Chapter Seventeen - Charlotte
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Charlotte
I KISSED BENEDICT Prescott-Hawthorne in front of a hundred witnesses, and I wake up the next morning a different person, which I resent, because I liked the old one. The old one had a containment strategy. The old one slept.
The first thing I do is conduct a damage assessment, because that is what I do.
That is the entire operating system. The facts are these: I have, of my own free will, in a lake house, in a burgundy dress, in front of Margo, Margo, who by now has told the continent — crossed a room, put my hands in Benedict’s hair, and kissed him until the music stopped meaning anything.
There is no plausible deniability. No class project to blame it on, no demonstration, no pedagogy.
There is a video, almost certainly. There are nine texts on my phone, four of them from Tess, and one from a number I don’t recognize that simply says finally, the whole team owes Reyes forty dollars.
I have lost control of the narrative completely, which is the thing I fear most in the measurable world. And I lie there waiting for the regret to arrive, braced for it, the way you brace for cold water.
It doesn’t come.
That’s the part that frightens me. Not the lost control. The not-regretting.
I am a person who regrets things. I have a finely calibrated regret instrument; it runs constantly, low, in the background, auditing every decision for the hidden flaw.
I have regretted kisses by parking lots.
I have regretted unforced errors in the fourth game of matches I won.
I regret things I did correctly. And here I lie, the morning after the most reckless, least-planned, most publicly out-of-control thing I have ever done, running the instrument over all of it, and getting nothing.
No flaw. No hidden cost. Just the memory of my hands in his hair, and the sound he made against my mouth, and the strange clean quiet of having finally stopped fighting a war I’d been losing on purpose for a year.
I shake the instrument. Still nothing.
I have never been so afraid of a feeling in my life as I am of that one: the absence of regret, sitting in the exact place regret is supposed to live.
By noon I’ve been tagged in three photos, two videos, and a meme.
The meme is, I’ll concede, well-constructed.
The whole campus has apparently been running a low-grade betting pool on the two of us for a month, Reyes’s whiteboard was not a joke, it was a prospectus — and the resolution is content.
Strangers have opinions about my mouth. People who’ve feared me for three years are sending heart emojis.
And the part of me that has spent its whole life controlling precisely how I am seen, curating the exact distance at which others are permitted to stand — waits in the wreckage of all that lost privacy to feel violated.
Instead I feel mostly just seen. Which is worse. And also somehow isn’t. I do not have a framework for a thing that manages to be both.
***
Indie finds me on the kitchen floor at nine a.m., sitting with coffee I’m not drinking, having a quiet structural crisis.
She doesn’t say I told you so, which is the single greatest act of restraint in the recorded history of our friendship. She sits down on the floor next to me, hip to hip, hands me a piece of her toast, and says, “So.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m eating toast on the floor with my best friend. Who kissed a boy.”
“I had a containment strategy.”
“I know, baby.” She leans her head on my shoulder. “It was airtight. It was a beautiful plan. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“I am enjoying this so much. I have waited so long. Do you know how long I’ve waited?
I have listened to you call that boy an ongoing situation, and a menace, and a waste of a perfectly good forehand, basically every day for a year.
I have watched you build your entire personality around pretending he doesn’t exist. And last night you climbed him like a tree in front of the whole team—”
“I did not climb him like a tree.”
“Margo has it on video. You climbed him like a tree, Charlotte. It’s beautiful. It’s going in the wedding slideshow.”
“There is no wedding.”
“There’s always a wedding,” she says serenely, “in the slideshow,” and eats her toast, and I love her so much in that moment I could weep. Which I do not do.
And I laugh, it comes up out of me wrong and wet and surprising, half a laugh and half the other thing — and Indie just stays there with her head on my shoulder, eating her toast, while I come as close to falling apart as I let myself come, which from me is one hard breath and a jaw that won’t quite work.
She doesn’t make me explain. She already knows.
She’s been here. Eight feet of courage in a crowded room is the same eight feet no matter who’s crossing it.
