Chapter Sixteen - Benedict
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Benedict
I AM, AS a rule, a chill person. It’s bedrock, not vanity, just a plain fact about me.
I am the chillest person in any room I have ever walked into.
I don’t get rattled, I don’t get angry, and I have never, in twenty-two years, been jealous of a single thing, for the simple structural reason that nothing has ever been mine in a way I could lose.
Everything comes to me. Everything stays or leaves without my permission, and I shrug either way, because shrugging is free and caring costs.
Jealousy is for people who think they own something.
I have owned nothing. I have been, for twenty-two magnificent years, enviably, bulletproofly chill.
This holds up beautifully right until a man named Connor puts his hand on the small of Charlotte Astor’s back.
***
She comes late, and I feel it the instant she does, because over the past three weeks I’ve developed a kind of Charlotte-radar that pings whenever she enters a structure, and I’ve been not-watching the door for an hour with the dedicated focus of a man absolutely not watching a door.
She comes in the way she does everything, like she’s decided the room is lucky to have her and is prepared to be proven wrong — in a burgundy thing I will not attempt to describe, because there are no words for it that leave a man any dignity.
She wears it like a weapon, clearly chosen to make her feel like a woman in command of a room. It’s working on every man in the building except the one she came here to avoid, who happens to be the only one who knows exactly what it’s for.
We haven’t spoken since the court. Since I put my hand over her hand and started loosening her fingers and told her the truest thing I had, and she looked at me like I’d handed her a live grenade and walked off without looking back.
Three days. The eighteen inches has become a canyon.
She rebuilt the whole wall overnight, brick by brick.
So I do the mature thing. I don’t go to her. I station myself across the room with Julian and a drink I’m not drinking, and I give her exactly the distance she asked for.
“You’re doing the thing,” Julian says, not looking at me, watching the same door I’m not watching.
“I’m not doing a thing. I’m at a party. I’m relaxed. I’m a lake.”
“Sure, man.” He takes a sip. “You’ve checked that door forty times in an hour. I counted, because I love you and I have nothing else going on.”
“That’s a you problem.”
“Mm.” He tips his head across the room. “There she is, by the way. Forty-one.”
I do not turn to look. I want that on the record. I hold out a full three seconds.
Then I look.
Connor plays club something, lacrosse, maybe.
He has the shoulders and the untroubled eyes of a man who has never once been the smartest person in a room and has never noticed.
He lights up the second Charlotte walks in; every man in the house did.
Her dress is short and ruffled at the bottom; long legs in a heel taller than I thought the economical Charlotte would ever wear.
A low neckline, the gentle curve of her chest and her waist cinched in.
It ignites my attention and imagination immediately.
Almost, it seems, at the same time as Connor.
A man with the particular confidence of a guy who’s never been told no by a girl out of his league, because he’s never correctly identified one.
He crosses the room to her with a beer in each hand like an offering.
She takes it. She’s being polite. She came to this party specifically to talk to people who aren’t me, and Connor is, undeniably, not me.
He leans in to say something over the music.
He puts his hand on the small of her back.
The exact spot. My spot, the one I had my hand on in a kitchen and a hallway and on my own court three nights ago while I loosened her grip finger by finger. And some lacrosse Adonis just puts his hand there. Casually. Like it’s unclaimed.
Something goes through my chest that I have no filing system for.
Hot, total, no off-switch. I’ve spent twenty-two years never feeling it, which means it takes me a humiliating second to place, and the instant I place it, I clamp down so hard my jaw aches, because the one thing I have never done, the one move I don’t make, is let a room see me want something.
Too late for the room. Not too late for her, if I’m careful.
I’m already moving. I was never going to be careful.
“Hey, man.” I arrive, clap Connor on the shoulder with an alarming amount of warmth. “Good to see you. Matt, right?”
“It’s Connor.”
“Right. Sorry.” I do not look sorry. I lean down toward Charlotte’s ear — toward the exact territory the music gives me an excuse to enter — and with one hand I ease her a courteous half-step out of Connor’s orbit and into the gap beside me, and I say it low, just for her, deniable as anything: “Leave room for Jesus.”
She turns her head and looks at me.
Not startled. Not charmed. Reading, the way she reads a service motion, a balance sheet, a witness who’s just changed his story. Whatever crossed my face when his hand landed, whatever’s still on it, she sees all of it. I watch her see it.
And then she does the worst possible thing. She says nothing about it.
If she called it what it is, I could deny it in my sleep; denial is my first language.
But she doesn’t hand me the fight. She just lets me know she caught it, one beat too long on my eyes, and turns back to her drink like the whole thing bored her.
She’s not going to spend it. She’s going to hold it, the way she holds everything she might need later.
“Matt’s going to get the wrong idea,” she says.
“Matt will recover.”
“It’s Connor,” says Connor.
“Nobody’s talking to you, Matt.”
Connor looks between the two of us, reads the air the way the whole campus has been reading it for three weeks while we insisted there was nothing to read, and, to his eternal and unexpected credit, removes himself to a less radioactive part of the party.
I have made a great many people feel welcome in my life. This is the first time I’ve made one feel the opposite on purpose, and I’m not proud of how good it feels. Like finding a muscle I didn’t know I had. One that exists for a single purpose.
The purpose is her.
