Page 41 of Love All
“Margo has it on video. You climbed him like a tree, Charlotte. It’s beautiful. It’s going in the wedding slideshow.”
“There is no wedding.”
“There’s always a wedding,” she says serenely, “in the slideshow,” and eats her toast, and I love her so much in that moment I could weep. Which I do not do.
And I laugh, it comes up out of me wrong and wet and surprising, half a laugh and half the other thing — and Indie just stays there with her head on my shoulder, eating her toast, while I come as close to falling apart as I let myself come, which from me is one hard breath and a jaw that won’t quite work. She doesn’t make me explain. She already knows. She’s been here. Eight feet of courage in a crowded room is the same eight feet no matter who’s crossing it.
“It’s so much,” I say finally. Quietly. The truest thing I’ve said out loud in weeks. “I didn’t — Indie, I don’t know how to want something this much. I never learned. I learned the opposite. I’mgoodat the opposite.”
“I know.”
“What if I’m bad at it? What if I do it wrong, and lose him, and end up worse off than if I’d just — kept the plan?”
She lifts her head and looks at me with her honest face on, the one that can’t lie, and she says: “Then you’ll have lost something real, instead of protecting yourself from ever having it. Which is worse, Charlotte. It just hurts slower, so you can pretend it doesn’t count.”
I have nothing for that. She’s right, and being right is a thing Indie does so gently you don’t feel it go in until you’re already bleeding better.
That’s the thing about being loved by someone honest. You can’t win the argument, because they’re not arguing. They’re just sitting in the room being right, with toast, until you run out of plans. I’ve spent four years being the one who fixes Indie’s life. I did not understand, until I was on the floor of my own kitchen getting mine fixed back, how much it costs to be the one who lets herself be helped. It costs control. It costs the whole fortress.
And she has just demonstrated, with a piece of toast and her head on my shoulder, that the price is somehow worth paying.
***
He comes over that night. I text him,Itexthim,initiated contact, a flagrant violation of a protocol that no longer exists — and he comes, and we don’t talk about the lake house, and we don’t talk about the bet. For a while we just sit on my couch and argue about a movie neither of us is watching.
“This is a bad movie,” he announces, twenty minutes in.
“You picked it.”
“I picked it because you said you hated it and I wanted to find out if you were right. You’re right. I hate that you’re right. It’s the most consistent feature of my life now.” He gestures at the screen. “Why is he runningtowardthe explosion? No one runs toward the explosion.”
“You would run toward the explosion.”
“I would run toward the explosioncharmingly,and survive, because the universe protects me, which we’ve established is my entire problem.” He looks over, and the movie keeps going, ignored. “You’re not watching this either.”
“I’m conducting surveillance.”
“On the film?”
“On you. You’re an ongoing situation. I keep notes.” I hear the word leave, and I don’t care. Which is new.
The whole apartment hums with the thing we’re not saying: that he’s on my couch, in my space, by mutual choice, with no operation and no excuse and nowhere either of us has to be.
It should be unbearable, the humming. For three weeks the not-saying was a kind of warfare, eighteen inches of held breath. But something changed at the lake house. Something got said with my mouth that can’t be unsaid. So the silence on the couch isn’t a standoff anymore. It’s an agreement we simply haven’t gotten around to signing. He knows. I know. The only question left is who stops pretending first, and I have discovered, to my ongoing horror, that I have become a person capable of going first.
And then I stop pretending to watch the movie, and he stops pretending to watch me pretend, and the distance between us on the couch does the thing the eighteen inches has been threatening to do for weeks.
It collapses.
He kisses me slowly this time. Nothing like the lake house, that was a dam breaking. This is a decision, made carefully, in private, with the lights low and no one to perform for.
There is a specific cruelty to a patient man, and I have never been on the receiving end of it before. Every boy I have ever let near me was in a hurry, to get somewhere, to prove something, to collect the win. Benedict is in no hurry at all. He kisses me like the kissing is the point and not a toll on the road to somewhere better. Like getting to do exactly this is already more than he expected the universe to hand him, and he intends to take his time being grateful. It undoes me faster than any urgency could. I have a whole defense built against being wanted in a hurry.
I have none at all against being savored.
One hand comes up to the side of my face, the way it did in the kitchen, except this time I don’t shove him off. This time I pull him closer. This time I climb half into his lap, the way I showed Indie a man would want, and find out, with my whole traitor body, that I want it too.
For a while it’s just that. Kissing, unhurried, his hand warm at my jaw and mine fisted in his shirt, the terrible movie throwing light around the dark room, both of us pretending we aren’t shaking. I have kissed people. I have done a great deal more than kiss people. I have never once, in any of it, felt like the kissing was a place to arrive instead of a toll to pay on the way somewhere, and I keep waiting for the part of me that manages these encounters to step in, take notes, stay safely behind the glass.
