Chapter Eleven - Charlotte
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Charlotte
THE PROBLEM WITH Cole Whitman is that he is too decent to be brave on schedule.
We did everything right. He has his proof, Indie has hers, they spent the second exhibition orbiting each other at a polite and agonizing four-foot radius, and now, at the after-party, in some lacrosse player’s enormous, regrettable house, they have achieved a new and excruciating equilibrium: wedged in a corner, secretly in love, publicly discussing, I am not exaggerating, the parking situation.
For thirty-five minutes. I timed it. I time everything.
It would be funny if it weren’t so familiar.
Two people in a crowded room, each certain the other’s politeness is a verdict.
I know the whole grammar of it; I’ve watched Indie speak it her entire life.
I just never expected to catch myself speaking it too, across a kitchen island, with a boy I decided to hate.
“He’s not going to do it,” I say to Benedict, the two of us posted against that island like generals losing a war. “He’s going to discuss visitor parking with her until graduation and then write her a very nice email.”
“A very nice email,” Benedict repeats, mournful. “Subject line: Re: Us, Possibly. He’ll spend a week on the subject line.”
“He’ll BCC himself. To have a record.”
“He’ll attach a calendar invite. Marked tentative.” He shakes his head at his best friend across the room with the specific despair of a man watching another man fumble the only thing that matters. “I can’t keep watching. I’ve tried to be patient. I have run out of patience.”
“He needs a push.” Benedict watches the two of them in their corner, eighteen inches apart and a thousand miles from doing anything about it.
“Something with a clock on it. Right now he thinks he has all the time in the world, because nothing’s threatening to take her away.
Cole doesn’t move toward a thing. Cole moves to protect one.
” He turns his head, and I watch the idea arrive on his face, and I know it’s mine before he says it, because it’s the ugly clever one. “Phase two-B.”
“Phase two-B,” I agree, and feel the specific guilt of a woman about to enjoy her work too much.
Here’s the part I’m not proud of and will defend anyway: there is, in fact, a real boy across the room who’s been looking at Indie all night.
I didn’t invent him. I don’t invent people, that’s the rule, that’s the one wall I keep.
His name is Ryan, he plays club lacrosse, he has the friendly uncomplicated handsomeness of ‘the-boy-next-door’, and he has genuinely, observably been assembling the nerve to talk to my best friend for an hour.
We’re not going to lie to anyone. We’re going to point at a true thing and turn the lights up on it.
It is, even by the elastic standards I’ve been setting all month, a step closer to the line.
The overhears were clean, true things, true voices.
This is using a boy. Dangling a girl’s attention like bait.
Choreographing jealousy on purpose. I know it, and I tell myself the distinction that lets a person sleep: Ryan will survive, and the only heart we’re actually gambling with is Cole’s, and Cole’s heart is the one we’re trying to save.
It’s a good rationalization. They’re always good. That’s what makes them rationalizations and not reasons.
“Indie.” I collect her straight out of the conversation she and Cole are failing to have — stalled somewhere around visitor parking, each holding a drink they have no intention of drinking, because she and Cole have so much in common it’s almost unbearable.
She throws him an apologetic little sorry — one second over her shoulder as I steer her off.
Cole receives her departure like a man being informed the sun will not, after all, be available today.
“Don’t look now. Ryan. By the speakers. Lacrosse, terrible shoes, lovely jaw.
He’s been looking at you all night, he’s about to come over here, and you are going to let him. ”
She goes the specific white of a woman who would rather face a firing squad. “Charlotte, I don’t — why would I—”
“Because he’s cute. So tonight you’re going to stand here and accept a perfectly nice boy’s attention with your spine straight, and you’re going to find out it doesn’t kill you.
” I do not say the other reason. The other reason is standing thirty feet away holding a beer he’s forgotten about, going very still.
“It’s a muscle. You’ve just never used it. ”
“I don’t know how to — do that. The thing. The being-wanted thing. I don’t know what to do with my face.”
“Your face is the easy part,” Benedict says, stepping in, gentle in the way he only gets once a conversation, when it actually counts.
“You just stop hiding the thing that’s already true.
You like being looked at by someone kind — everybody does.
It’s a Tuesday, not a felony. The trick isn’t pretending. The trick is not flinching.”
