Page 49 of Love All
“You keep saying that. You never do.” I tilt my head. “I’m starting to think you like me.”
And I turn my phone around so she can see the screen, where the little red dot has been blinking the whole time. Recording.
She stares at it. Then at me. Pure murder.
“You absolute—”
“I love a new ringtone,” I say.
***
She laughs.
For one second, at the edge of a gala, with fourteen cents and a stolen recording between us, the unmeltable Charlotte Astor throws her head back andlaughs, the real one, the one she saves, aimed at me, in public, with the wall in temporary ruins — and the relief of it goes through me like heat.There. There she is. We can still get back to there.For that one second I let myself believe the whole disaster is just a bad few days and a misunderstanding named Jack, and that the laugh means the door is still open.
Then the laugh fades, and I watch her remember. Watch it all come back across her face, Jack, the cost, the four days, the thing she’s decided is coming. Watch her reach down and pick the wall back up off the floor where the laugh dropped it.
“Delete that,” she says. Quiet now. Not playing.
“Never.”
“Ben.” And there it is — my name. Not a weapon. Almost a plea. “Delete it. Please. I can’t — I have to—” She stops. Starts again, smaller. “Don’t make this harder than it’s already going to be.”
And I understand, standing there holding eleven seconds of audio I already know I will never delete, that she has decided. The laugh wasn’t a door opening. It was a door she was saying goodbye through. Somewhere in the last four days, with Jack’s help, and her history’s — she made up her mind to leave first, on her own terms, while she still holds the wheel. And the gala, the bet, the ringtone, the laugh, all of it, is the long goodbye of a girl determined to write the ending herself before anyone can write it for her.
I do not delete the ringtone. I’d sooner delete my own hands. Eleven seconds of Charlotte Astor calling me the smartest boy in the world and failing, against her own best efforts, to keep from laughing, it is the realest thing I own, and I am not going to be the one who lets it go.
Even if she is.
“Charlotte,” I say. “Whatever you’ve decided — don’t. Just let me tell you about Jack. Twenty minutes. Then decide.”
I go after her. The old me wouldn’t have. The old me would have shrugged, found the nearest stranger to charm, and let her go, because chasing is what you do when you’re afraid of losing something, and the old me was never once afraid of losing anything. But I’m not the old me. She saw to that. So I cross the room after her, through the boosters and the noise, with no plan and no line, just the certainty that I cannot let her author this ending alone — and I catch her by the coat check, and she turns, and her face is already composed. Already gone. Already a thousand miles away.
“Not here,” she says. “Not tonight. I can’t do this here.”
And the awful thing is that she’s right, it isn’t the place, and I let her go for the second time that night, and hate myself the exact amount I deserve.
She’s gone, back into the glittering room, back behind the wall, paying the rest of her debts to people who have never once made her laugh. And I stand at the edge of it holding a phone and a forfeit and the dawning certainty that I won the bet and am about to lose the entire war.
I won it eighty cents at a time. A guy with a borrowed card reader and a hand-lettered sign and a year’s worth of being liked, finally bolted to something that mattered, five dollars from a stranger in a dining-hall line, a fistful of change from a kid, every person who gave because I made them feel, for ten seconds, like the most interesting person at the fence. It was the only planI ever made entirely by myself, and it beat the most relentless person I’ve ever met by the price of a gumball, and I should feel like a champion.
I feel like a man watching the one prize he actually wanted walk out toward the coats.
I have a phone holding the best eleven seconds of my life, and an empty space at my side where, eight days ago, she actually slept, eight uninterrupted hours, on my chest, undefended, a thing she swore the next morning never happened. I’ll take the eleven seconds. They’re better than the silence. Barely.
And silence, I’m beginning to understand, is what I’m about to have a vast and uninterrupted amount of.
Fourteen cents. The price of nothing. The exact distance between us, close enough to be unbearable, and just wide enough to lose by.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Charlotte
HE COMES TO my apartment the night after the gala, which I knew he would, because the new Benedict, the one I made, the one who reaches — was never going to let me end this from a distance. And some cowardly part of me was counting on it.
You can’t author the wreck without the other person showing up to be wrecked.
I’ve spent the day getting ready for it, which is the most chilling part to admit. I didn’t sit in dread waiting for him. Iprepared.I thought about what I’d say and how I’d say it, the way I prepare for everything, a match, an exam, a hostile cross — because if I’m going to do the thing the floor has decided I have to do, I’m going to do it well. I even rehearsed the worst line, the one I’m holding for last. Said it under my breath in the shower until it came out flat enough to be lethal. I didn’t lose control and lash out. I built the cruelty in advance, carefully, the way I build everything.
