Page 55 of Love All
***
And here is where I lie to the one person I have never successfully lied to. And get away with it. Because she lets me.
“Nothing happened. It ran its course. The bet’s over, the thing’s over, we’re both adults, it’s fine.” Every word a clean flat stone. “It was never going to be a — it was a season. It’s done. I’m honestly relieved. You know I don’t have the bandwidth for that during the spring.”
She looks at me a long moment. She knows. Of course she knows — she left a coffee outside my door four mornings running, watched me not answer her texts, clocked exactly which version of me is sitting on this counter. The sealed one. The dawn-court one. The one that only comes out when something’s gone through the floor. She knows it isn’t nothing. She knows “ran its course” is a phrase I built specifically to be too smooth to grab.
And she lets me have it.
That’s the thing I’ll never get over about Wednesday. She’s the happiest she’s ever been, two days from the question, lit up over a love that worked — and she looks at her best friend lying badly on a kitchen counter, and she makes a decision I can watch her make: not to push. Not to pry the lie out of my hands and force me to feel the thing under it, because she knows I’m not ready, and she knows forcing it would only send me higher upthe wall. She gives me the room. The exact mercy I’d never have had the courage to ask for.
“Okay,” she says. Gentle. “It ran its course.” Then, after a moment, not looking at me, examining her own knee: “But just between us — you’re coward Lotte.” She says it without one ounce of accusation, which is the only reason it gets all the way in. “I’m not going to make you talk about it tonight, because it’s Wednesday and I’m too happy and you’d just go to the moon, and I’d spend a week talking you back down. But I’ll be here when you’re ready. However long that is. Even if it’s after Saturday. Even if it’s June.” She looks up. “You don’t run a course on me, Lotte. I’ve got a lifetime pass.”
I do not cry, because I do not cry. But I have to look at the refrigerator for a while.
“Tell me about the dress,” I say, finally — which is me surrendering, and her winning, and both of us agreeing to call it a change of subject.
And she lights back up, instantly, completely, the way only Indie can — and tells me about the dress, and the flower thing, and her plan to not let Cole finish the sentence. And I sit in the warm radius of her happiness and let it be the only heat in the room, and for an hour it’s almost enough. For an hour I let myself believe the worst is behind us. I authored my own wreck and walled it off clean. Indie is two days from the best thing that will ever happen to her. The play worked. The one good thing I built is about to bloom in public in a borrowed dress. And whatever I did to myself in that doorway, I at least,at least, kept my oldest promise.
I kept it away from her. The disaster is mine, and the joy is hers, and the line between them holds, the way my lines always hold.
That’s the lie I go to sleep on Wednesday night. The most comfortable lie I’ve told in a week: the storm is over, and it onlytook me down, and everything that matters more than me is safe.
***
I don’t know about the equipment desk.
I don’t know that two buildings over, while Indie sat on my counter glowing about a dress, a boy I taught to coast was careless with the one secret that could turn her glow into the worst night of her life. I don’t know that Jack has it now, the whole shape of it,they built it, the two of them, Cole doesn’t know— and is carrying it around like the wound he’s carried for two years. Waiting, the way patient men wait, for a room full of people and a girl in a borrowed dress and a question about to be answered.
I don’t know that the play I’m so quietly, secretly proud of, the one good thing, the unqualified good, the thing that ishers— has a fuse on it now. Or that the fuse runs straight back to me. To a court in September. To a plan I drew up in love and never once imagined could be turned into a weapon.
It’s a particular kind of cruelty, the one the universe was setting up that week, and I’ve had a long time to admire its symmetry. I spent the whole season terrified of the cost, hunting for it, bracing for it, certain it would come for the thing I let myself want. And it did come. It just didn’t come for me. I was so busy guarding my own undefended places, so sure the bill would land where I’d left myself exposed, that I never once thought to guardhers.I built Indie a love and never imagined the love could be the thing they used against her.
You watch the door you came in through. You never watch the one you built for someone else.
I go to sleep Wednesday believing I’ve protected the only thing that matters.
The formal is Saturday.
I have no idea I’ve already lost it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Benedict
I GO TO the formal to confess.
That’s the thing I have to lead with, because everything that happens after is going to make me look like a coward, and I was, I was a coward for three whole days, but on the fourth day, the day of, I finally find the bottom of being fine, and I put on the suit with one plan and one plan only: find Cole before Jack does, sit him down, and hand him the truth myself. Gently. In daylight. The way I should have at lunch a week ago, when he sat across from me glowing.
I rehearsed it.Cole. Before anyone else says anything tonight, there’s a thing you should hear from me. Charlotte and I, we nudged you and Indie together, back at the start. The conversation you overheard, that she liked you, that was real, every word of it was true, but we set it up so you’d hear it, because you were too scared to move and so was she, and somebody had to. That’s all it was. It was love, Cole. We did it because we love you. It doesn’t change one true thing about you and her.I said it to the mirror until it stopped shaking. I have it. For the first time in three days I’ve done the brave, inconvenient thing in my own head, and all I have to do is walk into a ballroom and do it out loud, fast, before the man from the equipment desk gets there first.
I am one hour too late.
One hour. I will think about that hour for the rest of my life.
***
I know the second I see Cole’s face.
