Page 48 of Love All
“And,” Coach goes on, savoring it, “a huge congratulations and thank-you to Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne, whose grand total came in at… forty-eight thousand, six hundred and twelve dollars—” he pauses. He actually pauses, the showman. He lets it hang. “—andtwentycents.”
For a second, nobody does the math.
Then everybody does the math at once.
Six. Twenty.Fourteen cents.
I won. By fourteen cents. Out of forty-eight thousand dollars apiece, mine raised with a sign and a card reader, a thousand strangers at a time; hers raised by sheer terrifying competence — the whole season-long war has come down to the price of nothing. Less than the change a kid dumped in my hand outside the dining hall two months ago.
Across the floor, Charlotte’s mouth falls open. Then it shuts. Then her eyes find mine, and she mouths five words at me, slow and clear and incandescent with disbelief:
Are you fucking kidding me.
And of course it’s fourteen cents. Of course it is. Two people who spent a year proving they’re perfectly, exactly matched, across a net, across a bench, across a bed — went out and raised, independently, with opposite methods, two fortunes that landed within a dinner tip of each other. We can’t even have a blood feud without it ending in a tie so close it needs a microscope. A man with any sense would read it as an omen. I have no sense. I have a grin, a phone, and a girl I’m about to lose by the very same impossible margin.
The room comes apart. People are screaming. Reyes is on a chair.
I grin at her. I can’t help it. It’s the first real thing that has passed between us in four days, and it’s rage, and I’d take it over the silence a hundred times out of a hundred.
***
She finds me at the edge of the room ten minutes later, because a bet is a bet, and Charlotte Astor pays her debts the way she does everything: on time, and with contempt.
That’s the thing about her, even now. Even walled-off and leaving. She came to pay. She could have ducked it, the whole school watched her lose; nobody would have made her stand here and perform a forfeit; she could have sent a check and a note and vanished into her own grace. But Charlotte does not duck a debt. Not even a humiliating one. Not even to a man she’s decided to leave. She comes and stands in front of me with her chin up to settle what she owes, and God help me, I love her so much in that second I can barely get the words out.
“Fourteen fucking cents,” she says, by way of hello. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Get what over with?”
“Don’t.” Her jaw is tight. The wall is up, but her eyes are doing something behind it — something at war with the rest of her face. “You know the terms. You won. By the change in a man’s pocket, you won. So name it. The humiliation to be named later. Name it and let me go.”
Because that’s what the bet is, in the end. Not a wager. Athread.The first one, the one she threw down on an empty court in September because I dared her to earn something, and we’ve both been earning ever since. Her the money. Me the right to stand near her. It has pulled us hand over hand all the way here. And now it’s the last thread still connecting us across a room she has otherwise walled me out of, and I am not about to cut it with a cruel forfeit.
I’m going to use it. I’m going to use it to pull her back one more inch.
So I don’t make it cruel. I make it ours.
“Say it,” I say. “The thing from the terms. That’s the whole forfeit. Just say it, out loud, where I can hear it.”
She knows exactly which thing. Her mouth goes flat. “You’re very handsome and the smartest boy in the world,” she says — fast, flung at me like a glove, already turning to leave.
“Ah, ah, ah.” I catch her elbow. Gentle. An out right there if she wants it. “Not like that. Slowly. And louder. I waited two months and fourteen cents for this. I intend to savor it.”
She turns back, and for one second, one second, the wall cracks, and there she is. The real one. Furious and reluctant and fighting a thing at the corner of her mouth that wants, against every order she’s giving it, to be a smile.
It’s the most herself she’s been in four days. Furious at me, furious at the bet, furious at the part of her that’s enjoying this against her will, and underneath all of it, just for that second, the thing I’ve been starving for, the thing the wall has been keeping from me: she is glad to be standing here losing to me. She’d die before admitting it. It’s written all over her anyway.
And she squares up, and she says it, loud, ringing, mortified, magnificent, to the whole edge of a crowded room:
“You arevery handsomeand thesmartest boy in the world!”
The crowd whoops. She glares. I grin.
“Happy?” she snaps.
“Deliriously. Say it once more, I think I missed the—”
“I will end you.”
