Page 59 of Love All
We just learned to be afraid in different houses.
I don’t answer him because I have nothing yet to say that isn’t either a move or a wound, and I am, for the first time, trying very hard not to make another move.
***
So I stop.
It is the hardest thing I have ever done, and it doesn’t look like anything. It looks like a girl sitting on her kitchen floor, thefloor where Indie fixed me once, the floor where I lied to her about Ben — doing nothing. No plan. No optimized message. No coffee left as strategy. No serve to hit, no court to narrow the world down to, no wheel to hold. I sit in the unfixable thing and do not try to fix it, and it is unbearable, and I make myself bear it. Because every single time in my life I’ve tried to fix a thing by taking control of it, I’ve made it worse, and the people I love have paid, and I am finally, finally out of evidence that my way works.
And in the silence, the real silence, not the engineered kind I built in my doorway, but the kind where you’ve put the tools down and have nothing left to do but look — a thought arrives. Small, and terrible, and entirely unwelcome.
The only thing that might give Indie back what I took from her isn’t a plan. It’s the truth. The whole shape of it, out loud, in public, where I did the damage, with my own name attached and no curtain anywhere. Not a managed reveal. Not a precise message that lands. The actual opposite of everything I’m good at: standing up with no control over how it goes, no guarantee it works, no wheel, and handing Indie back the one thing I stole. The right to know exactly what was done to her, and decide for herself what it means.
It would clear her in front of everyone who watched her be humiliated. It would cost me the only thing I’ve ever truly kept, which is the appearance of always having known best. And I cannot do it alone, because half the truth isn’t mine to tell. Half of it lives in a boy I gutted in a doorway. A boy who just offered, with the match still warm in his hand, to do anything at all.
I look at his text again.Tell me and it’s done.
I am going to have to go to Ben. The one person I promised myself I’d never need, after I made so very sure he’d never come back. I am going to have to walk back across all of it and ask the man I destroyed to help me undo the disaster we built together. Not to win him back. Not as a move. Because it is the only wayleft to give Indie the truth, and the truth is the only thing I have left that isn’t a lie I’m telling to stay in control.
I don’t sleep. I sit on the floor until the light comes up gray in the window, and for once I don’t fill the dark with a plan. I just let it be true: I hurt her. I can’t fix it the way I fix things. And the only road back runs straight through the wreckage of the one bridge I was most careful to burn.
There’s a kind of terror in it I didn’t expect. Every other low point of my life, I had the wheel, the cold house, the dress at nine, every loss since. I survived them all the same way: seize the controls, steer hard into the skid, call the wreck I chose better than the wreck I feared. This is the first time I have ever sat in the skid and not grabbed anything. It feels like dying. It also feels, somewhere far underneath, like the first honest minute I’ve had in years, because for once I’m not performing the recovery. Not managing the optics of my own grief. Not three steps ahead, arranging how this will look. I’m just a girl on a floor who hurt her best friend and doesn’t know how to fix it and is going to have to ask for help from someone she wronged.
It’s a strange feeling, putting down the wheel for the first time at twenty-one.
Your hands don’t know what to do. They just sit there. Open. Useless.
Free.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Benedict
COLE COMES BACK for his things on Sunday.
I hear the key and I’m up off the couch too fast, and I say his name, and he doesn’t answer. He just goes to his room and starts putting shirts in a bag. I stand in his doorway and watch him do it. He folds each one. Cole never folds anything.
He’s folding shirts so he doesn’t have to look at me.
“You don’t have to move out,” I say.
“I’m staying at Reyes’s for a while.” He sets the bag down and reaches for the stuff on his desk. “It’s easier.”
“Cole. Please just let me say the one thing and then I’ll shut up. Indie didn’t know. She wasn’t in on any of it. Whatever Jack told you about pity—”
“Don’t.” He says it quietly, which is worse than loud. He holds a phone charger in both hands and looks at it instead of me. “You know what I keep landing on? I couldn’t figure out why a girl like that would ever laugh at my jokes. And I told myself, stop it, man. She just likes you. And it turns out I was right the first time. There was a reason. There was a whole plan.” His voice stays level the entire way through, and that’s the part that takes the wind out of me. “You built me a girlfriend because you felt sorry for me. That’s not a favor, Ben. That’s the meanestthing anyone’s ever done to me, and you did it because you care. I can’t even be angry at it right. I don’t know where to put it.”
“That’s not what it was—”
“Then what was it.” He finally looks at me. “Because here’s the thing I can’t get around. You looked at me, and you looked at her, and some part of you decided I couldn’t get there on my own. That I needed a running start she didn’t know she was giving me. You can dress that up however you want. Underneath it is you thinking I wasn’t enough.” He isn’t angry saying it. He’s just tired. And sure. “And the worst part is, you weren’t wrong to think it. I couldn’t say two words to her. I needed the help. So now I get to know that the best thing that ever happened to me happened because my friend ran a charity for the kid who couldn’t do it himself.”
“You’re not a charity, Cole—”
“I know it’s not what you meant.” He zips the bag. “It’s what it is anyway.”
He gets the last of it and stops in front of me, because I’m still in the doorway, because some idiot part of me thinks that if I stand here long enough, the right sentence will arrive. It doesn’t. I don’t have a right sentence for this. I have charm, and charm is the thing that built the trap, and I can see him waiting for me to try it, almost hoping I will, so he’ll have something clean to hate.
I step out of the way instead.
