Chapter Nineteen - Charlotte
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Charlotte
I WAKE UP on Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne’s chest having slept all the way through the night.
I lie very still and take a breath, because old habits are the last to die and mine die never.
Eight hours. Unbroken. No three a.m. audit, no lying awake pre-running tomorrow.
Just his heartbeat under my ear and gray morning light and the warm impossible weight of his arm across my back.
A feeling in my chest I almost have to look up, I encounter it so rarely, a low, full, dangerous contentment.
The kind that doesn’t ask permission. The kind I have spent my entire life refusing to issue a visa to.
I should get up. Getting up is what I do; the day has a schedule and the schedule has me in it.
Instead I stay exactly where I am. I feel his heartbeat, and count it, slow.
I count every beat, and then notice I’ve stopped wanting to count it and just want to feel it, which is the kind of thought that should alarm me a great deal more than it does.
Whatever he did to me in the dark, and he did a great deal, thoroughly, with a patience that ought to be illegal — the more dangerous thing is the after.
The staying. The arm across my back. The not-leaving.
I have survived being wanted my whole life.
I have no defense at all against being kept.
He’s awake. Of course he’s awake; he told me once he doesn’t sleep much either. Two insomniacs who somehow knocked each other out cold. “Morning,” he says into my hair, and I feel him smile. “You drooled on me.”
“I do not drool.”
“You drooled like a Saint Bernard. It was the most relaxed I’ve ever seen you.”
“I’m revising my entire opinion of you. Downward.”
“You don’t have an opinion of me. You have a dossier. And it just got a new entry — drools, adorably, like a Saint Bernard — so it’s basically complete now.”
“I’m burning the dossier.”
“You’d never. You worked too hard on it.” His arm tightens. “Stay. It’s early. I’ll make terrible coffee and we’ll do nothing all day.”
And I stay. That’s the part I have to be honest about before the rest of it: I stay, and it’s good. I’m happy, and for about four days I let myself have it.
***
They are the best four days of my life, but a person built like me cannot have the best four days of her life without the back of her brain quietly starting to calculate the bill.
And they are good. Concretely, specifically good.
He shows up to my dawn practice, once, exactly once, bleary and appalled and clutching two cups — and stands at the fence heckling my serve until I hit him with one, on purpose, and he declares it the finest morning of his entire life.
Indie and Cole start folding us into things, the four of us, and I learn the particular vertigo of being half of a couple at a table of couples: Ben’s hand on the back of my chair.
Me being, for once, a person things happen with instead of a person who arranges them for others from a safe distance.
Margo cries. Tess opens a second betting pool, on a different question this time, whose terms I decline to learn.
And one afternoon I catch myself in the dining-hall window laughing with my whole face, the real one, the one I save for Indie — aimed at a boy, in public. And I don’t immediately take it back.
That, more than anything, should warn me how far gone I already am.
It creeps in slow. A Tuesday-morning sort of dread, low and patient.
I’ll be sitting across from him in the dining hall watching him be effortlessly, infuriatingly delighted by a bad joke, and instead of being happy I’ll feel the floor go thin under me, and the old voice, my mother’s voice, the cold-house voice — will start its quiet math.
This is too much. You have handed this person every weapon.
There is no exit. When it goes, and it will go; everything goes — it is going to take a piece of you that does not grow back, and you will have nobody to blame but the girl who let herself want it.
I know it’s fear. I am not stupid about myself; I’m just powerless against the parts I understand.
I know the contentment is real and the dread is a lie my history keeps telling me.
But knowing a thing and being free of it are different sports.
And by the fourth day I’ve started doing the thing I do.
The small terrible thing. The bracing, pulling back an inch at a time, going quiet, holding a little of myself in reserve, getting ready, the way you tense before a fall you’ve decided is coming.
I’d like to say I fight it. I don’t, really.
