Chapter Six - Benedict
CHAPTER SIX
Benedict
REYES AND THE freshman clear out the second Coach turns them loose, the way sophomores always do, like staying one minute past the whistle might get them volunteered for something.
Coach goes with them. And then it’s the two of us and the long gold end of the afternoon and a basket of balls neither of us is pretending to pick up, and I have about ninety seconds to attempt the single hardest thing I’ve ever tried on a tennis court.
Telling Charlotte Astor the truth. On purpose. And surviving it.
The light is doing what it does on the good courts at the end of a day, long, gold, forgiving.
The whole place still has the last two hours hanging in it like smoke.
The rhythm we fell into without permission.
The point where she left her own back undefended on my word.
Coach saying couple like a scouting report.
None of it cleared out with the sophomores.
And honestly, that makes the ask harder, not easier.
It’s one thing to pitch a scheme to your enemy.
It’s another to pitch it to a person you’ve just spent an afternoon being unreasonably good beside, while your whole nervous system keeps sending up the same cheerful bulletin, that went well, didn’t it?
shall we do it again?, and you have to talk over it.
I rehearsed. Every version has a seam she’d find.
That’s the tax on charming your way through everything: you build the reflex, you reach for the angle the way other people reach for a railing, automatically, before you’ve decided to, and Charlotte has spent a year training herself to feel for exactly that.
The spot where my hand goes to the rail.
The only pitch she won’t dismantle is the one with no rail at all.
No angle. No me. Just the true thing, said straight, which I have never once tried on her, and which I have no idea I can do.
I’m not doing this just for the excuse to stand near her, whatever it looks like later.
Julian thinks I am. Julian is mostly right about me, which is the worst of his many fine qualities.
But the realer reason has a name, and the name is Cole.
Cole Whitman, who is the best of us. Who showed up to every single one of my matches sophomore year, when the rest of my life was quietly coming apart, when a friendship I’d assumed would hold turned out not to — and said nothing about any of it, just kept appearing with two coffees and a bad joke until I found my way back to myself.
You don’t forget who stayed. And the picture of that guy, who held the line for me without being asked, spending his one clean shot at the good thing too scared to knock on the door?
I can’t carry it. I’ve carried worse. Not that.
She’s zipping her bag with the brisk efficiency of a woman who has already left in every way but the literal.
“So,” I say.
“If this is the real thing you wanted to ask, lead with whether it’s going to make me late.”
“It’s about Indie.”
Her hands stop on the zipper. Not long. Half a second. But I’ve spent a year studying the small involuntary things Charlotte does before she’s decided what to feel, and that’s one of them, and it tells me two things at once: she’s listening, and I’m not about to surprise her.
“No,” she says, before my next breath.
“You don’t even know what I’m—”
“I know it ends with me doing something for you. The answer is no.”
“It ends with you doing something for Indie.” I lean back against the net post, hands open, nothing up my sleeve, working hard to look like a man with nothing up his sleeve — which is the hardest possible thing to look like when it’s true.
“She’s in love with Cole. Cole’s in love with Indie.
They’ve been circling each other since September like two people allergic to their own happiness, and they’ll keep circling, politely, until they graduate and marry strangers and think about each other on long drives.
Unless somebody standing close enough does something. ”
She doesn’t say who’s Cole. Doesn’t say that’s absurd. Doesn’t do one single thing a person does when the news is new. She crosses her arms, which is what Charlotte does when she’s been hit somewhere true and intends to charge you for the privilege.
“You’ve noticed,” I say, a little stunned. “You already—”
“Of course I’ve noticed. I notice everything.” Her jaw is tight. “Which is exactly why I’m telling you to leave it alone. Engineering people’s feelings is manipulation, Hawthorne. I don’t do that to people I love.”
“That’s touching I didn’t know you were capable of any emotion other than contempt,” he says, wistfully. I swat at his forearm. Not hard. Just enough to sting a little. “It’s not manipulation,” he continues, “It’s a…nudge.”
“It’s a lie.” She slings the bag onto her shoulder. “You dress it up as helping, and underneath it’s still you deciding you know better than two grown adults what’s good for them. My parents do things like that and I really don’t want to be apart of it.”
