Chapter Fifteen - Charlotte
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Charlotte
MY CONTAINMENT STRATEGY survives the courtyard by about thirty-six hours, which I consider, all things considered, a respectable showing.
I’ll show my work. I’m a person who shows her work even when the work is humiliating.
After the courtyard, I went home and reinstated the protocol with extra clauses.
No initiating contact: held. No accepting invitations: held, technically, because he stopped sending them.
He started doing something far worse instead, which was nothing at all.
He simply existed, in the same finite campus as me, and let the finite campus do the work.
We’d end up in the same dining hall. The same wing of the same library.
The same coffee line, where he’d order my drink before I reached the counter, without looking up from his phone, and set it down in front of me, and not say anything, and not need to.
By Thursday I understood the thing nobody warns you about: you cannot contain a man who has stopped chasing you and simply started waiting, patiently, with your coffee order memorized, on the far side of every door you walk through.
We don’t discuss it. That’s the new tacit agreement, the unsigned treaty: we do not discuss why two people with no remaining reason to be near each other keep turning up at the same empty places at the same impossible hours, hitting balls neither of us needs to hit, pretending it’s about staying sharp for a season that, in my case, doesn’t even overlap with his.
We just play. He feeds; I hit; we rally until our arms give out and the conversation gets dangerous, and then one of us invents a reason to leave, and we both go home and don’t sleep, and do it again the next night.
It is, I see now, the single most romantic thing I have ever participated in. At the time I’d have had you killed for saying so.
“Your toss is drifting left,” I tell him, because criticism is the only language I trust myself to speak after eleven p.m.
“My toss is perfect. My toss is a Renaissance fresco.”
“Your toss is a cry for help, and it’s drifting left.”
“You watch my toss very closely for a woman who’s contractually contained.”
“I watch it the way you watch a man juggling fire. Out of a sense of impending liability.”
“You’d miss me if I dropped one.”
“I’d write up the incident report and feel nothing.”
“You’d write he was the smartest, best-looking fire-juggler I ever knew, and you’d weep onto the form.”
“I’d write deceased: as predicted, and I’d sleep like a baby.” I send a backhand at his feet, hard, just to watch him deal with it — which he does, gracefully, the way he deals with everything, the way that makes me want to throw a chair. “Serve. You’re stalling because you’re losing.”
“There’s no score. It’s eleven at night.”
“There’s always a score. I taught you that.”
It’s out before I hear the trap in it. I taught you that, the thing I keep saying, with the admission buried inside it: that I’ve taught him things.
That there’s a him-shaped hoard of things I’ve taught and learned and noticed.
That we have a history now, made of small transferred pieces of each other.
We both hear it land. Neither of us touches it. That’s the treaty.
He laughs, the real one, and it isn’t for an audience.
A laugh I have started, to my horror, organizing entire sentences around producing — and he catches the next ball instead of serving it, and walks toward me, spinning his racket, and the air on the court changes the way it does right before a thing happens that you will spend a long time afterward thinking about.
***
“Come here,” he says. “Your grip’s wrong on the backhand return. You’re late on it because you’re late getting around.”
“My backhand return is the best on either team, and you know it.”
“It’s the second best.” And he comes around the net to my side — to my side, which we do not do, which is a violation of the one geography that has kept this whole arrangement survivable — and stands behind me, and reaches around, and puts his hand over mine on the racket to adjust the grip.
The way coaches do. The way it means nothing when coaches do it.
It does not mean nothing.
His chest is at my back. His hand is over my hand. His breath moves the hair at my temple, and he says, low, into the space behind my ear, ostensibly about tennis:
“You’re gripping it like it’s going to get away from you. You hold everything like it’s already leaving.”
He isn’t wrong. Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne sees you.
He has watched me hold the world too tight for three weeks, and now he’s said it out loud with his mouth against my ear like it’s a footwork correction.
And the part that takes down the last wall I have left isn’t the closeness.
It’s the tenderness in it. No line. No move.
Just a true thing, handed gently to a person he has decided, for reasons I cannot begin to plan for, to be gentle with.
His fingers press mine, softly, loosening them one at a time off the death grip I keep on the handle, on the racket, on the ball, on the entire bright terrifying world.
I feel my own pulse going in my throat and his going in his wrist where it rests against mine.
For one long suspended second, under the ugly lights, on the one court in the world that has always been mine alone, I let him loosen my grip.
I don’t step away.
I want to turn around. I admit, alone in the dark where nobody can use it against me: I want, with a force that frightens me more than anything ever has, to turn around inside the circle of his arms and find out what the rest of it feels like.
The thing the kitchen only sketched. I want his mouth.
I want his hands to quit being so polite.
I want to find out what happens to all that effortless control of his when it finally breaks, and whether I could be the thing that breaks it.
I get as far as the first half-degree of the turn—
—and then I feel it. The sense I always get with him; the floor going out from under the part of me that has kept me alive my whole life:
I am not in control of this.
I step away. Hard. I put the whole width of the court between us before I’ve decided to, racket up like a shield, breathing like I’ve run a third set.
“Can we not,” I say.
He doesn’t move toward me. He’s good like that, too good; it’s its own kind of cruelty, the way he always lets me run.
He just stands there on my side of the net with his hands open at his sides, the place where my hand was still warm on the air between us, and he says, very quietly, no joke anywhere in it:
“Charlotte. We can’t keep doing this.”
“Doing what? We’re hitting. It’s a Tuesday.”
“You know what.” And then, because he is braver than me in the only way that has ever mattered, the only way I can’t manufacture or out-plan or win: “It’s not a Tuesday.
It hasn’t been a Tuesday in three weeks.
And we both keep showing up to the same empty courts at eleven at night to not-say it, and I’m tired, Charlotte.