“It’s so much,” I say finally. Quietly. The truest thing I’ve said out loud in weeks. “I didn’t — Indie, I don’t know how to want something this much. I never learned. I learned the opposite. I’m good at the opposite.”
“I know.”
“What if I’m bad at it? What if I do it wrong, and lose him, and end up worse off than if I’d just — kept the plan?”
She lifts her head and looks at me with her honest face on, the one that can’t lie, and she says: “Then you’ll have lost something real, instead of protecting yourself from ever having it. Which is worse, Charlotte. It just hurts slower, so you can pretend it doesn’t count.”
I have nothing for that. She’s right, and being right is a thing Indie does so gently you don’t feel it go in until you’re already bleeding better.
That’s the thing about being loved by someone honest. You can’t win the argument, because they’re not arguing.
They’re just sitting in the room being right, with toast, until you run out of plans.
I’ve spent four years being the one who fixes Indie’s life.
I did not understand, until I was on the floor of my own kitchen getting mine fixed back, how much it costs to be the one who lets herself be helped.
It costs control. It costs the whole fortress.
And she has just demonstrated, with a piece of toast and her head on my shoulder, that the price is somehow worth paying.
***
He comes over that night. I text him, I text him, initiated contact, a flagrant violation of a protocol that no longer exists — and he comes, and we don’t talk about the lake house, and we don’t talk about the bet.
For a while we just sit on my couch and argue about a movie neither of us is watching.
“This is a bad movie,” he announces, twenty minutes in.
“You picked it.”
“I picked it because you said you hated it and I wanted to find out if you were right. You’re right. I hate that you’re right. It’s the most consistent feature of my life now.” He gestures at the screen. “Why is he running toward the explosion? No one runs toward the explosion.”
“You would run toward the explosion.”
“I would run toward the explosion charmingly, and survive, because the universe protects me, which we’ve established is my entire problem.” He looks over, and the movie keeps going, ignored. “You’re not watching this either.”
“I’m conducting surveillance.”
“On the film?”
“On you. You’re an ongoing situation. I keep notes.” I hear the word leave, and I don’t care. Which is new.
The whole apartment hums with the thing we’re not saying: that he’s on my couch, in my space, by mutual choice, with no operation and no excuse and nowhere either of us has to be.
It should be unbearable, the humming. For three weeks the not-saying was a kind of warfare, eighteen inches of held breath.
But something changed at the lake house.
Something got said with my mouth that can’t be unsaid.
So the silence on the couch isn’t a standoff anymore.
It’s an agreement we simply haven’t gotten around to signing.
He knows. I know. The only question left is who stops pretending first, and I have discovered, to my ongoing horror, that I have become a person capable of going first.
And then I stop pretending to watch the movie, and he stops pretending to watch me pretend, and the distance between us on the couch does the thing the eighteen inches has been threatening to do for weeks.
It collapses.
He kisses me slowly this time. Nothing like the lake house, that was a dam breaking. This is a decision, made carefully, in private, with the lights low and no one to perform for.
There is a specific cruelty to a patient man, and I have never been on the receiving end of it before.
Every boy I have ever let near me was in a hurry, to get somewhere, to prove something, to collect the win.
Benedict is in no hurry at all. He kisses me like the kissing is the point and not a toll on the road to somewhere better.
Like getting to do exactly this is already more than he expected the universe to hand him, and he intends to take his time being grateful.
It undoes me faster than any urgency could.
I have a whole defense built against being wanted in a hurry.
I have none at all against being savored.
One hand comes up to the side of my face, the way it did in the kitchen, except this time I don’t shove him off. This time I pull him closer. This time I climb half into his lap, the way I showed Indie a man would want, and find out, with my whole traitor body, that I want it too.
For a while it’s just that. Kissing, unhurried, his hand warm at my jaw and mine fisted in his shirt, the terrible movie throwing light around the dark room, both of us pretending we aren’t shaking.
I have kissed people. I have done a great deal more than kiss people.
