Page 50 of Love All
And then I waited at home for him to bring me the chance to use it.
I knew it was wrong. I knew it cold. Nothing that comes next reflects well on me, and I’m not going to pretend I was confused, because I wasn’t. I have never been more clear-eyed in my life than I am when I open my door and see him standing there withhis whole undefended face on, holding the bad cheap flowers from the bodega on the corner, ready to fight for us —
— and decide, in cold blood, to make him stop.
Because here is what the four days and the gala and Jack have taught me. What the fear has been screaming since the first good morning: it got too deep. I let it get too deep. I slept eight hours on his chest. I laughed with my whole face in public. I told him I was scared and let him hold me through it, and every one of those is a door left open, and the cold gets in through open doors, and I can feel it coming. The cost. The bill. The moment it all gets taken away. And I cannot survive being the one it happens to. I decided that at nine years old, in a dress I never wore again.
The only way to survive losing him is to be the one who leaves. To do it first. On my terms. With my hand on the wheel, while I still have the wheel.
It’s not a decision you make with the front of your brain. The front of my brain knows better; the front of my brain spent a year revising its entire opinion of Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne and has, over my strenuous objections, fallen completely in love with him. But the decision doesn’t come from there. It comes from the floor, the oldest part, the part that has kept me alive since the cold house — and that part takes one look at how much I have to lose and rules, unilaterally, that the loss is unsurvivable, and the only mercy left is to make it quick and make it mine.
I’d love to say I overrule it. I don’t. I hand the floor the wheel. And the floor knows exactly one move, and it is a brutal one, and I am very good at it.
“Charlotte.” He holds the flowers out, a little helplessly, like he forgot he was holding them. “I know you talked to Jack. I know what he told you, and I know it landed right where you were already braced for it. So let me tell you the whole thing. Allof it — the worst version, the part where I’m the bad guy, because I was. I am. It’s true. Just let me tell it to you myself, instead of letting his version write the ending of us. Twenty minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”
And I look at him standing there, earnest and undefended andright,offering me the one thing I spent a month learning to want, the truth handed over willingly, no angle, the whole open hand — and I feel the floor take the wheel, and I reach for the only weapon that has never once failed me, and I aim it at the exact center of him.
“I’ve been thinking,” I say, “about what Jack told me.”
***
You have to understand that cruelty, real cruelty, the kind I was raised on — isn’t yelling. Yelling is amateur. Yelling is for people who’ve lost control. Real cruelty is precise. It’s quiet. It’s finding the one place a person is softest, the bruise they keep under everything, the thing they’ve spent their whole life hiding under a joke — and pressing your thumb into it, slowly, while you watch their face. I watched my mother do it across dinner tables my entire childhood. I swore I never would.
And I have spent a year learning, against my own will, exactly where Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne keeps his bruise. Which makes me the only person on earth equipped to do this to him properly.
That’s the obscenity of it. The part I’ll have to live with. Loving someone all the way down is the same skill as being able to destroy them. You can’t have one without the other. To love a person well, you have to learn them down to the soft hidden place, and the moment you’ve learned it, you’re holding the weapon, whether you ever meant to pick it up or not. I learned Ben in order to love him. I am about to use what I learned to end him. It is the most efficient cruelty there is.
It is precisely, exactly, to the letter, what my mother taught me love was for.
So I do it properly.
“Jack was right,” I say. Conversational. Setting it down between us like a verdict. “That’s the thing I keep coming back to. You’re exactly what he said. A man who has never once paid for anything in his life. Who floats.”
“That’s not—”
“I was a novelty.” I keep my voice level. Keep my face still. Do the whole terrible thing the way it’s meant to be done. “Be honest, for once. I was the one thing that didn’t fall into your lap. The one girl who told you no and meant it. And you chased it, because the chase was new, because nothing’s ever made you work and I made you work, and that was interesting, wasn’t it? For a season.” I tilt my head. “But you caught it. You caught me. The chase is over now. And you are going to get bored. You’ll coast off. You always coast off. Ask Jack.”
Every word going in exactly where I aimed it, the easy draining out of his face the way it did at the locker room, except this time I’m the one doing it. I’m the one holding the thumb to the bruise. And the bruise isam I real, is any of this real, or am I just a pleasant set of circumstances the universe hands things to, and I press, and I press, and I tell the man I love that he’s worthless, in the one dialect his deepest fear will believe.
He tries to talk twice.That’s not what this is, Charlotte. You know that’s not what this is.And the most methodical part of me notes that he’s right, and uses it anyway. Because the cruelty isn’t in saying a false thing. Any fool can say a false thing. The cruelty is in saying the false thing in the exact shape of a person’s truest fear, so that the part of them that has always secretly believed it drowns out the part that knows you’re lying. I’m not telling Ben he’s worthless. I’m reminding him that he has always suspected it.
And I’m offering myself up as the proof.
“So let’s not,” I say. “Let’s not do the slow version, where you get bored and I get left and we both pretend we didn’t see it coming. You won the bet. You won the — whatever this was. The conquest. Take the win, Hawthorne. Coast off. I’m not going to stand too close and pay like Jack did. I’m not going to be a cautionary tale in a black dress.”
The flowers are still in his hand. That’s the detail that undoes me. The stupid cheap bodega flowers, still in his hand, while I dismantle him in my doorway with the precision I usually save for people who deserve it.
***
He doesn’t yell either. That’s almost the worst part. I’ve handed him every reason to, and a lesser man would have. It would have been easier, a fight is a thing you can both survive. He doesn’t fight. He just stands there and takes it, the way Cole takes a hard ball. And when I finally run out of cruelty, he’s quiet for a long moment, and then he says, in a voice I’ve never heard him use, no charm in it anywhere, scraped all the way down to something true:
“You don’t believe a word of that.”
“I believe all of it.”
“No.” He shakes his head, slow. “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met, Charlotte. You don’t get to play dumb with me. You know exactly what you’re doing. You found the thing I’m most afraid of and you’re using it to make me leave — so you don’t have to be the one standing in the doorway when it ends. Because somewhere a long time ago, somebody taught you that leaving first is the only way to survive. And I get it. I do. I know the whole story — the cold house, the nine-year-old, the dress.” His voice cracks once, and he lets it. “But I’m not them. I’m not Jack’s version, and I’m not your mother’s lesson. I came herewith terrible flowers to tell you the truth about the worst thing I ever did, and you’re standing there weaponizing it before I can even—”
“I think you should go.”
