Page 63 of Love All
“I know there’s no prize.” He holds my eyes. “I figured that part out today too. Turns out it’s the only kind of thing worth doing.”
And that, not a touch, not a line, just him arriving, on his own, at the exact place I had to crawl to — is the closest I come all week to forgetting why I shut him out in the first place. I want, badly, to close the three feet between us. I don’t. Neither does he. We just stand there, both of us holding still, both of us choosing the girl under the hood over the thing we want. It is the first genuinely adult moment of my entire romantic life.
It hurts more than any of the cruel ones.
“I want to say one more thing, and then I’ll stop,” he says. “Not to move you. Just so it’s said out loud.” He waits until I look at him. “You didn’t do the doorway because you’re your mother. You did it because you were nine, and somebody taught you thatleaving first is how you live through it. That’s not the same as being cruel. Cruel people enjoy it. You’ve looked sick for a week. I’m not telling you that to fix us. I’m telling you because you’ve clearly decided you’re a monster and you’re not.”
I spent the entire week building the case that I am, in fact, my mother. I’d nearly finished it. And he walks in and takes it apart in four sentences, kindly, wanting nothing for it. I do not trust myself to answer. If I open my mouth, I’ll say the thing I can’t afford to say yet, the thing that isn’t Indie’s turn to hear about, so I put it away. And I understand, for the first time, exactly how much it cost him to stand in my doorway and get taken apart and not fire back. It is very expensive, holding a true thing and not using it as a weapon.
I’m learning the price in real time.
“Go tomorrow,” I say, when I can. “Before it calcifies. I’ll be with Indie — not managing her. Just near, if she’ll have me. Whatever happens with Jack, we clean up our own messes now. You go to yours. I go to mine. Even if neither one forgives us.”
“And Cole?” he says. “If Jack clears Indie with the school, that fixes her name. It doesn’t fix them. Cole still pulled back from her in front of everyone. He still believed it.”
“That one isn’t ours to fix.” I thought about this on the drive, too. “Cole doubted her when it counted, and no confession of mine puts that back. He has to be the one to earn it — on his own, by choosing to believe in her louder than he doubted her. If he does, she might let him. If he can’t, she’s better off knowing now.” I look at him. “We can clear the facts. We can’t hand Indie her faith in him back. He has to do that. Or not.”
“When did you get wise,” he says, and there’s no joke under it.
“Same week you got brave. Bad timing. Both of us.”
“Charlotte.” He says it as I reach the door. I stop but don’t turn, because if I turn, I’m not sure what I’ll do. “Whatever thisis or isn’t — thank you for coming here instead of doing it alone. I know what it cost you to knock.”
“Two knocks,” I say. “No wasted motion. Don’t read anything into it.”
I hear him almost laugh behind me. I let myself keep it, the almost-laugh, all the way down the stairs and out to the car, where I sit for a while, not driving.
I have just handed the most important thing in my life to a set of hands that aren’t mine and will not be reporting back to me hourly. Every cell I own is screaming to go back up, to sit in on the conversation, to write him a single index card of things not to say. I grip the wheel, the actual one, the car one — and make myself not. And underneath the screaming there’s something I haven’t felt in so long I nearly don’t recognize it. Quiet, and awful, and a little like relief: the feeling of setting a weight down because you have finally admitted you were never strong enough to carry it alone. And that carrying it alone was the whole reason it kept crushing the people you handed it to.
Trust, I decide, driving home under streetlights I do not control, is just the thing you do when you’ve run out of evidence that your grip ever helped.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Benedict
JACK CLOSES THE equipment room at six. I get there at five of, so he can’t tell me to make an appointment.
He looks up when I come in, and his face does the thing it always does around me now — goes smooth and ready, a man setting his feet. “We’re closing,” he says. “Return anything?”
“No.” My mouth is dry. I practiced this in the car, and every version sounded like a guy performing an apology, which is its own kind of lie. So I throw the practiced ones out and just start. “I came to say the thing I owed you two years ago.”
That gets him. Not much. A flicker.
“I was out till three the night before the semi,” I say. “You told me not to go, and I told you that you were being dramatic. I showed up wrecked and I played wrecked, and at four-all in the third I hit a garbage serve and I laughed. At your whole life. And then I spent the summer telling you it’d work out while the committee took your scholarship, and when you stopped talking to me, I decided you were the one being unreasonable. I made myself the guy it happened to because I didn’t want to own what I did. I was too comfortable to try the one week you needed me to, and it cost you the thing it never once cost me. I have known that on some level for two years, but saying it was heavy, and I don’t do heavy.” I make myself hold his eyes through the wholething. “I’m sorry. I made your life very difficult and called it a rough patch and went back to my life. I’m sorry.”
The room is very quiet. Somewhere, a fluorescent light buzzes.
Jack sets down the clipboard he’s been holding like a prop. For a second he doesn’t look smooth or ready. He looks twenty years old, standing in a conference final, watching his doubles partner laugh.
“You know how long I waited for you to say that.” His voice isn’t steady the way it usually is with me. It’s steady the way a thing is when a person is holding it very hard. “Two years. I used to script it. What you’d say, what I’d say back. I had a whole speech. And you’re not doing the smile now…so thanks.”
He picks at the edge of the desk. When he talks again it comes out lower, like it isn’t fully meant for me.
“You want to know what the last year has been? I hand out towels to guys I used to beat. I sign out hoppers for a team I was the two seed on. I watched you walk through here twice a week for three years — still golden, still late to everything and forgiven for it — and every single time, I did the math again on how the exact same season ended my whole thing and didn’t leave a mark on you. That’s what it was. Not the scholarship. I could’ve swallowed the scholarship. It was watching it cost me everything and cost you nothing. Over and over. At the equipment desk.” He looks up. “So when the chance came to make it cost you something, I took it. I’m not going to stand here and pretend I feel clean about how — now that I know the Roy girl was real. But you asked why I did it. That’s why. I wanted you to feel a consequence. Just one.”
I don’t defend myself. There’s nothing to defend. “You’re allowed to have wanted that. I’d have wanted it too.”
“Yeah, well.” He wipes his face with the back of his hand, once, rough. “Why now? Somebody put you up to this? The Astor girl?”