Fighting it would mean telling someone, Indie, or him — and telling someone would mean saying the fear out loud, where it could be looked at and found ridiculous.
I’m not ready to be talked out of it. The fear is the only thing holding the exits open.
So I feed it instead, quietly, the way you feed a thing you’ve decided to keep.
I notice every small gap between us and count it as proof.
I clock the half-second his attention drifts at dinner and enter it into evidence.
He is, by every honest measure, exactly as warm and present as he was the first morning. The retreat is entirely mine.
I just need it to look like his. So that when I run, I can call it self-defense.
He notices. He notices everything about me. He doesn’t push. He just gets a little careful, a little watchful, the way you get around a thing you can feel pulling away and can’t think how to hold.
On the fourth night he catches my wrist, gentle, as I’m inventing a reason to leave early. “Hey. Where’d you go?” Not the room. He means me. He felt me leaving the way you feel a draft come in under a door.
“I’m right here,” I say. Which is a lie. And he looks at me a long moment and decides, kindly, wrongly, to let me have it. He keeps letting me have things. That’s the trap of him: he hands me every out and trusts me not to take them.
I’m about to take all of them at once.
Because on the fifth day, the cost I’ve been bracing for walks up to me at the athletic complex and introduces itself.
His name is Jack.
***
I’ve seen him before, like a person only once you’re told to look, around the edges of the men’s program, never quite in it.
A tall guy with a wound in his posture I remembered once and forgot.
Dark hair and a severe jaw line. I’m waiting for Benedict outside the men’s locker rooms, in the loud chlorine-and-rubber hum of the complex, already half-retreated, already rehearsing tonight’s reason for leaving early, and into that exact frame of mind, into a girl who has spent five days hunting for the cost. He walks up, unhurried, like he’s been waiting just as long.
People like that find each other. A girl looking for proof and a man carrying it around like a wound were always going to collide.
He stops in front of me.
“You’re the Astor girl,” he says. “The tennis one. The one he’s—” He doesn’t finish it. He doesn’t have to; the whole campus finished it a week ago. “Huh.”
“And you are?”
“Jack.” He watches my face for recognition and doesn’t get any, and something flickers — bitterness, old and worn smooth. “He hasn’t mentioned me. Course he hasn’t. Why would he.” He smiles, and it doesn’t reach anything. “We were best friends. Doubles partners. You’d think it’d come up.”
Every instinct I have goes quiet and alert at once, the way it does when a match turns live. “What happened?”
“Ask him.” Jack shrugs, but the shrug costs him something.
“Ask him what he was doing the week of conference finals, sophomore year. Ask him real careful, and watch his face. Because the thing about Ben—” he leans in, not unkindly, which is somehow worse “—is that nothing’s ever his fault.
It just lands on whoever’s standing next to him.
He floats. Everybody around him pays the bill.
” He glances toward the locker room door.
“I lost my ranking. Then my scholarship. Then years of a friendship I’d have died for — because he couldn’t be bothered to try the one week it counted, and then he apologized with a grin and went back to being golden.
I’m just the guy it landed on.” His eyes come back to me, and there’s something in them I recognize, because I was raised by people who have it: the specific pity of someone who’s already seen the ending of your movie.
“You seem smart. You seem like you keep your eyes open. So keep them open. People who stand too close to Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne tend to be the ones who pay for him. Ask him about that week. Ask him about me. See if he can do it without smiling.”
The locker room door opens. Ben comes out, and I watch something happen to his face that I have never once seen happen to it. The easy gold drains out. The grin goes somewhere. A flinch he can’t charm over. And he says, low, careful, in a voice with no joke anywhere in it:
“Jack.”
“Benny.” Jack doesn’t smile. “Just meeting the girlfriend. She’s out of your league. Tell her I said so.”
And he walks off, that wound in his posture, and leaves the cost sitting in the air exactly where I’ve been bracing for it to land.
I have never seen Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne not know what to do.
