the entire lake house and the music and the man named Connor and the last three weeks and the last twelve months all go, at once, completely silent.
Charlotte Astor is kissing me.
She tastes like the something-blue she’s been not-drinking, and she makes a small sound against my mouth that I feel go all the way down my spine. Her hands come up off my shirt and into my hair. I get my arms around her and lift her half off the floor because I cannot, physically, in this moment, do anything else. And she lets me. She, who lets no one do anything. She’s given up the whole width of the court and crossed to my side of it, and she’s kissing me like she finally lost an argument she’s been having alone for a year.
I’ve imagined this, more times than is dignified, in a library and a kitchen and on a court at eleven at night with her griploosening under my hand — and I had it completely wrong. Because I imaginedwinningit. Finally getting past the guard. That isn’t it at all. There is no guard. She took it down herself, with her own two hands. This is not me getting through to Charlotte Astor. This is Charlotte Astor deciding, all at once, with the full force of that formidable will, to answer the only way she can stand to, without a single word she’d have to defend in the morning.
It is not a careful kiss. Nothing about us has ever been careful. It’s a collision, a rally finally won, two people who spent months firing across a net dropping the rackets to find out what’s on the other side — and it goes on long enough that somebody nearby whoops, and somebody else — Margo, obviously, gleefully, at the volume of a marching band — yellsFINALLY,and we do not stop. Because for once, in our combined and heavily defended lives, neither of us is performing anything for the room.
When she finally pulls back, an inch, just an inch, her forehead against mine, both of us wrecked and breathing like we ran a fifth set — she doesn’t let go of me.
That’s the part. She doesn’t step away.
“That,” she says, unsteadily, against my mouth, “was a terrible decision.”
“The worst,” I agree. “Do it again.”
She does.
And the second one is different. The first was a dam giving way, a year of pressure finding the crack all at once. The second is a choice. Slower, deliberate, both of us awake to it now, her mouth softer and surer against mine, one of her hands flat over my heart where she can feel exactly what she’s done to it and isn’t pretending, for once, that she can’t. She kisses me like she’s decided something. Like she ran the comparison again and changed her answer. Like the worst tactical decision of her life isalso, possibly, the first one she has ever made with her whole self instead of her spreadsheet, and she’s going to see it through if it kills her.
Which, she has now informed me twice, she fully expects it might.
***
