Page 42 of Love All
The part of me does not step in. There is no glass. There’s only his mouth, and my pulse, and the dawning, terrifying suspicion that I am, for the first time in my life, entirely present for something I cannot control.
It gets heavy fast. His hands find the hem of my shirt and ask a question against the skin of my waist, and I answer it, archingup into him. His mouth goes to my jaw, my throat, the spot under my ear I didn’t know was a spot until he found it, and I make a sound I’d deny under oath, and feel him smile against my skin, pleased, undone, as wrecked as I am. His fingers spread warm across my back and start to move, and somewhere in the heat of it I feel my shirt lift an inch, cool air on my stomach, his voice at my throat saying my name like it’s the only word he has left—
And I freeze.
I don’t decide to. That’s the thing about the fear: it doesn’t ask. One second I’m molten and the next I’m a held breath, every muscle rigid, the old animal panic flooding up from the floor of me.You are not in control of this. You cannot plan this. You have handed this person the power to ruin you, and there is no exit.My hands fist in his shirt. Not to pull him closer this time.
It isn’t a thought, when it comes. It isn’t reasoned. It’s older than reason. A body remembering a lesson the mind agreed to forget, the one from the cold house, about open doors and the cost of wanting. My mind knows Benedict is safe. My mind has run the numbers on him for weeks and found him, against every prior I own, trustworthy. But the fear doesn’t live in the mind. It lives in the floor. And it has just reached up through twenty-one years of very good flooring and taken me by the ankle.
He feels it instantly. Of course he does. He reads me the way I read a scoreboard.
He stops. Everything. At once. His hands go still and then lift clean off my skin, palms up, and he pulls back far enough to see my face, and there is no frustration in his. None. Just the open, searching thing he only ever shows me.
“Hey,” he says softly. “Hey. We’re okay. Nothing has to happen. Nothing at all.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Don’t apologize. Don’t.” He brushes my hair back, gentle, the heat banked down to nothing in an instant, like he flipped a switch he never resented having. “We’ve got all the time in the world, Astor. There’s no clock on this one. We’re not on anyone’s schedule but ours.”
He says it like a fact, not a reassurance, like he’s already decided it and is simply reporting the decision.No clock.It’s such a foreign concept I nearly ask him to say it again. Everything in my life has a clock. Most days Iamthe clock.
And I sit there in his lap with my shirt askew and my pulse wrong and my whole carefully defended self cracked open down the middle, and I do the thing I have spent twenty-one years engineering my entire life to avoid.
I tell him the truth.
“I’m scared,” I say. “I’m not — it’s not you. It’s that I want this so much, and I was raised to find the cost first.”
He doesn’t fix it. That’s the thing I’ll, that’s the thing about him. He doesn’t try to talk me out of it, or promise me there’s no cost, or do any of the things a lesser, more frightened man would do. He just gathers me in, careful, and holds me against his chest where I can feel his heart going, and says, into my hair:
“Okay. Then we go slow. As slow as you need. I’m not going anywhere, and I’m not a cost, and the only thing I want tonight is to be the guy you got scared in front of and didn’t have to run.”
I don’t run. I stay. I put my head on his chest and let him hold me on a couch in front of a movie neither of us will ever finish, and after a while he starts, absurdly, badly — narrating the terrible film in a low voice, doing all the characters, until I’m laughing into his shirt. Until the scared thing in me has loosened its grip, finger by finger, the way he loosened my hand off a racket under the sodium lights.
Nobody has ever picked the scared version of me before. I didn’t know you were allowed to. I didn’t know there was a way of being seen that didn’t cost you the whole war.
And it is, I run all the comparisons; it’s the engine of me — braver than the kiss. Braver than anything I have ever done on a court. The single bravest thing in my entire well-defended life:
I let someone see me scared. And I let them stay.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Benedict
IT’S FOUR NIGHTS later, and it’s her idea. I’ll deny that to my grave, because she’d kill me, but it matters, so let it stand. Her idea.
She shows up at my door at ten with no preamble, in jeans and one of those soft worn shirts she’d never let the public see her in, and when I open it she doesn’t say hello. She says, “I’ve thought about it.” Like a deposition. Like she ran the numbers, weighed the risk, and arrived at a verdict — which, knowing her, she has.
“Thought about what?” I say, although I know, because the air on my side of the threshold has already changed.
“You said there was no clock.” Her chin is up. Her eyes are not as steady as her chin. That’s the tell — the chin holding the line her nerves can’t quite. “I’d like to be the one who starts it.”
It takes everything I have not to reach for the joke. The joke is right there, something about the clock, the bet, getting it notarized — and I watch myself decline it, which is not a thing I do. Declining a joke is like declining to breathe. But she’s just handed me something that clearly cost her, standing in my doorway having plainly rehearsed the sentence in the car, and you don’t meet a thing that brave with a bit.
You meet it with both hands.
I have been handed a great many things in my life without earning one of them. And I understand, standing in my own doorway looking at Charlotte Astor being brave in soft clothes at ten at night, that I have never been handed anything like this, and that this one I will have to be worthy of, which I have no idea how to do, and intend to spend the rest of my life learning.
“Come here,” I say.
