Page 28 of Give In to Me
Professor Salvatore. The man I’ve been watching from the third row for two years. The man whose voice lives in my chest like a second heartbeat.
His men saved my life.
Hesaved my life.
My whole body has gone electric. My finger is frozen against the page, mid-circle, pressing so hard the paper’s going to tear. Two years of collected details are running through this new understanding. How he arrives before dawn. How even the other professors give him space. His suits that fit like armor, his voice that never rises above a murmur. The stillness. The composure that never, not once, cracks.
Oh, my stars.
It’s my mother’s phrase, and it rises in me unbidden, the way prayers do. Not willed, just there, pulled up from somewhere deeper than thought.
I think: I have to look normal. I have to sit here and look like a girl taking notes and not like a girl whose entire understanding of the world just turned inside out.
My circle won’t restart. My finger won’t cooperate.
David leans over. “You okay? You look like you saw a ghost.”
“Fine,” I whisper. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone standing very far away. “Just thought I forgot to turn in an assignment.”
He accepts this. David always accepts things. It’s one of the nicest and most occasionally frustrating things about him.
I look back at the podium. Professor Salvatore is writing something on the board now, his back to the hall, his handwriting angular and European in a way that has caused me a truly embarrassing amount of private distress. His shoulders are straight. His posture carries an authority that has nothing to do with academia and everything to do with whatever made those men jump out of their SUVs on a Tuesday night for a stranger in an alley.
My circles used to be peaceful. A thinking habit, something my hands did while my mind wandered through cornfields and daydreams and the quiet fantasies of a girl too sensible to ever act on them.
Right now my circles aren’t peaceful. Right now my finger is pressed against the margin of my notebook and I’m not drawing anything at all.
He turns back to face the hall.
Two hundred students look at him the way they always do, that blend of fear and fascination that follows him through every room he enters. The girl three seats left has given up pretending to take notes. A boy in the front row is sitting up straighter.
But I’m not looking at him the way I always do.
For two years I’ve watched him with the aching, deliberate distance of a girl who knows her place. Third row, cotton dress, circles in the margins, the quiet certainty that a man like this exists in a different atmosphere. I’ve looked at him with longing and admiration and the sweet, safe impossibility of a crush that never has to go anywhere.
I’m not looking at him like that now.
I’m looking at him withknowledge. With the electric, terrifying awareness that the man behind this podium is connected to the men in this room who are connected to the night that split my life into before and after.
He’s scanning the hall. He does this, methodical, moving from section to section. He doesn’t look at individual students. He surveys the room the way a general surveys a field, and his gaze passes over me as it always does, quick and impersonal, another face in the third row.
Except this time it doesn’t pass.
His eyes reach me and stop.
I don’t know what he sees. I don’t know what my face is doing. Something terrible, probably, something that announces I JUST FIGURED SOMETHING OUT in neon letters acrossmy forehead. I try to arrange my expression into something resembling normal academic attention and I fail, completely, because my heart is slamming against my ribs and my finger is still frozen against the page and every nerve ending in my body is lit up like the Fourth of July over the prairie.
His eyes hold mine. One second. Two.
He’s neverlookedat me before. Not really. Not like this. In two years of sitting in his third row, I’ve been furniture. I’ve been one face in a sea of faces, and I’ve been fine with that, grateful for it, even, because if Luciano Salvatore ever actually looked at me I would probably forget how to be a person, and—
He’s looking at me.
His expression changes. Barely visible. If I weren’t someone who has spent two years studying him, I would miss it entirely.
He knows.
I don’t know how. I don’t know what he reads on my face that tells him the ground just opened beneath me, but he reads it. With an instinct that operates faster than thought.
