Chapter Thirty-One - Charlotte
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Charlotte
I LOSE THE regional final on a Saturday, in three sets, and it is the best tennis I have ever played.
That’s the part nobody warns you about. I don’t choke.
I don’t fall apart. I play the cleanest match of my life against a girl from the state school who is simply, on this day, better than me, faster to the ball, calmer on the big points, more willing to go for the line when it matters.
I do everything right. I’ve chased this title for three years, lost it twice, built my whole spring around it.
And on the day I finally play well enough to deserve it, I lose anyway.
Match point, I hit a backhand I’d bet my life on, and it catches the tape and drops on my side, and it’s over. The thing I organized a year around is just, gone. Cleanly. Fairly. Nothing to blame, no one to manage, no version where my grip could have held it.
I make myself walk to the net and shake her hand and mean it.
She earned it. I tell her so, and watch her face do the thing winners’ faces do, the disbelief, the light — and I remember, dimly, from a long time ago, that I used to think that light was the whole reason to play.
Somewhere in three years of chasing this, I stopped playing for the light and started playing to not feel the dark.
Those are not the same sport. The girl across the net just beat me at the first one while I was busy grinding away at the second.
And I stand at the baseline and wait for the sky to come down.
It doesn’t. That’s the whole story of the day, if I’m honest. I did everything right and lost the thing I wanted most, the exact catastrophe I have spent my entire life arranging my world to prevent — and I survived it.
I’m still standing. My heart is still going.
The scoreboard says I lost, and I am somehow, impossibly, still a person.
Nobody ever told me you could do that. In the cold house they taught me the opposite.
They taught me that loss is the end of you, that the only safe move is to never want anything you could lose, and I believed it so completely that I nearly threw away the one thing I actually wanted rather than risk finding out it was a lie.
It was a lie. I find out at the baseline of a court I just lost on.
You can want a thing with everything you have, and lose it, and live.
***
I look up into the small crowd, and Ben is at the fence.
He didn’t tell me he was coming. He’s just there, alone, in the spot along the chain-link where he stood once at dawn with two coffees, heckling my serve until I hit him with one.
No coffees this time. No grin, either. He’s watching me with his whole face open, the way he looked in my doorway with the terrible flowers, and I understand that he came to watch me chase the biggest thing I wanted, and stayed to watch me lose it, and isn’t going anywhere.
For my entire life, losing has been the thing I do alone. Behind a wall. Where no one gets to see the wreckage. Every instinct I own says: give him the composed nod and the flat eyes, shake the winner’s hand, disappear into your own grace, fall apart later, in private, on schedule, controlled.
I don’t. I walk off the court, and I walk straight to the fence, and I let him see it, the loss, the wet eyes I don’t blink away, the whole undefended thing.
I don’t cry. I want to be clear: I don’t cry, even now.
But I let my eyes go bright and stay bright, and I let him watch them do it, and for me that is more naked than sobbing would be for anyone else.
I hand him the one thing I have never handed a soul: myself, in the exact moment of losing, with the guard flat on the ground.
“You played beautifully,” he says, low, through the chain-link. “I’ve never seen you play like that.”
“I lost.”
“I know. You played beautifully, and you lost.” He says it plainly. No fixing in it. No bright side. He isn’t trying to manage the loss away. He’s just standing in it with me — which is a thing I did not know I was starving for until he did it. “Both of those are true. You don’t have to pick one.”
And I put my fingers through the fence, and he puts his through the other side, and we stand there hooked together through the chain-link while the crowd trickles out around us, and I stop performing being okay, and he lets me, and neither of us says the big thing yet.
It doesn’t need saying yet. It’s already in the fence.
***
We end up at my apartment. In my doorway, the one where I gutted him, the one where I stood with my hand on the cold knob and let him go — I stop, and I make myself say it there, in that exact spot.
Because that’s where I did the worst thing, and it seems right to do the best thing in the same square of floor.
“I have a bad history in this doorway,” I say.
