Chapter Five - Charlotte
CHAPTER FIVE
Charlotte
I ARRIVE AT court four twenty minutes early, because being early is a form of control and I take my control where I can get it.
I have a plan. I always have a plan. The plan is: treat the next two weeks like a deposition.
Show up, be flawless, give the man nothing he can use, log the hours, win the gate for the children, and exit having revealed exactly as much of myself as a hostile witness reveals to opposing counsel, nothing that isn’t already in the transcript.
Doubles with Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne is a thing happening to me, like taxes, like bad weather.
You don’t befriend cold rain you didn’t choose.
You dress for it, you endure it, and you do not, under any circumstances, let it see you shiver.
So I warm up the way I always warm up: alone, against the back fence, hitting into an empty court, listening to the particular silence of a facility before anyone arrives to fill it.
Except it isn’t going to stay empty. That’s the whole problem.
For eleven years the empty court has been the one place I answer for nobody but myself, no partner to carry, no rhythm to match, no second set of mistakes to absorb as my own.
In twenty minutes, the athletic department is going to walk a six-foot liability onto my side of the net and call it a marquee event.
I hit harder. The fence takes it without comment, which is one of the things I like best about fences.
He shows up at four exactly, which is the first thing that goes wrong.
I’d budgeted for him being late. I had a whole speech drafted about respect and other people’s time, and instead he comes through the gate on the hour, carrying two coffees, wearing the unbothered ease of a man arriving at a party he already knows likes him.
“Astor.” He holds one out. “Oat milk, one sugar, scandalously hot. I asked Indie.”
I do not take it. “You interrogated my best friend about my coffee order.”
“I asked a friendly question of a friendly person. She volunteered it. She also told me you’d refuse it on principle and then resent it for the rest of practice, so.
” He sets it on the bench beside my bag, where it sits, steaming, being exactly correct.
“It’ll be there when your principles get tired. ”
“I don’t have principles about coffee. I have principles about you.”
“Name one. I’ll violate it immediately, just to watch.”
“My principle is that I don’t accept gifts from men about to lose to me in front of a paying crowd. It would be like taking a sandwich from someone on his way to the gallows. Bad manners. Confusing for the children.”
“And yet.” He nods at the cup, serene. “Still warm. Principles run cold, Astor. Coffee doesn’t.”
I hate that he did it. I hate more that Indie handed him my entire instruction manual. And most of all I hate the small treacherous warmth of being known well enough to be predicted, secondhand, even, and even by him.
I leave the coffee where it sits. I last, if anyone is counting, eleven minutes.
Coach Leon runs the session himself, which tells me everything about how badly the department needs this exhibition to print money.
Leon does not personally supervise a practice unless there’s a budget riding on it.
He’s planted two of the men’s squad across the net to give us live bodies, Reyes, plus a freshman whose name I never get around to acquiring — with orders to hit at us like they mean it, because you can’t learn a partner against a ball machine.
So that’s the afternoon: the brand-new and deeply unwilling pairing of Astor and Prescott-Hawthorne learning to share a court in real time, two sophomores doing their honest best to expose us, and Coach watching from behind the baseline with the weary patience of a man who has refereed worse marriages.
“Formation,” I tell Benedict, snapping into the only register I trust, the one with a clipboard in it. “I serve, you poach. I call the side, you cover what I tell you to cover, and we do not improvise. Improvisation is a word for two people making separate mistakes at the same time.”
“Good morning to you too.”
“It’s four in the afternoon.”
“I know. I was matching your energy. You greeted me with a drill.” He spins his racquet, loose, that golden-boy looseness that has certainly cost lesser women their better judgment. “Lead on, Captain. Tell me where to stand. I live to be told where to stand by you. It’s the highlight of my season.”
What I have never realized about playing doubles with a person you’ve spent a year fighting across the net is that the net is the entire relationship.
The net is what makes it bearable. Take it away, put him on my side, four feet to my left, breathing the same point I’m breathing and the hostility has nowhere to travel.
No net to cross. It just sits between us on the same square of court, unemployed, looking for work.
So I give it a job. I turn it into instruction.
“Closer to the center line,” I tell him, on the third repetition. “You’re guarding the alley. It’s a trap.”