Indie looks at him, then at me — one small desperate flicker between us — and I watch her decide to be brave the way I’ve watched her decide a hundred things: chin first, the rest of her catching up. “Okay,” she breathes. “Teach me. Fast. Before I lose the nerve.”
“Then we’ll show you,” says Benedict.
And that, that is the moment the floor tilts, though I don’t feel it go.
***
I could just tell her. Lean in, hand at the back, chin up, breathe, four sentences, done.
I am superb at four sentences. But Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne does not do four sentences when a performance is available, and before I’ve finished my first one he’s peeled off the wall and taken the floor.
Of course he has. Because this, the choreography of being wanted, is the one subject on this earth he’s more qualified to teach than I am, and we both know it.
I should stop him. I have theories about why I don’t. I don’t care for a single one of them.
“Forget the clipboard,” he tells Indie, easy and warm, rolling up his sleeves like a man about to fix a sink.
“Charlotte will hand you a flowchart. I’ll give you the truth, which is that men are simple.
Men are cavemen. You don’t have to be clever — you have to be findable.
Rule number one.” He looks at me, and something flickers behind it.
A dare. “Eye contact. You hold his eyes. And then, just once, you let yourself get caught looking at his mouth.”
He looks at my mouth.
I hold his eyes. I let myself glance, once, at his mouth. And he grins, just a little. His breath changes. The dare goes out of his face and something steadier and far more dangerous comes into it, and I log the small vicious thrill of that under research.
“Rule number two.” And then, without one word of warning, with the unbothered confidence of a man who has never once been slapped for trying it, he puts his hands on my waist and lifts me onto the kitchen island like I weigh nothing — sets me down on the cold marble with my knees level with his ribs — and my heart bolts like a startled animal, and he feels it go.
Senses it. The satisfaction that moves across his face is the single most hateful thing I have ever witnessed.
“It’s loud at a party. So he leans in and whispers something.
Probably something stupid. You laugh anyway. ”
“It’s almost always stupid,” I inform Indie, clawing back roughly eighty percent of my voice. “So don’t be too eager about it. Just — giggle. A little. Kind of cute.”
“Demonstrate the giggle,” he says, wicked.
“Demonstrate the whisper,” I say, “before I demonstrate a knee to your throat.”
He leans in. He brings his mouth to my ear, slow, unhurried, a man with nowhere on earth he’d rather be — and presses his lips just barely to the shell of it, and says, low, only for me, with absolutely nothing instructional left anywhere in his voice:
“You look so fucking gorgeous tonight.”
I laugh. I was told to laugh, so I laugh, and it comes out real and breathless and entirely, catastrophically wrong, and my heart is going so loud I’m certain the whole house can hear it keeping score against me.
“Good,” he murmurs, pulling back just far enough to watch my face do the thing it’s doing, insufferably pleased with himself. “See? Easy.”
We’ll see who finds it easy, I think.
“Next: a little physical touch. Men love that. Touch is—”
“Touch-starved,” I cut in. “Fitting.” And because I do not, as a matter of policy, lose rounds, I take the floor back.
“Like this.” I reach out and close my hand around his bicep — for Indie, purely instructional — and it is, irritatingly, rock under my fingers.
I hold on a half-second past the outer limit of pedagogy.
“Something small. Just enough to tell him it’s allowed. That he can.”
And he answers it. He steps in, into the space my knees make on either side of him, closer than any lesson requires — and one hand slides around to the small of my back and settles there with a weight that isn’t asking permission so much as planting a flag.
A hand that announces itself to every other man in the room in block capitals: back off.
“And if you want to kiss him,” I hear myself say, from somewhere a long way off, “it’s easy.
You don’t lunge. You give him one small reason, and you let him close the rest of it himself.
” I curl my fingers into the front of his shirt — and there it is, the thing I let myself picture exactly once, late, in the bad light of the library, and then buried alive, arriving now in the flesh: the cedar and the heat of him and his mouth a single breath from mine — and I pull, slowly, until there is nothing left in the whole world between us but the decision.
And right there, at the very lip of it, with his eyes gone dark and his breath caught and the room dissolved to static around us—
I let go.
I press him back two inches with the flat of the hand I had fisted in his shirt, and I give him my coldest, brightest, least genuine smile.