Page 53 of Love All
I engage.
“You must be thrilled. Mission accomplished. You got in her ear, you handed her the worst version of me, and she ran with it. Hope it was worth whatever you think I owe you.”
“You think this was about you?” Jack laughs, short. “Everything’s about you, isn’t it. I told the truth. She did the math. That’s not my fault. That’s just you being you, and people finally seeing it.” He leans back. “You float, Ben. I’ve been telling people for two years and nobody believed me, because of the grin. She believed me. Smart girl. Too smart for you.”
And here is where I should walk away. Here is where any sane, unwounded man walks away. But he just helped blow up the one good thing I ever built, and I’m gutted, and I want, childishly, recklessly, fatally — to wipe the smug certainty off his face. To prove I am not the coasting nothing he’s decided I am. That I made something real. Once.
“You don’t know the half of what she and I did,” I say. “You think I float. You think nothing I touch is real. She and I builtsomething this semester that’s going to outlast both of us, and nobody’s ever going to know it was us, and that’s thepoint—”
“Built what?”
I hear it the second it’s out. I watch his eyes change.
“Cole and Indie,” I say, and cannot stop saying it, the bitter momentum carrying me straight off the cliff. “We got them together. The whole thing. The two of us. They think they found each other, and they didn’t — we — she ran the play and I — it doesn’t matter. It was the realest thing either of us ever did, and you’ll never understand it, because you’ve never made anything that wasn’t about a grudge.”
The silence after is different from the silence before.
Jack sits very still. And I watch it happen on his face, the slow, terrible dawning, the gears turning. A man who has been looking for a weapon for two years, finally being handed one. Gift-wrapped. By the idiot he hates. Who has never in his careless life learned to keep his mouth shut when it counts.
“Cole doesn’t know,” Jack says slowly. Not a question. Testing the weight of it. “Cole thinks it’s real. Cole thinks he found her himself.”
“Itisreal—”
“But he doesn’t know you built it.” Jack’s mouth does something I don’t like at all. “He doesn’t know the whole thing started as aproject.That the great love of Cole Whitman’s life was a bet between two bored rich kids who were laughing at him the whole—”
“That’s not what it was, and you know it—”
“It’s what it’llsoundlike.” And he smiles then. Fully. For the first time since I’ve known him. And it’s awful — because it isn’t cruelty, exactly. It’s relief. The relief of a man who has finally found a way to make me feel what he felt two years ago, standing in the wreckage I coasted away from. “Huh. Thanks, Benny. Ireally mean that. You always did love to hand people the thing that ruins them. Nice to be on the giving end of you for once.”
He stands up, and leaves the desk, and leaves me holding a ball hopper.
I stand there a long time. Long enough that the kid working the desk asks twice if I need anything, and I say no, fine, great, the autopilot answering for me while the actual me does the math I was too gutted and too proud to do thirty seconds earlier, when it might have mattered.
Here’s the math. Jack doesn’t want money. Jack doesn’t want a girl or a ranking or an apology; those ships sailed years ago, in a wreck I built. Jack wants one thing, the only thing a man carries that long. He wants me tofeel it.To stand in the rubble of something I care about and understand, finally, from the inside, the exact weight of the bill I handed him sophomore year and grinned my way out of paying. For two years he’s had no way to make me feel it, because nothing I touch ever costs me anything. Because I float. Because the gold seals every wound before it can teach me a single thing.
And I just handed him the way. I told him where I built something I actually love. Something undefended. Something with two of my favorite people standing inside it, not knowing it has a fuse. I lit it for him and passed him the match and called it winning an argument.
He isn’t going to come after me. That’s the genius of it. The awful symmetry. He’s going to do to me exactly what I did to him: nothing, to me, directly. He’s going to let it land on whoever’s standing closest. And the people standing closest to the thing I just confessed are Cole, who sat across from me an hour ago glowing,somebody set the whole thing up,about to ask the most important question of his life — and Indie, who will be standing right next to him when it detonates, and who has donenothing in this entire story but love her best friend and get loved back.
And behind both of them: Charlotte. Who made me swear, on an empty court, before any of the rest of it, before the lake house or the gala or the doorway, that whatever happened between her and me, we would never, ever let it reach Indie.
Her over the plan,I told her, that first cold morning. Meaning it with everything I had.Every time.
And then she left me, and I let the leaving turn me back into the floating careless thing I promised her I wasn’t, and in one sealed, gleaming afternoon of beingfine,I handed the plan, and Indie, and Cole, and the one good true thing the two of us ever made together — to the single person on earth who has waited two years to watch me learn what a bill feels like.
I put the ball hopper away. My hands are steady. They’re always steady.
That’s the whole problem with me, and it took twenty-two years and a girl in a doorway and a friend at an equipment desk to find it out: my hands are always steady, right up until the second I realize what they’ve already done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Charlotte
GRIEF, IT TURNS out, has excellent manners when you raise it the way I was raised. It doesn’t make scenes. It gets up at dawn and goes to practice and hits four hundred balls with a clean steady toss and a face that gives nothing away. The only tell, the single tell, is that the court is the only place all day it can stand to be, because the court is the one room in my life where being alone is thepointand not the verdict.
So that’s where I am, the morning after I broke it off with him. And the morning after that. And the one after that. Out under the early lights at an hour with no witnesses, doing the thing I have always done when the floor of my life gives way: narrowing the entire world down to a yellow ball and a white line and the small clean war between them.
It works. That’s the terrible thing about the way I was built. It all works. The wall holds. The serve goes in. You can run an entire life on control and never once let anybody see the bill, and I am proof of it, gliding around a court at six in the morning, perfectly composed, perfectly alone, having engineered the second of those things in order to never have to feel the first.