“This isn’t your family.”
“Everyone always says that.” She isn’t quite looking at me now.
“You want to know the Astor house specialty? Deciding what’s best for someone and calling it love, so they’re not allowed to argue with it.
My mother could fund the cure for a disease and never once ask the patient how he felt about being saved.
That’s the water I learned to swim in. I’m not doing it to Indie.
Indie gets to be the one who decides what Indie wants. ”
“She’s already decided what she wants. She decided in September. The only thing she hasn’t decided is that she’s allowed to have it.”
“And you appointed yourself the man who tells her?”
“No. I appointed you.”
It’s out before I’ve thought it all the way through, but I can see it burrowing into her brain.
“That’s the whole pitch, Astor. Not me managing anybody.
You. Indie trusts you more than she trusts herself.
At least as it relates to Cole. I’m not the one who can fix this.
You are. I’m just the idiot who happened to be standing where he could see both of them aching at the same time, and now I can’t un-see it. ”
And there it is, the real objection, under the principle, the thing the principle has been wearing as a coat.
She isn’t afraid of manipulating Cole and Indie.
She’s afraid of being the kind of person who manages the people she loves.
Because she’s been managed, expertly, by professionals, since birth — and somewhere young she decided she’d rather lose people honestly than keep them by arranging the furniture.
It’s the most decent thing I’ve ever learned about her. She handed it to me by accident, trying to win an argument.
So I put my own rail down too. It’s the only fair play left.
“Okay. Then here’s the truth, no posture on it.
Sometimes you do a bad thing to help good people.
Especially people you love. You don’t lie to them, you don’t trick them — you clear the one obstacle they can’t clear themselves, which in this case is that each of them is convinced the other one couldn’t possibly.
We won’t manufacture or puppeteer. We’ll simply turn on a light in a room two people are already standing in.
” I hold her eyes. “Are you really going to let Indie spend another semester aching over a guy who aches back, because the method offends you?”
She huffs, her hands folded securely in front of her. Landing one on Charlotte is alarming, because she doesn’t flinch. She goes still, courtroom still, the stillness when the foreman stands and you get about three seconds to work out whether you’ve won or signed your own warrant.
She goes quiet.
From Charlotte Astor, quiet is a notarized document.
She doesn’t do it for effect. She does it because the part of her that fires a comeback every nine-tenths of a second has briefly run out of objections, and she’d rather you didn’t notice.
I notice. I always notice. I stand on an empty court and watch the most relentless person I’ve ever met run out of reasons to say no to a good thing, and I get that mid-point feeling, a ball hanging at the very top of its arc, the suspended instant before it picks which way everything goes.
“What?” I say, all wounded innocence, because I am physically incapable of leaving a silence alone while I’m winning. “You don’t love love?”
“What can I say.” She huffs it out, rolling her eyes at the darkening sky like it has personally let her down. “I love love.”
“So you do love love.”
“I love when you’re quiet. You’re so handsome when your mouth shuts.”
“I know a couple of ways you can keep it shut.”
“That’s a threat, not an offer,” she informs the sky.
“With me they’re frequently the same thing. It’s a feature.”
“It’s a personality disorder with good cheekbones.”
“You think I have good cheekbones.”
“I think you have a gate to move out of, and a plan to go write that isn’t charming.”
She rolls her eyes hard enough that I fear for the muscle.
But she doesn’t say no. She doesn’t say yes either, Charlotte Astor would sooner be waterboarded than say yes to me out loud on a first ask — but she hitches the bag higher, turns for the gate, and says over her shoulder, in the flat tactical voice she saves for terms:
“If we did this — if — it would be for her. Not for you. There is no version where it’s for you.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“And you’d do exactly what I said, when I said it, with no improvising, because improvising is—”
“Two people making separate mistakes at the same time. I was listening. I always listen to you. It’s the best part of my day and I resent it.”
“Ground rules.” Still walking, ticking them off the way a prosecutor reads counts.
“One. Indie never knows we touched it. If it works, it works because two people found their own way to each other, and they get to believe that for the rest of their lives, because they’ll have earned the belief.