I’m tired of the eighteen inches. Aren’t you tired? ”
I am so tired. That’s the unbearable part. I am bone-tired in a way no amount of winning has ever fixed, tired the way you get when you’ve spent years holding a door shut against your own house.
I could say it now. This is the opening.
He’s cracked the door, done the brave thing, laid it on the net between us and stepped back and left me room to come meet him there.
All I have to do is offer one true sentence and the eighteen inches close.
I know precisely which sentence. I am never at a loss for the sentence.
I stand on my own court, under the ugly lights, with the realest thing in my life held out to me on an open hand—
—and I feel the floor go, and I do the thing I have always done when the floor goes. The thing that has kept me upright, and alone, for twenty-one years.
“I have to go,” I say.
I don’t run. I have some pride left. I walk, chin up, racket in hand, my whole body screaming — off my own court, past the man who has just offered me the one thing I’ve ever wanted that I can’t earn.
I don’t look back. Because I know that if I look back and see his face, the open, undefended thing he only ever shows me — I will not make it to the gate.
So I keep my eyes forward, and I leave him standing alone under the sodium lights on the court that used to be mine alone.
Holding nothing. Having done everything right.
Having been brave, having reached, and been left there for it.
By me.
Because I am the part of this story that doesn’t work.
***
The truth about control. The one I’d never say out loud.
It isn’t about being a tyrant. People think it’s about being a tyrant.
It’s about safety. When you control a thing, it can’t surprise you, and when it can’t surprise you, it can’t hurt you, and I learned very young, in a very large and very cold house, that the people who got hurt were the ones who let themselves want something they couldn’t guarantee.
My mother has never lost control of anything in her life.
She has also never, as far as I can tell, been genuinely happy.
And somewhere around the age of nine, I did the math wrong on purpose and decided the first thing was worth the second.
I could name the specific night, if it mattered.
It doesn’t. A dinner. A dress. A thing I wanted so badly I let it show on my face, and the precise, surgical way that wanting was used against me before the soup was even cleared.
By people who loved me. Which was the entire lesson.
Which was the whole curriculum. Wanting is a door you leave open, and the cold gets in through open doors.
So I taught myself to want nothing I couldn’t provide myself, and I got very, very good at it.
For twelve years I have wanted, exclusively, the things that come when you work for them, rankings, grades, the clean cold approval of a scoreboard — because those can’t be taken from you out of spite.
You earn them, and they’re yours. People are the other kind.
People, you can do everything right for and lose anyway.
And I decided, at nine, in a dress I never wore again, that I would simply never find out.
Safe is better than happy. You can plan safe. You can earn safe. Safe shows up at five a.m. and does the work and never once lets the floor go out from under it.
I built an entire self on that math. The girl who needs no one.
The girl who can’t be ambushed because she’s already run every scenario twice.
The girl alone in the empty box at every match, winning, untouchable, safe.
It’s a very good fortress. I designed it myself, at nine, and I have maintained it ruthlessly every day since. And it has kept out exactly everything.
Which is the problem with a fortress. The thing nobody mentions to the cold nine-year-old laying the first stone: it doesn’t only keep the bad things out.
It keeps everything out. You end up perfectly safe in a room by yourself, which is just the long way of spelling alone, and you don’t notice for about twelve years.
And then a boy puts his hand over your hand under the sodium lights and starts, gently, undoing the stonework, and I understand, with the clean horror of a true thing arriving all at once, that wanting him is the one event in my entire engineered life whose outcome I cannot control.
I can’t plan it. I can’t earn it, he’ll want me or he won’t, and no number of dawn courts will move that needle a millimeter.
I can’t measure it, audit it, or win it.
To have it, I’d have to do the one thing I have spent twenty-one years building a fortress against: hand another person the power to hurt me, and trust them not to use it.
No guarantee. No spreadsheet. No exit. No control.
I would rather play that man for the championship of the world with my wrong hand. I am not being dramatic. I have run the comparison, and I stand by it.
And here’s the genuinely frightening part, the part I can’t get past at one in the morning with my pulse still wrong: I’m no longer certain I’m right.
The math held for twelve years. Safe over happy.
Control over the floor going out. Then I spent three weeks watching Indie get loved correctly in the daylight, and sitting eighteen inches from a boy on a bench being the happiest I have ever been, and somewhere in there the math sprang a hairline leak.
And through it keeps coming the one question I have never once permitted myself to ask:
What if the people who get hurt are also the only ones who ever get anything at all?
So I drive home, and I don’t sleep, and at one in the morning Margo texts the group chat that there’s a thing Friday, a real party, somebody’s lake house, the whole team, the new couple, half the campus — and would I come, because I never come.
And I lie there in the dark with my pulse still wrong and the ghost of his hand still loosening my fingers, and I think: yes.
Yes, I’ll come. I’ll come and I’ll drink something blue and I’ll talk to people who aren’t him, and I will get this, whatever this is, back under management.
Where it belongs. Where everything in my life belongs. Where I can see all the exits.
It is exactly the wrong instinct. The instinct of a woman trying to outrun a feeling by walking faster, when the feeling isn’t behind her at all.
It’s inside her. Has been for weeks. Has packed its own bag and moved in and started rearranging the furniture.
You cannot get a thing back under control by surrounding it with a lake house and a hundred drunk undergraduates.
You can only give it a larger room to get loose in.
But I don’t know that yet, or I know it and refuse it, which is the same thing in a better coat. So I make my plan, and feel the cold clean click of having a plan, and mistake it, the way I always do, the way I was raised to, for safety.
I text back: in.
It is the single worst tactical decision I have ever made. I make it on purpose. To feel safe.
Which tells you everything you need to know about how good my judgment had gotten by the middle of that week.