Page 51 of Love All
“Charlotte—”
“Go,Benedict.” And I give him the last one. The killing one. The one I kept in reserve, delivered flat and final and cold as the house I learned it in: “You were a project. That’s all. I’m very good at projects. Congratulations on being a difficult one.”
Something closes in his face then. Not the gold, the gold is long gone. Something underneath it. Something I spent two months coaxing open. A door I watch shut from the inside. And I know, watching it, that I’ve done it. I’ve finally found the bottom of even Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne’s patience. I’ve hit the one nerve the unkillable charm can’t grin over.
For a year I threw everything I had at that charm and never once got under it. I called him hot air and a black hole and a man who’d earned nothing. He collected every insult like a gift, because none of them were true and we both knew it. This one is different. This one I built to be believed. And I watch him believe it, the proof of how well I know him landing on his face as the worst kind of betrayal — because the only reason the blow connects at all is that I was close enough to learn where to aim it.
I turned the intimacy itself into the weapon. That’s the thing he’ll never forgive. And the thing I’ll never forgive myself: not that I hit him. That I used the closeness to do it.
He sets the flowers down on the little table by my door. Carefully. Like they’re the only thing in the room that hasn’t done anything wrong.
“Okay,” he says, very quietly. “Okay. You win, Charlotte. You always win.”
And he turns, and he walks down the hall, and he does not look back. And I stand in my doorway having gotten exactly, precisely what I wanted.
Which was to be the one left standing.
***
I close the door. I don’t cry, because I don’t cry. I stand in my own apartment in the absolute silence I have engineered, holding the wheel I refused to let go of, perfectly safe, perfectly in control, perfectly alone — and I understand, with the clean horror of a true thing arriving all at once, that I have finally become her.
Not metaphorically. Exactly. I took the most precise weapon in the world and put it through the chest of the one person who never once aimed anything but tenderness at me. And I did it for the reason she always does it: to control an outcome. To manage a loss. To never, ever be the one left holding the open door.
The flowers are on the table. Cheap. Wilting already. Bought by a man who crossed a city to fight for me and got gutted in a hallway for his trouble.
I should open the door. He’s probably still in the stairwell, he’s not fast when he’s hurt. I learned that much. I learned all of him. I learned him the way I learn things I intend tokeep.Three steps and one sentence and I could undo it:I lied. I’m sorry. I’m scared. Please come back.Indie’s voice is in my head, the thing she said on the kitchen floor a lifetime ago,you’ll have lost something real instead of protecting yourself from ever having it. Which is worse. It just hurts slower.She was right. She is always right.
And I stand with my hand actually on the doorknob, the metal cold under my palm, for what feels like an hour, while the part of me that loves him begs the part of me that grew up in the cold house to open the door.
The cold house wins. The way it always wins. It has a twenty-one-year head start.
I take my hand off the knob. I let him go.
I don’t call Indie. I couldn’t survive her kindness; kindness, right now, would finish me. I sit down on the floor of my kitchen, the same floor where she fixed me, once — and hold the wheel I refused to let go of, and I am, by every measure I was raised to trust, completely safe. No one can hurt me now. I’ve made certain of it the way I make certain of everything: by controlling it. By ending it first. By being the one who leaves.
And I sit there in the airtight safety I built and understand that it is indistinguishable, from the inside, from the worst loneliness I have ever felt.
I authored the wreck. It’s a flawless wreck. No loose ends. No soft edges. Every exit sealed.
My mother would be proud of it.
That’s the sentence that finally does what the gala and Jack and even his face in the doorway couldn’t quite do. The sentence that sits me all the way down on the cold floor. My mother would beproud.Of the precision. Of the control. Of a daughter who looked at the best thing that ever happened to her and chose, flawlessly, on schedule, with no soft edges — to destroy it before it could destroy her. I spent my entire life running from becoming her.
I ran directly into her arms. In a hallway. With a man’s cheap flowers wilting on the table as the evidence.
And I have never in my life wanted anything as badly as I want, in that silent perfect room, to be the kind of person who’d have let him stay.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Benedict
YOU WANT TO know the most useless thing about being good at recovering from things?
It works.
I’m on a court the next morning at a reasonable hour, not her court, not dawn, I’m not a masochist — hitting with Reyes, and I’m fine. I’m charming. I make the jokes. I win the points I want and throw away the ones I don’t, the way I’ve always played, the way I’ve always lived, and Reyes laughs and Coach nods and nobody watching would know that the night before, a girl in a doorway took the most precise weapon on earth and put it clean through the middle of me.
That’s the thing about the gift, the gold, the charm I was handed instead of a personality: it’s also a sealant. It closes over a wound so fast and so smooth that even you can’t find the seam. I’ve been doing it my whole life. Bad grade, dead grandfather, friendship I torched in a conference final, smile, shrug, move on, because moving on is free and I have always, always had the money. By noon the day after Charlotte ends us, I have reassembled the entire golden surface of myself. Gleaming. Unbothered. Intact.
