Chapter Twelve - Benedict #2
That’s what I mean. The court won’t let her lie. We are losing the war of pretending one involuntary tell at a time, and the scoreboard is the only thing in the building keeping the real score.
We don’t drop another service game. Somewhere in the third-to-last point I catch her eye and she does the thing, the small involuntary brightening, there and gone — and I think: there she is. There’s the one place you can’t brick over.
On the court, she lets me see it. On the court, she has no choice.
That’s the deal I accidentally made with the universe: two hours a day where Charlotte Astor is exactly as honest as her body, which can’t lie, which keeps voting for me in front of witnesses while the rest of her drafts resolutions against it.
The trouble, and I feel it land even as we shake Hargrove’s furious hand, even as the gate bell rings and Coach Leon beams and the boosters surge — the trouble is that this is the last one.
***
Cole finds me at the fence before I’ve toweled off, and he has the face.
The new one. The one I’ve spent two weeks quietly building toward, lit from somewhere structural, a house with all its windows finally on.
Indie hovers twenty feet back, pretending to talk to Tess and not quite managing to look anywhere but at him, and Cole keeps drifting his eyes to her mid-sentence like a compass that found north and can’t believe its luck.
“I asked her,” he says. “To the thing next weekend. A date. I used the word, out loud, like a man, and she said yes before I’d finished it.” He shakes his head, dazed. “I don’t even know what happened. Something just clicked. The whole campus suddenly made sense.”
“I’m happy for you, Cole.” I am. That’s the pure part — the part with no angle anywhere in it, the one thing in this entire operation I never have to lie about. “You did good.”
“I almost didn’t. I was talking myself out of it, like always, and then—” he laughs at himself “—I don’t know. I just decided I’d rather find out than wonder. You know?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”
I do know. That’s the joke the universe has spent a month assembling at my expense.
I know exactly. I wrote the speech. I loaded it into two terrified mouths and watched it work, twice, and now I’m standing at a fence congratulating my best friend on doing the one thing I can’t make myself do, while the woman who helped me teach it to him stands ten feet away, rebuilding a wall between us with her bare hands.
There are no more exhibitions after tonight.
The two weeks are up. The marquee event has run its glorious course, the department has its money, and Coach Leon stands at center court thanking everyone for coming and announcing, to enormous applause, that Astor and Prescott-Hawthorne have raised, he says the number, for the children’s wing.
The crowd roars. Charlotte stands beside me in the white that photographs, accepting it with the gracious, lethal smile.
And I do the math nobody else in the building is doing.
No more mandated practices. No more warm up at five.
The scheme is finished too, Cole and Indie have spent forty-eight hours in the incandescent, can’t-stop-grinning early days of two people who finally quit pretending, which makes Operation Hero a closed case.
Retired with honors. The bet isn’t settled, the gala’s still weeks out, the fundraising still live — but the bet never required us to stand four feet apart at five o’clock. The bet I could lose by email.
Which means that as of the moment this crowd goes home, there is not one official reason left on the books for Charlotte Astor to spend another hour beside me.
Julian told me this day was coming. You’re going to be standing in a room with her and no reason to be there, and you’re going to have to figure out, with no script, what you actually want.
I know what I want. That’s no longer the hard part. I knew it somewhere around the second straw of a milkshake. I confirmed it with a hand at the small of her back in a stranger’s kitchen. I signed it in blood while she shoved me off and called it pedagogy.
The hard part is that I built my entire life out of never reaching for things, because things came to me.
And the one thing that never came to me is standing two feet away, signing autographs for boosters’ kids, pretending, with the full force of a will I have watched bury grown men, that two nights ago did not happen.
I’ve spent a fortnight teaching everyone else to be brave. Cole. Indie. Ask her. Just ask her. That’s the whole thing.
I pick up my bag. Across the court, she finishes with the last kid, and looks up, and catches me looking, and for one second, one second, before the wall goes back up — she doesn’t look away.
Physician, I think. Heal thyself.
The exhibition is over. Everything that forced us together is over save the fundraiser and that will be two people in a room.
Not sitting together. On opposite sides of the court once again.
I stand on an emptying court in a white shirt that photographs, knowing exactly what I want and exactly what it would cost to reach for it, and understanding, finally, why I’ve spent my whole life making sure I never had to.
There’s a freedom in having nothing to lose, and I’ve had it my whole life without once seeing it for the cage it is.
When every win comes easy and every person who leaves can be charmed back or shrugged off, you never have to be brave.
Brave is just the word for doing the thing when it could actually cost you. My stakes were never real.
She made them real, somewhere between a bet and a milkshake and a hand flat on my chest in front of four hundred people.
And I have never, until her, had anything I couldn’t afford to lose.