“I stood right here and used everything I knew about you to make you leave, because I was so sure I was going to lose you that I decided to lose you on purpose. On my terms. I’ve spent my whole life doing versions of that.
Leaving first. Never wanting anything I couldn’t survive losing.
” I look at him. “I lost the biggest match of my life two hours ago, and I’m still standing here.
So I’ve run out of the excuse. I don’t get to say I can’t survive losing you, because I just proved I can survive losing things.
Which means the only reason left not to want you all the way is cowardice.
And I’m done being a coward about the one thing that was ever worth it. ”
He doesn’t say anything. He’s letting me get there.
“I’m sorry for the things I did,” I say.
“I’m going first, because Indie told me one of us had to, and because you already went first — in a gym, in front of everyone, for a mess that was half mine — and asked me for nothing.
So. I love you. Not the version of you I built.
You. The one who lost his shine and stood up straighter without it.
I love you, and I’m not managing it, and I’m not bracing for it to end.
And if it ends, I’ll survive that too. But I am not going to spend the survivable years alone in a cold house because I was too scared to say anything. ”
For a second he just looks at me. Then he steps in and takes my face in both hands, careful, like I’m a point he waited the whole match for, and he says, “I love you. God, Charlotte. I’ve loved you since you told me I’d earned nothing and meant it.”
And he kisses me in the doorway where I broke us both, and it undoes the doorway completely, and I pull him inside by the front of his shirt and kick the door shut on every ghost in it.
***
It’s different this time. The first time, he took me apart on purpose, all control and edge, a battle I was thrilled to lose. This time there’s no battle. There’s just the two of us, guards down, finally with nothing left to prove or hide. It’s slower.
It’s so much more.
He undresses me in the half-dark like he’s learning me, not claiming me.
He pulls my shirt over my head and just looks, both hands sliding up my ribs to my breasts, thumbs finding my nipples and circling until they go tight and I have to hold onto his shoulders.
“I love watching this happen to you,” he says against my throat, rolling them between his fingers, and I feel it drop all the way down between my legs.
He gets my sports bra off, then his own shirt, and I drag my palms down his bare chest, and neither of us is performing anything.
We’re just two people who finally stopped running, undressing each other in the dark.
He walks me back to the bed and lays me down and gets my shorts and underwear off in one slow pull, and then he kneels on the floor and draws me to the edge of the mattress and puts his mouth on me.
No warning. No games. Just his tongue, flat and warm, dragging up the length of my pussy and settling on my clit, and I arch off the bed with a sound I did not authorize.
He holds my thighs open with both hands and works me slow, long even strokes, then his lips closing around my clit and sucking — and I get both hands in his hair and stop pretending I’m in charge of any of it.
“Ben—” His name comes out wrecked.
He hums against me, pleased, and slides two fingers into me while his tongue keeps going, curling them up into the spot that lights my whole spine, and I’m climbing already. Fast. Embarrassingly fast. I don’t care.
“Let me watch you,” he says, lifting his mouth just enough to say it, fingers still moving, his chin wet. “All the way. Don’t hide it from me. Not tonight.”
I don’t. I usually go quiet at the end. Lock it down.
Keep it mine. This time I let him watch my face do the whole thing, the tension, the crest, the fall — and I come against his mouth with my fingers tight in his hair and his name breaking apart in the air.
Loud. Undefended. Seen. He works me through it, gentle now, until I’m shaking and pushing his head away because it’s too much.
Then he comes up over me, and I reach down and get my hand around his cock, and he groans into my neck. He’s hard and hot in my palm, and I stroke him slow, base to tip, thumb sliding over the wet head, learning what makes his breath catch.
“Charlotte.” My name, ragged. “You don’t have to—”
But I want to. I push him onto his back and move down and take him in my mouth, and the sound he makes is worth every wall I ever built and finally tore down.
I take him deep, cheeks hollowing, my hand working the base, and he props himself up on his elbows to watch me, one hand cradling the back of my head, not pushing. Just there.
