Chapter Ten - Benedict #2
“He didn’t have to tell me. You’ve seen him.
” A shrug, perfectly bored, perfectly real.
“He learned her coffee order off a girl on her team. He’s got the bus schedule for her away meets memorized and he’s not even on that bus.
Cole. Cole. It’s like he’s too much of a gentleman. It’s so frustrating.”
And then I say the only line I scripted. The one I argued with Charlotte about. The one I made true-and-boring on purpose, flat, a little frustrated, the way you talk about a friend you love who won’t help himself:
“It’s Indie. He’s been head over heels since September. It’s like he’d rather lose her slow than risk her fast. And I can’t watch it much longer.”
The magazine stops moving.
That’s the whole tell with a person pretending to read.
The page stops. I don’t look. Julian doesn’t look.
We complain about Cole’s stubbornness for another forty seconds the way men do, affection dressed as exasperation, every word of it true — and then we wander out toward the courts without looking back, and behind us a girl sits very still on a treatment table, holding an ice pack to a wrist that doesn’t hurt, redoing math she’s had backwards for a month.
Charlotte is waiting around the corner, out of sight, vibrating.
“Well?”
“Page stopped. She heard it. All of it. Clean.”
And Charlotte Astor, who spent the entire setup certain I’d ruin it, who trusts approximately four people and a ball machine — looks at me for one second with something I have never been on the receiving end of from her.
Not a verdict. Not a barb. Not a wall. Something in the neighborhood of thank you.
Then she ruins it immediately, because she’s her. “You did boring. I genuinely did not think you had it in you.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“You contain one, and it’s show-off.” But she bumps her shoulder into mine as we walk. Once. On purpose. A thing she’d have died before doing in week one.
“Huh,” I reply, not precisely to her, “Julian said something very similar.”
“Your captain is a wise and handsome man.”
I nod. True.
Ease. I feel it the whole length of the hallway.
I’ve been touched by a great many people in my life.
I’m a toucher’s dream, huggable, handsome, harmless.
None of it ever cost the toucher anything.
Charlotte bumping her shoulder into mine in a training-room hallway cost her something, a rule, a wall, a year of standing policy — and that’s the difference nobody ever explains to you: the touch that matters is the one the other person had to decide to give.
I’d trade every easy embrace I’ve ever collected for that one deliberate two inches of contact.
I’m fairly sure I already have.
We’ve done it. Both halves. Cole has his proof, Indie has hers, and somewhere across campus two terrified, decent people are lying awake doing corrected math. All that’s left is to put them in one more loud room and get out of the way.
***
Cole finds me that night. Of course he does. He knocks on my door at eleven with the wild eyes of a man who’s paced a hole in a rug.
“I talked to her. At the mixer. For like forty minutes. About everything — books, her sister, the away-meet bus.” He says bus like a sacrament.
“And I think — Ben, I think she might actually—” He can’t finish.
Cole can never finish the hopeful ones; his voice gives out under the weight of needing them to be true.
“Is that insane? Tell me if that’s insane. ”
And here’s where the rules turn cruel. Because the honest answer, it’s not insane, it’s true, I know it’s true, I’ve spent two weeks and a small criminal conspiracy making sure you’d find out it’s true — is the one answer I can never hand him.
So I give him the next-truest one. The one I’d give him anyway, conspiracy or no conspiracy.
“It’s not insane. I’ve watched her watch you, man. It’s not pity, and it’s not in your head.” I lean in the doorway. “The only insane part is you standing in my hall at eleven o’clock instead of asking her to the next thing.”
“What if I’m wrong?”
“You’re not wrong.” I say it with my whole chest — because I know, because I built the knowing.
And because some part of me, the part Julian keeps trying to make me look at, is learning something off Cole right now that I don’t have language for yet: he’s about to do the brave, unscripted, terrifying thing I’ve spent two weeks arranging for everyone except myself.
Cole is going to reach. And I’m going to spend three more days helping two of my friends reach for each other while I stand in the identical dark with the identical math, too much of a coward to take my own advice.
“Ask her,” I say. “Just ask her.”
He nods, terrified, luminous, already gone somewhere in his head to rehearse it in a mirror. He’ll do it. I shut the door and stand in my room thinking physician, heal thyself, followed by several things considerably less dignified, and I don’t sleep much.
I should be thinking about the finish line. The good deed, nearly done.
Instead I’m thinking about a shoulder bump in a training-room hallway, and how it landed harder than anything either of us has ever said across a net.
Three days left of the operation that has become the only place I’m allowed to stand next to her.
And no idea, none, what I’m going to do when the room goes quiet, and there’s nothing left to plan, and no script for the only true thing I have left to say.