That’s the thing that sticks, more than anything Jack said.
The most fluent, unbothered, gracefully-handled man I have ever met stands there beside me with his hands useless at his sides, no charm, no save, no line — watching the back of a man he has plainly wronged, and looking, for the first time since I’ve known him, like someone with a cost he cannot talk his way out of.
A less frightened version of me would read it correctly.
Would see guilt that means something, a man who knows exactly what he did and hates himself for it, which is the precise opposite of a man who floats.
But I am not the less frightened version.
I am the one with the wall half-built and a fistful of fresh bricks with Jack’s name on them.
***
Ben tries. On the walk back he tries — “that’s a long story, it’s old, it’s not what it sounded like, can we — can I tell you the whole thing, not here” — and the awful part, the part I’ll hate myself for later, is that I barely hear him.
Because Jack didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already, in the cold-house part of me, believe.
He just said it out loud, in a man’s bitter voice, with a lost scholarship for evidence:
People who stand too close to Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne are the ones who pay for him.
There it is. The cost. The one I’ve been waiting for since the first good morning. Finally, mercifully: a name, a face, a number. A man who loved Ben and stood too close and lost everything, walking around campus as a broody cautionary tale.
I should let Ben tell me the whole thing.
I know it now; I knew it then. I should do for him the exact thing Indie taught me, the thing I lectured a whole campus about, give him the chance, hear the truth, don’t let the fear write the ending.
But fear doesn’t wait for the truth. Fear has been packed and ready by the door for four days, just waiting for a reason.
Jack handed it one with a bow on it.
“Charlotte.” He’s stopped walking, there on the path.
He makes me stop too, and there’s something in his face I’ve never had aimed at me.
Not the grin. Not the charm. Something stripped and urgent.
“Whatever he told you, I will tell you all of it. The parts that make me look bad and the parts that make me look worse. Tonight, for as long as you want. I’m not going to defend it.
I just need you not to decide the ending before I’ve said a single word. Please.”
And it’s the please that does it, the same word he dragged out of me four nights ago, handed back now — and I cannot afford to hear it. Because hearing it means staying. And staying means the fall.
“I have to go,” I say. Which is the thing I say. “I have a — I’ll call you.”
I don’t call him. I go home, and I sit on my kitchen floor.
I do not tell Indie, because telling Indie would mean hearing her be right.
And I start, quietly, methodically, with the terrible competence I bring to everything — to build the wall back up.
Brick by brick. Higher this time. Because now I have proof.
Now I have a Jack. And the proof says exactly what I’ve always known: the people who let themselves want him are the ones left standing in the wreckage, paying his gravity bill, holding nothing.
He texts. Of course he texts, twice that night, once the next morning, every one of them careful and kind and trying.
Can we talk. It isn’t what Jack made it sound like.
Please, Charlotte. Let me tell you the whole thing.
I read every single one and answer none, which is a specific cruelty I am not proud of.
I tell myself I need time to think. I do not need time to think.
I need time to retreat, to get the wall high enough that whatever he says next can’t clear it.
Because some animal part of me has decided that the only way to survive losing him is to leave first, on my own terms, while I still hold the wheel.
It is the worst logic in the world. It is the logic of a girl who would rather author the wreck than sit and wait for it. I have it in my bones. I was raised on it, in a cold house, by experts.
Indie knows something’s wrong by the next morning, she always knows, and she doesn’t push either.
She just leaves a coffee outside my door and a text that says here when you want to talk, no rush, love you, and I look at it and feel the specific shame of being loved well by people while you’re hard at work proving you don’t deserve it.
I don’t answer her either. I’m very busy.
A wall is a great deal of work when you’re determined to build it alone.
The bet’s reckoning is in two days. The gala. The whole school. And I go into it already retreating, already braced, already turning the best thing that has ever happened to me into a cost I can get out ahead of, which is the thing about being raised to find the cost first.
You find it whether it’s there or not.