“Look at you,” he breathes. “Look at you. God, I love you.”
I feel that everywhere.
But I don’t want it to end like that. I come back up his body and kiss him, and I can taste both of us, and I reach for the drawer and get what we need and roll it onto him.
And then I straddle him and sink down slowly, taking him inch by inch until he’s all the way inside me.
We both go still and just breathe. He fills me completely.
His hands come to my hips. Not gripping.
Just holding. His eyes find mine and stay.
“Hi,” he says. Stupidly. Tenderly. Buried inside me.
“Hi,” I say back. And I start to move.
It’s slow. I ride him slow. He meets me, and we keep our eyes open, which we have never done, which is the most exposed thing of all.
No hiding in the dark. No game. Just my body moving over his and both of us watching what it does to the other.
He reaches up and thumbs my nipples, then slides one hand down between us to circle my clit in time with me, and I feel the second one building. Deeper than the first.
“That’s it,” he murmurs. “I’ve got you.”
And this time, letting go doesn’t feel like losing the wheel. It feels like finally trusting someone else to have a hand on it.
I come around him with my forehead pressed to his, saying his name, and he follows a few strokes later, hips lifting into me, my name in his mouth like the only word he has left — both of us holding on through it.
Both of us watching. Nothing performed. Nothing hidden.
The realest thing I have ever done with another person, and I do it with my eyes open.
***
Afterward I lie on his chest in the dark, and I do not do the math on the exits.
There aren’t any I’m looking for.
“I lost the biggest match of my life today,” I say into his skin.
“I know.”
“And this is still the best day I’ve had in a year.
” I lift my head to look at him. “That’s the thing I could never let myself find out.
That you can lose the thing you planned your life around and still have the best day — because the day was never really about the thing.
Tennis keeps score with a number that starts at nothing.
Love, zero, all of it. I always thought that was the point.
That love was the word for nothing. The score before anyone’s earned a thing.
” I put my head back down, over his heartbeat.
“It’s not nothing. It was never nothing.
It’s just the only thing on the whole board they don’t make you earn first. You just have to be brave enough to stop keeping score. ”
He’s quiet for a moment, his hand moving slow through my hair.
“You know what got me?” he says. “At the fence. You lost, and you walked straight at me. Not away. I’d have bet everything I own that you’d give me the polite nod and vanish, and I’d have to chase you for a week.
You walked right at me with your guard on the ground.
That’s the bravest thing I’ve ever watched anybody do — and there was a whole match of brave things right before it. ”
“I’m out of practice at being seen,” I say. “I was planning to hide from you for at least a month. Possibly two.”
“I know. I’d cleared my schedule for the chase.”
“Disappointed?”
“Charlotte.” He tips my chin up. “You did the one thing I didn’t know how to make you do.
You went first. I’d have waited years for it.
You gave it to me in a doorway two hours after the worst loss of your life.
” He shakes his head. “Don’t ever apologize for being out of practice.
You did it perfectly the first time it counted. ”
“You’re going to win that title next year,” he says, after a while.
“Probably. I’m very good.” I feel him laugh under my cheek. “But if I don’t, I’ll survive it. I’ve got recent evidence.” I close my eyes. “Stay. It’s late. The world can wait. We’ll do nothing, on purpose, which I’m told is a thing people do.”
He tightens his arm around me, the not-leaving, the being kept, the thing I had no defense against and have finally stopped defending against.
I fall asleep before I mean to, on his chest, the way I did exactly once before and spent the next morning insisting had never happened.
This time I’m not going to insist. This time, if he brings it up, the drooling, the Saint Bernard, the dossier — I’m going to let him have it.
I’ll add the entry myself. Sleeps, all the way through, only on him.
The dossier is never going to be complete. That’s the point of it now. You don’t finish learning a person you’ve decided to keep. You just keep going, forever, with your eyes open, and the score you stopped bothering to keep.
We do nothing, on purpose, all the way till morning.