Love All (The Match Point #1)

Chapter One - Charlotte

CHAPTER ONE

Charlotte

MATCH POINT TAKES four strokes. Serve wide, backhand cross, forehand up the line behind her. Done. Marist’s number one dives like there’s a version of this story where she reaches it.

There isn’t. Six-two, six-love.

Love. Tennis’s word for zero. I just took a whole set off this girl, and the official record will say she scored love. It’s the funniest joke in organized sports. Nobody but me ever laughs at it.

We shake at the net. “You serve beautifully,” I tell her, warm as a handwritten note. My mother taught me that a compliment aimed right does more damage than any insult. She says a half-hearted thanks and walks off the court; a gaggle of friends waiting for her at the sidelines.

Exactly.

I collect my bag. I don’t look at my box. I already know what’s in it: nobody. My father is in Geneva, allegedly. My mother thinks showing up is a service you hire. That stopped being sad around tenth grade and it’s hard to miss what you never really had. I play better without an audience anyway.

The scoreboard claps loudest.

My phone buzzes while I zip the racquet in.

Indie writes: six and love?? CHARLOTTE. you’re disgusting. i love you. dinner?

Four exclamation points and a heart come back. ‘Definitely,’ I respond, ‘and you’re the disgusting one. i have standards.’

That will be the warmest conversation I have all day, and I’m at peace with it. Indira Roy is my roommate, my confidant, and the one person alive I don’t keep score with. Everyone needs exactly one. More is a liability.

The locker rooms sit beyond the show courts, where the men's team is practicing this afternoon. Same as every afternoon. The schedule was apparently carved into stone sometime in 1962, and they defend it like a border. To get anywhere, I have to walk through them.

I wasn’t trespassing, per se. I was in transit through hostile territory.

You hear Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne before you see him.

That’s the truest thing anyone will ever say about the man.

A group of boys makes a specific noise when it’s arranged around him, a low rumble, an audience deciding in advance to laugh.

I come around the windscreen and there it is.

The semicircle. Him in the middle of it.

Racquet dangling off one hand like he forgot he owns it.

Not one drop of sweat on him. Telling a story with his hands.

Cole Whitman spots me first and does his little wave. I nod back. Cole has done nothing to deserve my contempt, and I try to be economical with it.

Then Benedict turns around.

Fine. Since we’re here. The boy is offensively good-looking, and I mean that as a formal complaint.

Tall and loose, built like he’s never had to make room for anybody, Large shoulders.

A team shirt that fits snug across a wide chest. Dark hair with the sun picking gold out of it, shoved back by a hand that considers product beneath it.

And the mouth, always a half-second from a joke at your expense, because nobody has ever told it no.

He looks like a trust fund that learned to walk.

He looks like the reason legacy admissions exist. I noticed all of this exactly once, in September of last year.

I’ve renewed my objection weekly ever since.

“Astor.” Warm, delighted, like I’m room service. “You’re glowing. Steal candy from a baby? Burn down an orphanage?”

“Six and love,” Cole supplies. Helpfully. Traitorously.

“Six and love.” Benedict puts a hand to his chest, wounded. “Charlotte, that’s art. Did she cry?”

“Winners don’t ask about crying. It’s a tell. It means you’ve thought about it.”

The semicircle rumbles, tips toward the laugh. I can pull that sound as easily as he can. I’d just never admit to wanting it.

“See,” he says. “No mercy.”

“No time.”

“You could have taken the other path,” he supplies, unhelpfully. “Or flown by on your broomstick.”

There isn’t another path and he knows it. “And miss the chance to run you over?”

“So you have been looking for me.”

“No one looks for misfortune, it’s…gravity.”

“Ah,” he says, “So you’re in my orbit.”

“Like a black hole.” I hitch my bag onto my shoulder. “I tripped over your massive ego and got sucked in.”

He grins. Wide. He enjoys it landing — that’s the defect in him. Insult Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne and he receives it like a gift you wrapped yourself. Behind him, Julian Vega — the captain, all calm — says, “She’s got you, Ben,” fond as a best friend enjoying a public execution.

“She does not have me. We’re flirting. This is flirting.”

“This is not flirting.”

“It’s the most flirting I’ve done all week.”

“And that,” I say, “is the saddest thing I’ve tripped over all week.”

And here is where I should leave. The line is mine, the room is mine, the exit is twenty feet away, and a good closer walks on the applause.

Instead, Benedict tilts his head and looks at me like this is the best thing his afternoon could possibly produce— and I have never once left the last word lying on the ground.

It’s my worst quality. Top three, certainly.

So I turn and give him my full attention. The thing he’s always angling for. The thing he’s never earned.

“Hawthorne. Be honest.” Sweetly. On me, sweetly is a siren. “Do you think I’m pretty?”

Surprise crosses his face, then the specific joy of a player who’s been handed a real rally. He doesn’t hesitate. “Very.”

“Do you think I’m smart?”

“Lethally so.”

“Do I seem desperate to you?”

“Definitely not.”

“Then why the fuck,” I say, “are you hitting on me?”

The boys detonate.

I know it’s an ace before it clears the box.

Cole has to sit down on the bench. A freshman makes a sound like a punctured ball.

Julian looks at the sky like God owes him an explanation.

