Page 40 of Love All
And I understand it then, holding the unmeltable Charlotte Astor in the middle of a lake house while the team loses its collective mind around us.
The bet was nothing. The scheme was nothing. The exhibition, the gate, the fundraiser, the entire elaborate machinery the universe built to force the two of us onto the same square of court — none of it was ever the point. It was all just a long enough excuse for this. For her to choose. Finally, in front of everyone, with no operation to hide inside, no clipboard, no rail, to cross the distance herself and reach for the thing she isn’t sure she can survive.
She reached. She, who never reaches. She was braver than me in the end, which I will spend the rest of my life trying to deserve.
I spent the whole month teaching people to reach. Wrote the speech, loaded it into Cole’s mouth and Indie’s, watched it work twice, and then sat on a bench too much of a coward to take a single word of my own advice. In the end I didn’t have to. She did it for both of us. Closed the distance I was too scared to close, paid the price I was too careful to pay. And the humbling, dazzling fact of it is that the bravest person I have ever met is the one I spent a year calling the most defended. I had her backwards the whole time. The way she had me backwards. The way we had the entire thing backwards from the first day on the courts.
Which is more or less how this always goes.
And somewhere far back in my chest, under the elation, under the disbelief, under the taste of something blue — a much smaller and quieter voice, the one that has always known the cost of things even when the rest of me refused to, notes that we have just done the most dangerous thing two people like us can do. We stopped pretending. We took the one relationship neither of us could afford to lose and bet the whole thing on the table. In public. With no exits.
The pretending, the quiet voice says, was the safe part.
But that’s a problem for a sober Tuesday. Tonight there’s a burgundy dress and the distance finally crossed. Charlotte Astor’s hands are in my hair, and I kiss her again, in the middle of everything, and let the dangerous part wait its turn.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Charlotte
I KISSED BENEDICT Prescott-Hawthorne in front of a hundred witnesses, and I wake up the next morning a different person, which I resent, because I liked the old one. The old one had a containment strategy. The old one slept.
The first thing I do is conduct a damage assessment, because that is what I do. That is the entire operating system. The facts are these: I have, of my own free will, in a lake house, in a burgundy dress, in front of Margo,Margo,who by now has told the continent — crossed a room, put my hands in Benedict’s hair, and kissed him until the music stopped meaning anything. There is no plausible deniability. No class project to blame it on, no demonstration, no pedagogy. There is a video, almost certainly. There are nine texts on my phone, four of them from Tess, and one from a number I don’t recognize that simply saysfinally, the whole team owes Reyes forty dollars.
I have lost control of the narrative completely, which is the thing I fear most in the measurable world. And I lie there waiting for the regret to arrive, braced for it, the way you brace for cold water.
It doesn’t come.
That’s the part that frightens me. Not the lost control. The not-regretting.
I am a person who regrets things. I have a finely calibrated regret instrument; it runs constantly, low, in the background, auditing every decision for the hidden flaw. I have regretted kisses by parking lots. I have regretted unforced errors in the fourth game of matches Iwon.I regret things I did correctly. And here I lie, the morning after the most reckless, least-planned, most publicly out-of-control thing I have ever done, running the instrument over all of it, and getting nothing. No flaw. No hidden cost. Just the memory of my hands in his hair, and the sound he made against my mouth, and the strange clean quiet of having finally stopped fighting a war I’d been losing on purpose for a year.
I shake the instrument. Still nothing.
I have never been so afraid of a feeling in my life as I am of that one: the absence of regret, sitting in the exact place regret is supposed to live.
By noon I’ve been tagged in three photos, two videos, and a meme. The meme is, I’ll concede, well-constructed. The whole campus has apparently been running a low-grade betting pool on the two of us for a month, Reyes’s whiteboard was not a joke, it was aprospectus— and the resolution is content. Strangers have opinions about my mouth. People who’ve feared me for three years are sending heart emojis. And the part of me that has spent its whole life controlling precisely how I am seen, curating the exact distance at which others are permitted to stand — waits in the wreckage of all that lost privacy to feel violated.
Instead I feel mostly just seen. Which is worse. And also somehow isn’t. I do not have a framework for a thing that manages to be both.
***
Indie finds me on the kitchen floor at nine a.m., sitting with coffee I’m not drinking, having a quiet structural crisis.
She doesn’t sayI told you so,which is the single greatest act of restraint in the recorded history of our friendship. She sits down on the floor next to me, hip to hip, hands me a piece of her toast, and says, “So.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m eating toast on the floor with my best friend. Who kissed a boy.”
“I had a containment strategy.”
“I know, baby.” She leans her head on my shoulder. “It was airtight. It was a beautiful plan. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“I am enjoying thisso much.I have waited so long. Do you know how long I’ve waited? I have listened to you call that boy an ongoing situation, and a menace, and a waste of a perfectly good forehand, basically every day for a year. I have watched you build your entire personality around pretending he doesn’t exist. And last night you climbed him like a tree in front of the whole team—”
“I did not climb him like a tree.”
