Page 62 of Love All
He steps back and lets me in.
***
The apartment is too quiet. Cole’s shelves are half empty. I clock it, and understand it, and don’t comment, because it isn’t mine to comment on, and because the emptiness says everything about what this has already cost him.
I don’t sit. Sitting is for negotiations.
“I did a cruel thing to you in my doorway,” I say. “I want to say it before I ask you for anything, so you know I’m not pretending it away to make the ask easier. I found the thing you’re most afraid of, and I used it, on purpose, because I would rather hurt you than risk you leaving me first. That’s the whole reason. There isn’t a better one underneath it. I’m not here to take it back or make you feel better about it. I just needed you to hear that I know exactly what I did.”
He’s quiet a moment. “Okay,” he says. Notit’s fine.Just — received. He doesn’t reach for a version that lets either of us off. I’ll admit I didn’t expect that. I braced for charm or for cold, and got neither, and it throws me more than either would have.
“And I told Jack,” he says. “So you know I’m not pretending mine away either. Nobody dragged it out of me. I wanted to prove to him I’d built something real, so I threw the realest thing we ever made at him, and he took it and lit Indie on fire with it. That’s mine. Not yours. Not his. Mine.”
“I know.” And I do. Somewhere in the last week, I stopped needing it to be more his fault than mine. “We did the same thing, Ben. Different words for it. You were careless because careless was safe, and I was controlling because control was safe, and we both went for the safe thing at the exact moment the people we love needed us to do the hard one. We’re not opposites. I spent a year telling myself we were.”
Something moves behind his eyes. He doesn’t say anything. He just takes it in, and lets it be true, and I watch it cost him something to agree, and I respect him for paying it.
There’s a photo lying face-up on the coffee table, out of place among the mugs and the mess, two boys and a small trophy, one of them Ben, the other one laughing. I don’t have to ask who the laughing one is. Ben sees me see it.
“I got it down last night,” he says. “It’s been on a shelf for two years and I never once actually looked at it. Turns out if you make yourself look, you find out you’re the reason the other guy stopped laughing.” He doesn’t reach over to put it away or turn it face-down. He lets it sit there between us, face-up — which a month ago he could not have done. “I always told the story like the friendship just ended. Like it was something that happened to me. It didn’t happen to me. I did it. I’ve never said that sentence out loud before tonight, so — there. I did it.”
I have watched this man charm his way out of every uncomfortable thing that has ever approached him. Watching him sit still inside one instead, on purpose, with the evidence face-up on the table — does something to me I do not have permission to feel, and feel anyway.
***
“Here’s what I came to ask.” I make myself keep my hands still. “Indie is being torn apart out there. You’ve seen it. The whole school has her as the villain of a con she didn’t run. Cole thinks he was somebody’s charity case. Both of those are lies, and both of them trace back to a thing you and I did, and I cannot fix it by myself. I’ve been trying to find a way, and there isn’t one where I stand up and clear her — because I’m the one who lied to her, so anything I say just sounds like the guilty party spinning. It has to come from somewhere that isn’t me.”
“It has to come from Jack,” he says.
He’s already gotten there. I stop.
“It has to come from Jack,” I agree. “He’s the one who poisoned Cole. If it comes from him, it’s true. If it comes from me, it’s noise.” I take a breath, because here is the part I drove over to say, and it is the hardest sentence I own. “And I can’t make Jack do anything. I can’t buy him or out-argue him or manage him. The only person with any road to Jack is you — and only if you walk in there and do the thing you have never once done in your life. Tell him the true version of what you did to him. Not the smooth one. The one where you don’t come out looking good. Own the whole debt, out loud, and then ask him to help you undo what he broke. Because Cole and Indie are innocent, and the fight was always supposed to be yours.”
He nods slowly. He doesn’t flinch from it. That’s new too.
“I already decided to,” he says. “This afternoon. Before you knocked. I didn’t know how — that’s your department, the how — but I knew I had to go to him and stop being charming and just be the guy who did it. So.” He almost smiles, and doesn’t quite. “You drove all the way over to talk me into a thing I was already going to do.”
For a second I can’t speak. I think of Indie on my counter, telling me she was going to say yes before Cole finished thequestion. I came steeled for a fight, and he said yes before I got the question out. And I understand, standing in his half-empty apartment, that I spent a year mistaking this man for a coward, when the only real coward in the room was always me.
***
“There’s a condition,” I say, and hate that I still have one. “You have to do it alone. I don’t get to come. I don’t get to script it or stand in the back or hand you note cards.”
“You’re going to let me do something important with no supervision.” He says it gently. Not as a dig. “That might be the biggest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Don’t make me regret it in real time.”
“You should know it might not work.” He says it because it’s true, not to get out of it. “Jack’s wanted me to hurt for two years. I walk in and hand him the exact confession he’s been waiting for — he might just take it and keep the poison in Cole’s ear anyway. He’d be within his rights. I don’t have anything to make him do the decent thing. All I’ve got is the truth, and an apology I owe him regardless.”
This is the part I knew was coming. The part that had me sitting at three red lights optimizing a plan I can’t use. There is no guaranteeing it. I cannot build a version that comes out right. For a person like me, that isn’t a detail. It’s the whole terror, the thing I’ve organized my life to never have to feel: wanting an outcome badly, and having no lever on it. Having to let it be decided by someone I can’t manage, in a room I’m not in.
“I know it might not work.” My voice does something I don’t authorize. “That’s the part I keep choking on. If I could guarantee it, I’d have done it myself already — badly — and made it worse. I can’t. So I’m going to do the thing I have never done, which is want something this much and let it be out of my hands. If it fails, it fails, and I’ll have to live in that. But it can onlypossibly work if it’s you, honest, with no strings I’m pulling from offstage. So.” I make myself say it. “I’m trusting you. Not the plan.You.I don’t have a fallback. That’s what trusting someone is, it turns out. I looked it up. It’s just doing it without a fallback.”
“I won’t let you down.” And then, quieter: “Charlotte. I have to ask the other thing, and then I’ll let it go, I promise. Is any part of this about us? Because I need to know what I’m walking into. I can do it either way. I just don’t want to hope wrong.”
There it is, out on the table. The question we’ve both been stepping around. I owe him a straight answer, and the straight answer is complicated, and I give him the whole of it.
“No,” I say. “And I’m not saying no to protect myself this time. I’m saying it because it’s true, and you deserve the true one. I’m not doing this to win you back. If I let it be about us, it stops being about Indie. You have to go to Jack because it’s right — not because there’s a version where I’m the prize at the end. There’s no prize, Ben. That’s the whole point of it. If you can only do it for a prize, don’t do it.”