“I’m aware of the alley’s reputation.”
“Then stop falling for it. Split-step on my toss, not after. You’re a half-beat late, and a half-beat late is a winner going the other way.” I toss, serve, watch him move. “Late.”
“I was contemplating.”
“Contemplate on your own time. On my serve, you move.” I gather another ball. “Again.”
He doesn’t sulk, which annoys me. Sulking I’d know what to do with.
He adjusts, splits early the next time, right on the toss, and puts the poach away into the open court with a soft little efficiency I’d admire in anyone whose existence didn’t personally offend me.
Then he has the gall to look over, eyebrows up, waiting, like a dog who has performed the trick and would now like to discuss compensation.
“Better,” I say. It costs me a molar.
“Say it like you mean it.”
“That was me meaning it. Don’t get greedy.”
I run us through serve-and-poach until my arm complains.
And the infuriating part, the part I’ll be lying about by omission for weeks, is that he’s good.
Not coasting-good. Not gifted-and-lazy good, not the good that shows up to collect compliments.
He reads the poach a half-beat before I call it.
He covers the lob I haven’t warned him about because he saw it leave the returner’s strings the same instant I did.
Twice he takes a ball that is technically mine, cleanly, without apology, in exactly the two spots where insisting on mine would have cost us the point; both times I open my mouth to correct him and close it again, because there is nothing to correct.
“You can say it,” he says, after the second one.
“Say what.”
“That I’m not getting in your way.” He’s grinning, lightly winded, criminally pleased with himself. “It’s killing you. You had a whole speech about improvisation and I’ve ruined it by being correct. Go ahead. I’ll wait. I’m very patient when I’m winning.”
“You’re not winning. There’s no score. It’s practice.”
“There’s always a score, Astor. You taught me that.” He bounces on his toes, ready for the next ball. “Fifteen-love, by the way. I’m keeping it in my head. You’ve been ahead the whole time, if that helps. You’re a genuinely terrifying tennis player and I’d follow you into a war.”
“Then cover the alley and stop narrating.”
He covers the alley. He stops narrating.
And for about forty minutes, against every intention I carried through that gate, it’s, as a tactical observation, nothing more — good.
We’re good. Two people who agree on nothing, who built an entire rivalry out of refusing to give each other an inch, turning out to give each other, on a tennis court, exactly the inch required and not one more.
His serve, my net. My setup, his put-away.
There’s a point in the middle of it, and he will never, as long as I live, get the satisfaction of knowing I remember it — where Reyes throws up a lob I’ve misjudged, and behind me Benedict says got it, in a voice with no panic anywhere in it, and I trust it.
I just trust it. I turn and cross and leave my entire half of the court undefended on the unverified word of Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne, and the overhead comes down clean and unreturnable, and for one half-second I have handed a person the single thing I have never handed anyone.
My back.
A rhythm neither of us agreed to, and both of us, mid-rally, simply fell into, you match a stranger’s stride on a sidewalk without deciding to, and three blocks later you notice you’re in step.
I notice. Mid-point, a ball comes back harder than it should.
I shift to cover his half and find him already covering mine, and we cross behind each other in the small scrambled choreography doubles partners spend years learning, and his hand finds the small of my back for half a second.
Just guiding. Just here, I’ve got this side, you take that one. The most ordinary contact in the sport.
It lands in my spine like a struck note. I put the next ball into the bottom of the net.
“Mine,” I say, too fast. “My fault. Bad footwork.”
“Sure,” he says, and does me the enormous, unbearable courtesy of not looking at me while he says it.
“Okay, somebody explain this to me,” Reyes calls from the far baseline, hands on his hips, ball abandoned. “A week ago you two wanted each other in the ground. Now you’re crossing like figure skaters. I feel like I’m intruding on something.”
“You are,” Benedict says, retrieving the ball, unbothered. “A private demonstration of competence. I’d walk you through it, Reyes, but you’d need a picture book.”
“He’s protecting her now. Hawthorne’s gone soft—”
“I’m protecting the scoreline. Astor doesn’t need protecting. She needs you to hit it like you mean it so I’m not bored back here.” He spins the ball on his strings. “You’re down a break, by the way. To two people who can’t stand each other. Sit with that.”