Page 9 of Love All
I have no idea whether she can do it. I am deeply, unwisely curious to find out.
So that’s engine one, idling nicely.
Engine two starts up about ten seconds later, when Cole comes around the lockers, sees the sheet, and lights up like the Fourth of July before he can stop himself.
“You’re paired with Charlotte,” he says.
“I’m aware. Reyes is drafting the eulogy.”
“No, but—” He catches himself, but I’ve already seen it — the leap his whole openhearted face made before his brain could finish the paperwork — and now I get to watch him try to walk it back and fail, because Cole couldn’t hide a feeling in a hurricane. “It’s just. The exhibition. The women’s team will be there. For the doubles they pair everybody, so. Everyone’s there. Indie’ll—”
He stops.
“Indie’ll be there,” I finish for him, gently, because watching Cole attempt her name is like watching a man defuse a bomb in oven mitts. “At the exhibition. Watching.”
“Watching thetennis,” Cole says, fast. “She likes tennis. It’s a tennis thing. She’ll be watching the tennis.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m putting on a shoe.” I put on the shoe. “I’m only observing that if a person wanted, hypothetically, to end up standing near another person at a crowded charity event, an exhibition is a very forgiving environment. Lots of milling. Lots of accidental proximity. Nobody keeping score.”
Cole looks at me with the slow dawning horror of a man who has watched me operate. “No.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You have theface.The scheming one.” He drops to a hiss. “Ben. I swear to God. Do not manage this. Do not make me a project. Last time you made my life a project, I gave a toast at a wedding.”
“And they’re radiantly happy.”
“They send you a card everyyear,Ben.”
“Because I’m a humanitarian.” I stand, knock my shoulder into his. “Go shower. You smell like longing and you’ve got drills.”
He goes, throwing one last suspicious look over his shoulder, and I sit back down on the bench and feel the whole thing arrange itself in front of me like a play diagrammed on a whiteboard, every arrow suddenly obvious.
Cole has it bad for Indie, spottable-from-orbit bad. Indie, and I’d put my ranking on this, is at minimum interested back, because nobody on that side of the facility laughs at a six a.m. bus joke out of charity. They are two decent, terrified people standing in separate rooms waiting for the other one to knock, and they will keep standing there, politely, until graduation, because that’s what decent terrified people do.
And the one human being on earth holding a master key to Indira Roy, the person whose blessing would tell Indie it’s safe to want the thing she wants — is Charlotte Astor.
Who I’m about to spend two weeks standing four feet away from. By decree. With nowhere for either of us to run.
I have, on occasion, been accused of coasting. Of letting things land in my lap and calling it talent. Fair, all of it. But the second I see a way to get my best friend the thing he’s too scared to reach for,anda reason to stand next to Charlotte that has nothing to do with a bet — my brain comes online in a way it hasn’t in years. All cylinders. Every light on the dashboard.
I’m going to get Cole and Indie together.
And I’m going to need Charlotte to do it.
The trouble with that plan, the only trouble, but it’s a big one. Charlotte Astor would saw off her own serving arm before she’d help me with anything, on principle, for free. She’ll assume it’s a trap. She’ll be right to; everything I’ve ever offered her has been one. So I can’t pitch it ashelp me.I have to pitch it ashelp Indie.And I have to mean it, because she’ll smell the exact moment I don’t.
The deranged part, the part I keep turning over all afternoon, through drills, through dinner is that I do mean it. I want Cole to have the good thing. I want Charlotte to want to help me hand it to him. I want, if I’m being honest, which I try very hard never to be, a project the two of us share that isn’t a war.
I make the mistake of saying some of this to Julian on the walk back to the dorms. Not all of it. The Cole-and-Indie part.
“Let me make sure I have the shape of this,” he says. “Your plan — to win a fundraiser you don’t know how to run, while playing a sport you refuse to take seriously, next to a partner who would pay cash to watch you drown — your plan is toadda covert matchmaking operation. On behalf of Cole. Requiring the active cooperation of Charlotte Astor. Who hates you.”
“When you line them all up like that, it sounds like a lot.”