And then it’s just the two of us, four feet from a speaker, in a room that has stopped containing anybody else.
***
Neither of us says anything.
That’s the whole scene, if you’re keeping score. Two people who could each talk a stadium into silence, standing four feet apart with the loudest thing either of us has ever felt sitting in the gap between us, and not one word for it.
I’m not going to say it. I want that noted, not because I don’t know it.
I’ve known it since September. Saying it is just the one move I’ve never made in my life, the reach with no net under it, and even now, even here, with the whole thing already blown, I can feel myself doing exactly what I always do.
Waiting. Holding her eyes and letting the silence be somebody else’s to break.
Which is the miscalculation of my life, because the somebody else is Charlotte Astor.
And Charlotte Astor would rather do anything on this earth than talk about a feeling.
She’d rather run a gala. She’d rather play a third set in the rain.
There is exactly one thing available to a person in this moment that isn’t talking, and she is the most decisive human being I have ever met.
She kisses me.
She crosses the four feet and the eighteen inches and the three days and the wall she built that morning.
She fists both hands in the front of my shirt, the way she did in a kitchen to teach a lesson, except there’s no lesson now, no audience, nothing to prove — and she pulls me down, and she kisses me.
Hard. And the entire lake house and the music and the man named Connor and the last three weeks and the last twelve months all go, at once, completely silent.
Charlotte Astor is kissing me.
She tastes like the something-blue she’s been not-drinking, and she makes a small sound against my mouth that I feel go all the way down my spine.
Her hands come up off my shirt and into my hair.
I get my arms around her and lift her half off the floor because I cannot, physically, in this moment, do anything else.
And she lets me. She, who lets no one do anything.
She’s given up the whole width of the court and crossed to my side of it, and she’s kissing me like she finally lost an argument she’s been having alone for a year.
I’ve imagined this, more times than is dignified, in a library and a kitchen and on a court at eleven at night with her grip loosening under my hand — and I had it completely wrong.
Because I imagined winning it. Finally getting past the guard.
That isn’t it at all. There is no guard.
She took it down herself, with her own two hands.
This is not me getting through to Charlotte Astor.
This is Charlotte Astor deciding, all at once, with the full force of that formidable will, to answer the only way she can stand to, without a single word she’d have to defend in the morning.
It is not a careful kiss. Nothing about us has ever been careful.
It’s a collision, a rally finally won, two people who spent months firing across a net dropping the rackets to find out what’s on the other side — and it goes on long enough that somebody nearby whoops, and somebody else — Margo, obviously, gleefully, at the volume of a marching band — yells FINALLY, and we do not stop.
Because for once, in our combined and heavily defended lives, neither of us is performing anything for the room.
When she finally pulls back, an inch, just an inch, her forehead against mine, both of us wrecked and breathing like we ran a fifth set — she doesn’t let go of me.
That’s the part. She doesn’t step away.
“That,” she says, unsteadily, against my mouth, “was a terrible decision.”
“The worst,” I agree. “Do it again.”
She does.
And the second one is different. The first was a dam giving way, a year of pressure finding the crack all at once.
The second is a choice. Slower, deliberate, both of us awake to it now, her mouth softer and surer against mine, one of her hands flat over my heart where she can feel exactly what she’s done to it and isn’t pretending, for once, that she can’t.
She kisses me like she’s decided something.
Like she ran the comparison again and changed her answer.
Like the worst tactical decision of her life is also, possibly, the first one she has ever made with her whole self instead of her spreadsheet, and she’s going to see it through if it kills her.
Which, she has now informed me twice, she fully expects it might.
***
And I understand it then, holding the unmeltable Charlotte Astor in the middle of a lake house while the team loses its collective mind around us.
The bet was nothing. The scheme was nothing.
The exhibition, the gate, the fundraiser, the entire elaborate machinery the universe built to force the two of us onto the same square of court — none of it was ever the point.
It was all just a long enough excuse for this.
For her to choose. Finally, in front of everyone, with no operation to hide inside, no clipboard, no rail, to cross the distance herself and reach for the thing she isn’t sure she can survive.
She reached. She, who never reaches. She was braver than me in the end, which I will spend the rest of my life trying to deserve.
I spent the whole month teaching people to reach.
Wrote the speech, loaded it into Cole’s mouth and Indie’s, watched it work twice, and then sat on a bench too much of a coward to take a single word of my own advice.
In the end I didn’t have to. She did it for both of us.
Closed the distance I was too scared to close, paid the price I was too careful to pay.
And the humbling, dazzling fact of it is that the bravest person I have ever met is the one I spent a year calling the most defended.
I had her backwards the whole time. The way she had me backwards.
The way we had the entire thing backwards from the first day on the courts.
Which is more or less how this always goes.
And somewhere far back in my chest, under the elation, under the disbelief, under the taste of something blue — a much smaller and quieter voice, the one that has always known the cost of things even when the rest of me refused to, notes that we have just done the most dangerous thing two people like us can do.
We stopped pretending. We took the one relationship neither of us could afford to lose and bet the whole thing on the table. In public. With no exits.
The pretending, the quiet voice says, was the safe part.
But that’s a problem for a sober Tuesday. Tonight there’s a burgundy dress and the distance finally crossed. Charlotte Astor’s hands are in my hair, and I kiss her again, in the middle of everything, and let the dangerous part wait its turn.