And Benedict, cracked open in front of his whole team, stands in the wreckage and grins at me.

Bright. Delighted. Hopeful. Like he set me a test and I just wrecked the curve.

Being looked at like that by a person you’ve committed to despising is a specific, unwelcome feeling. I don’t have a word for it. I’ve stopped shopping for one. Nothing fits.

“See, this is why,” he announces, to nobody, to everybody.

“Why what?”

“Why it’s you. Nobody else on this campus makes me work for anything.”

“You don’t work for anything.” It comes out flat. Flatter than I had intended. There was a distinct difference between banter and a barb. The whole court hears the difference and drops a register. “I give you nothing, Hawthorne, because you’ve earned nothing. It’s not personal. It’s fact.”

That’s the sentence that does it. I watch it go in.

Something behind his eyes sharpens, a player who stops clowning between points because the match just went live.

The grin stays. The underneath changes. He drags a hand through his hair, that lazy golden-boy gesture that has definitely ended relationships, and says, slower, tasting it:

“Earned nothing. Okay. Let’s fix that.”

“You can’t fix it. That’s what nothing means.”

“A bet.”

The semicircle goes quiet. A new kind of quiet. The pack can smell it.

“I don’t bet. Betting is for people who’ve made peace with losing, and I haven’t.”

“Which is exactly why you’ll win, so what’s the problem?

” Then he does the rarest thing in his repertoire.

He visibly thinks. “Founders’ Drive. Eight weeks out.

The athletic department’s big charity push — the money builds the children’s wing downtown.

Every athlete is supposed to fundraise, and nobody tries.

So let’s try. You and me. Most raised by the gala wins. ”

I almost laugh at him. “You want to race me at fundraising. I could out-raise your entire roster from my bed. Before coffee.”

“Sure you could. One call to Mommy and Daddy Astor and the kids have a new roof by Friday.” He tilts his head, and there it is — the trap, wearing excellent manners.

“So that’s the rule. No family money. No writing your own check, no dialing the name, no foundation, no trust, not one cent you share a bloodline with.

You raise it with your own two hands, out of whatever’s actually yours.

” He scoops a ball off the court and bounces it once, watching me.

“Unless that’s the part that scares you. ”

And, here is the part I will never say out loud, not under oath — it does.

A little. Which is the only reason I say yes.

This unemployed grin of a human being has just looked at the richest girl on campus and bet her that she can’t earn one single dollar nobody handed her.

And for half a second, half of one second, I’m not certain he’s wrong.

Unforgivable.

“Fine. No family money. Both of us from zero. Most raised by the gala.”

“Most raised by the gala.”

“And when I win, what do I get?”

He opens his hands: name it.

I think about my alarm going off in the dark. About the women’s team running drills at six a.m. in the cold all season while these boys stroll onto sunlit show courts every afternoon, because that’s how the schedule has always, so mysteriously, shaken out.

“Court hours. When I win, the men’s team forfeits the afternoon blocks for the rest of the season. You take the six a.m.s. The whole roster, out there in the frost. And I want a chair, so I can watch.”

“Collective punishment.” Hand to chest, scandalized and thrilled at once. “That’s dark, Astor. The other boys didn’t do anything.”

“The other boys benefit from a system. It’ll do.”

“You are going to be a terrifying lawyer.” He puts his hand out. “Done. And when you lose—”

“Which I won’t—”

“You say, out loud, in public, meaning every word: that I am the most handsome, smartest boy in the world.”

“In the world.”

“I’ve grown ambitious in my old age. Take the terms — or tell everyone here you’re scared of a little honest work.”

And it’s a good deal. It’s an extraordinarily good deal, which is exactly the thing I should stop and examine.

Strip off the names and the whole bet is effort against ease, and I have never met the human being who can out-work me.

In the impossible event I lose, it costs one sentence I’d rather swallow glass than mean.

I am the most careful person I know. I measure sleep in fifteen-minute blocks. And I don’t hear the trap close, because he built it from the one material I’d never think to inspect: my certainty that I’m right about him.

“Fine,” I say.

Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne smiles like I’ve handed him something he’s wanted for a year and was too well-mannered to steal.

“Fine,” he agrees.

Julian whistles, low. A freshman whispers oh, it’s on and gets shoved quiet.

The whole semicircle resettles like an audience buckling in for a long and bloody season, because every one of them understands the thing I’m too pleased with myself to see.

A bet only feels easy to the player who hasn’t noticed she agreed to play.

He doesn’t shake my hand. He holds my eyes a second too long instead, like a door he has no intention of letting close.

“Easiest wager of my life,” I tell him, already walking, taking my exit like a professional. “Enjoy the season, Hawthorne. I’ll enjoy the silence after it.”

“Astor.”

I look back. Second mistake of the afternoon.

He has the racquet up on his shoulder and the whole gold afternoon behind him and an expression I don’t have a category for. Patient. Certain.

“Fifteen-love,” he says. “We’re keeping score now.”

I don’t dignify it. I push through the door and let it slam on the sound of boys laughing, and the whole length of the corridor I tell myself the obvious: the score is nothing. Love means nothing. I’ve just been handed the easiest win of my life.

I’m very good at lying to exactly one person, and I never let myself do it.

In that corridor, I make the exception. I don’t even feel it go.