Two. We do not lie. Not to either of them, not once.
We arrange the room; we do not fake the feelings.
The first time you forge a text or invent a feeling that isn’t there, I’m out, and I take a swing at you on the way. ”
“Vicious. But reasonable.”
“Three.” Her voice changes — the steel goes quieter and somehow harder. “If at any point this starts hurting her instead of helping her, we stop. That second. However close we are to the end. Her, over the plan. Every single time.”
“Her over the plan. Every time.” I mean it, and I let her hear that I mean it. “I mean it.”
“I know you do. That’s the irritating part.”
She stops at the gate. Doesn’t turn around.
And eventually I’ll learn this about her, the way you learn a serve by getting aced with it: when Charlotte stops with her back to you and takes one extra second before she goes, it isn’t hesitation.
It’s her deciding to let you see that you got one past her.
From anyone else, nothing. From her, the whole stadium on its feet.
“Tomorrow,” she says. “After practice. Bring a plan that isn’t charming. I’ll bring one that works. We’ll see whose survives contact.”
And she’s gone, through the gate and into the dark, and I’m standing on empty court four with a basket of balls I still haven’t picked up and the specific, disqualifying lightness of a man who has just been told no in the exact tone other people use for yes.
Here’s the thing I’m not going to say to Julian, or Cole, or the inside of my own head if I can help it.
I wanted to win that more than I’ve wanted anything in a long time.
Not the bet, that. The argument. And I won it the only way that counts with her: by putting the angle down and meaning it.
By being, for ninety seconds on an empty court, a man with nothing up his sleeve.
She saw me with no rail to grab, and she didn’t laugh, and she didn’t run.
She gave me terms.
I told Julian I didn’t know whether I could survive being sincere at Charlotte Astor. Turns out I can. Turns out it’s the best ninety seconds I’ve had in years, and the dangerous part is that I already want to do it again.
I pick up the basket. I’ve earned the right to clean my own court. I’m smiling at a net post like it said something kind.
Julian is waiting by the gate when I finally haul the basket off, which means he watched at least the back half from somewhere, because Julian doesn’t loiter. Julian surveils.
“So,” he says.
“So.”
“She didn’t murder you. I had money on murdered. Reyes had grievous bodily harm. We’re both out the entry fee.”
“We talked.”
“You talked.” He falls into step beside me and takes the heavier strap off my shoulder without asking, which is the other thing Julian does.
“About the traffic, presumably. The economy. Definitely not about a covert two-person operation to marry off Cole, which you have somehow — against the posted odds of every bookmaker on this roster — talked Charlotte Astor into joining.”
“She didn’t say yes.”
“Did she say no?”
I don’t answer, which is its own answer, and Julian makes a low sound like a man watching a building he personally condemned decline to fall down.
“Don’t start,” I say.
“I haven’t said anything. I’m saving it.
” He walks a few steps. “I’m only noting that you’ve got the face.
The corkboard one, the planning one — except there’s a second thing under it now that I haven’t seen on you in a couple of years, and I’m not going to name it, because the last time I named one of your feelings out loud you didn’t speak to me for a week.
” He claps the back of my neck, warm and ruinous and correct.
“Get Cole his girl. And try, purely as an experiment, to notice what you’re actually doing while you do it. ”
“I’m doing a good deed.”
“You’re doing a good deed,” he agrees, handing my strap back at the foot of the dorm steps. “For three reasons. Same as ever.”
And he goes up whistling, leaving me to argue with an empty stairwell about exactly how many reasons a man is allowed to have before one of them gets a name.
Tomorrow. After practice. A plan that isn’t charming.
I have eighteen hours and exactly none of one, and I can’t remember the last time I looked forward to a deadline this much.
Two engines, I told Julian. I gave him both honestly and meant them, Cole, and the bet.
I’m only starting to suspect there’s a third I haven’t reported to anyone, least of all myself, idling somewhere under the other two and burning cleaner than either.
But the court is empty and the night is coming on, and some things you leave at the top of their arc, and let the morning decide which way they fall.