Page 43 of Love All
She comes.
***
I thought it would be a war. Everything with us has been a war, the bet, the court, the banter, the eighteen inches, two people firing across a net for a year. I thought, if this ever happened, it would be a competition. Both of us trying to win. Neither giving an inch.
It is not a war. That’s the first thing she undoes in me, the second I get my hands in her hair and feel her go soft against the door I’ve just shut behind her. She isn’t competing. She came here to lose on purpose, to hand over the one thing she has never handed anyone: the control, the wheel, the whole white-knuckled grip — and the trust in that lands so hard I have to stop, forehead to hers, and just breathe for a second before I can be careful enough to deserve it.
I’ve spent a year learning her tells across a net. The brightening before the kill. The one quiet point after a missed ball. The strings she touches twice before a big serve. I know her in motion, mid-rally, mid-insult, mid-takedown. I do not know this Charlotte at all, the one with her guard all the way down, and I go slow partly because she needs slow and partly because I am suddenly learning a whole new dialect of a person I was certain I’d studied to the bone, and every new word of it takes the air clean out of me.
“If you make this weird,” she says against my mouth, “I’m leaving.”
“Define weird.”
“Sincere. Slow. Any of the things your face is currently threatening.”
“No promises.” I kiss the corner of her mouth — the clever mouth I’ve been thinking about since September. “But first. One house rule.”
She pulls back an inch, suspicious. “A rule.”
“We need a safe word.”
“Awhat.”
“A safe word. You say it, everything stops. Instantly. No questions, no sulking — I go make you a sandwich and we never speak of it again. Non-negotiable. It’s the whole deal.”
“‘Stop’ is a perfectly serviceable—”
“Too easy to say by accident. Too easy to not mean. Pick something you would never otherwise say in this bed.”
She considers it with the gravity she brings to everything, and I watch her land on it. Watch her mouth tip.
“Connor.”
“You are not making the safe word the name of the man I nearly drowned in a lake.”
“It’s perfect. Nothing on earth would kill a moment faster, which is the entire function of a safe word. You said pick something I’d never otherwise say.” She’s fighting a smile and losing badly. “Congratulations, Hawthorne. Should I ever need you to stop, I’ll simply summon Connor.”
“I hate it. I hate that it’s perfect.Fine.Connor.”
And we’re both laughing then, foreheads together, and the laughing does the thing sincerity couldn’t have, takes the fear down a notch, makes the bed safe, turns the whole terrifying enterprise into something we’re doingtogetherinstead of something happening to her.
Then I pull back, joke off my face, because this part she gets straight.
“Everything else — you set the pace. You say slow, I slow. You say more, you get more. And the second ‘Connor’ leaves your mouth, we stop, wherever we are, no questions. You have all the control here, Charlotte. You always did.”
Something happens in her face when I say it,you have all the control here, something cracks and reassembles, because I’ve handed back the exact thing she’s terrified of losing, and in handing it back I’ve made it safe enough to let go of.
“I don’t want it tonight,” she says, very quietly. The bravest sentence I have ever heard her say. “That’s the whole — Ben. I’m so tired of running everything. Take it. Borrow all of it. I want to find out what I am when I’m not the one holding the wheel.”
So I take it.
***
There’s a moment, the first time, after the clothes and the logistics and the laughing at a stuck button (if you tear that shirt you’re replacing it,she informs me, and then, minutes later, does not care about the shirt at all) — where the joking runs out and there’s just the other person. Finally. All of them. Looking back at you.
She looks back at me in the low light. No wall, no guard, nothing held in reserve. Just Charlotte, undefended, letting herself be seen. I forget every clever thing I have ever known how to say.
I take my time, because she’s never been given time. I’ve been imagining this for the better part of a year and have no intention of rushing the one thing I actually wanted to earn.
