Page 29 of Give In to Me
He knows I just figured something out.
The moment stretches. The lecture hall continues around us, laptops clicking, someone coughing, David’s pen scratching his baseball rankings, and none of it reaches me. There’s this man looking at me from behind his podium, and there’s the girl from Nebraska who just realized that her hopeless, impossible, two-year crush saved her life in an alley when she was eighteen, and between us there’s a wire pulled so tight I can feel it humming in my teeth.
He looks away first.
In two years, I’ve watched him win every staring contest with every student, every colleague, every suited donor at every faculty event. He doesn’t yield eye contact. But he turns from me now. Back to the board, back to his lecture, back to the layers of security he’s been teaching us to build. And his hand, the one holding the dry-erase marker, has a tension in it that wasn’t there before.
My chest unlocks.
No. That’s not right. I’ve been fine this whole time. I must have been. But my lungs feel new, like they just remembered what they’re for, and when the air hits the bottom of my chest it trembles there, uncertain.
I look down at my notebook. My circle is a dent in the page, a small pressed wound where my finger pushed too hard. Beside it, my notes have stopped mid-sentence:concentric barriers—breach of one layer doesn’t—
Doesn’t what?
I press my pen to the page. My hand is still. I’m a girl who gets A’s and goes to church on Sundays and calls her parents every week and has never been kissed. I’m a girl who handles things. I can handle this.
Except that my eyes drift back to the podium, where Professor Salvatore has resumed his lecture with his usual immaculate composure, his voice wrapping around words likevulnerabilityandexposureand the cost of leaving the core unprotected, and I know with a certainty that settles into my bones like weather:
Nothing is going to be the same.
His men are still there. I can feel them at the back of the hall, two dark, silent shapes at the edge of my awareness. And at the front, their boss, his back to me now, writing on the board with a hand that Iwatched, I watched, hold that marker with a grip that wasn’t there ten minutes ago.
He looked away first.
And the worst part—the part that should frighten me but doesn’t—is that when our eyes met, when he looked at me and I looked at him and the whole room fell away:
I wasn’t afraid of him.
Not even close. What terrified me was how much I wanted him to look at me again.
Chapter 2
THE NOTE IS WAITINGon my desk after class.
Not typed. Not printed. Handwritten, in that angular European script that I could pick out of a lineup at forty paces:My office. 4 PM.
No signature. No please. Just three words and a time, written in ink so dark it looks like it bled through from the other side of something.
I stare at it for a full ten seconds while students stream past me, while David says something about the dining hall, while my finger traces a circle on the corner of the paper so fast it nearly burns. Then I fold the note carefully, tuck it into my notebook, and walk to my next class with his handwriting pressed against my sternum like a coal.
At 3:47 PM I’m standing outside his office door.
I’m thirteen minutes early, which is a choice I’ll regret for the rest of my natural life, because now I’ve thirteen minutes to stand in this hallway and think about what’s waiting on the other side of that door and my circles are getting smaller and faster and I’m drawing them on my own wrist like a person who has lost all connection to rational behavior.
His door is dark wood. Heavy. The nameplate readsProf. D. Salvatorein brass letters that don’t need to be polished because of course they don’t, because nothing about this man is allowed to tarnish. Through the door I can smell old books andsomething else, something warm and Italian that I’ve spent two years pretending doesn’t make my pulse change rhythm.
At 3:52 I knock.
At 3:52 and one second, I hear: “Come in.”
Two words. His voice, muffled through wood, still does something to the base of my spine that would be medically concerning if I described it to a doctor.
I open the door. I step inside. And the first thing I notice, before the bookshelves or the window or the warm amber of late afternoon, is that he’s standing.
Behind his desk, but standing. Not leaning, not sitting, not in any of the composed positions I’ve catalogued over two years of watching him from the third row. He’s on his feet and there’s an energy coming off him that I can feel from the doorway, something coiled and restless, and his jacket is off. Draped over the back of his chair. Just the white shirt, and his sleeves aren’t rolled today, and for some reason that feels more alarming than if he had been holding a weapon.
“Close the door.”