I have never once, in any of it, felt like the kissing was a place to arrive instead of a toll to pay on the way somewhere, and I keep waiting for the part of me that manages these encounters to step in, take notes, stay safely behind the glass.
The part of me does not step in. There is no glass. There’s only his mouth, and my pulse, and the dawning, terrifying suspicion that I am, for the first time in my life, entirely present for something I cannot control.
It gets heavy fast. His hands find the hem of my shirt and ask a question against the skin of my waist, and I answer it, arching up into him.
His mouth goes to my jaw, my throat, the spot under my ear I didn’t know was a spot until he found it, and I make a sound I’d deny under oath, and feel him smile against my skin, pleased, undone, as wrecked as I am.
His fingers spread warm across my back and start to move, and somewhere in the heat of it I feel my shirt lift an inch, cool air on my stomach, his voice at my throat saying my name like it’s the only word he has left—
And I freeze.
I don’t decide to. That’s the thing about the fear: it doesn’t ask.
One second I’m molten and the next I’m a held breath, every muscle rigid, the old animal panic flooding up from the floor of me.
You are not in control of this. You cannot plan this.
You have handed this person the power to ruin you, and there is no exit.
My hands fist in his shirt. Not to pull him closer this time.
It isn’t a thought, when it comes. It isn’t reasoned.
It’s older than reason. A body remembering a lesson the mind agreed to forget, the one from the cold house, about open doors and the cost of wanting.
My mind knows Benedict is safe. My mind has run the numbers on him for weeks and found him, against every prior I own, trustworthy.
But the fear doesn’t live in the mind. It lives in the floor.
And it has just reached up through twenty-one years of very good flooring and taken me by the ankle.
He feels it instantly. Of course he does. He reads me the way I read a scoreboard.
He stops. Everything. At once. His hands go still and then lift clean off my skin, palms up, and he pulls back far enough to see my face, and there is no frustration in his. None. Just the open, searching thing he only ever shows me.
“Hey,” he says softly. “Hey. We’re okay. Nothing has to happen. Nothing at all.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Don’t apologize. Don’t.” He brushes my hair back, gentle, the heat banked down to nothing in an instant, like he flipped a switch he never resented having. “We’ve got all the time in the world, Astor. There’s no clock on this one. We’re not on anyone’s schedule but ours.”
He says it like a fact, not a reassurance, like he’s already decided it and is simply reporting the decision. No clock. It’s such a foreign concept I nearly ask him to say it again. Everything in my life has a clock. Most days I am the clock.
And I sit there in his lap with my shirt askew and my pulse wrong and my whole carefully defended self cracked open down the middle, and I do the thing I have spent twenty-one years engineering my entire life to avoid.
I tell him the truth.
“I’m scared,” I say. “I’m not — it’s not you. It’s that I want this so much, and I was raised to find the cost first.”
He doesn’t fix it. That’s the thing I’ll, that’s the thing about him.
He doesn’t try to talk me out of it, or promise me there’s no cost, or do any of the things a lesser, more frightened man would do.
He just gathers me in, careful, and holds me against his chest where I can feel his heart going, and says, into my hair:
“Okay. Then we go slow. As slow as you need. I’m not going anywhere, and I’m not a cost, and the only thing I want tonight is to be the guy you got scared in front of and didn’t have to run.”
I don’t run. I stay. I put my head on his chest and let him hold me on a couch in front of a movie neither of us will ever finish, and after a while he starts, absurdly, badly — narrating the terrible film in a low voice, doing all the characters, until I’m laughing into his shirt.
Until the scared thing in me has loosened its grip, finger by finger, the way he loosened my hand off a racket under the sodium lights.
Nobody has ever picked the scared version of me before. I didn’t know you were allowed to. I didn’t know there was a way of being seen that didn’t cost you the whole war.
And it is, I run all the comparisons; it’s the engine of me — braver than the kiss. Braver than anything I have ever done on a court. The single bravest thing in my entire well-defended life:
I let someone see me scared. And I let them stay.