Page 30 of Give In to Me
I close the door. The click of the latch is very loud.
His office is smaller than I expected. Or maybe it just feels smaller because he’s in it and the air has changed, thickened into something I have to work through like wading. Bookshelves on two walls, floor to ceiling, leather spines and cracked covers and titles in Italian and English and what might be German. A single window behind him. His desk between us, wide and dark, covered in stacked papers so neatly aligned that my own study habits look feral.
He hasn’t spoken. He’s looking at me, and I realize with a jolt that this is the second time in my life he’slookeddirectly at me, and I was right, back in that lecture hall, when I thought if he ever actually looked at me I would forget how to be a person.
I’ve forgotten how to be a person.
“Miss Lively.” His voice is different at this distance. In the lecture hall it’s a broadcast, aimed at the back wall, calibrated for two hundred. Here, in this small room with the door closed and the afternoon going gold outside his window, it’s just for me. Lower. Closer.
“Professor Salvatore.”
My voice is even, which is a minor miracle that I attribute entirely to my parents, who raised me to be polite in the face of natural disasters.
He studies me. I don’t know what he’s looking for. His eyes move across my face with an attention that feels like fingertips, and I have to lock my knees to keep standing because no one has ever looked at me like that. Not once. Not ever. Like I’m a page in a language he’s trying to translate.
“Sit down.”
There’s a chair in front of his desk. Wooden, no cushion, institutional. I sit. My hands find my lap, and my finger immediately starts circling the inside of my left wrist, and I watch his eyes drop to the motion and track it, and oh. Oh, my stars. He’s watching my hands.
“You seemed distracted in my lecture today.”
It’s not a question. He doesn’t ask questions he already knows the answers to.
“Yes.” I should probably elaborate. I should probably come up with some academic excuse involving research stress or sleep deprivation or literally anything other than the truth. But I’m a terrible liar. Mama says my face goes transparent when I try, like holding a letter up to the sun. So I just say it again: “Yes.”
His jaw tightens. That muscle, the one I noticed from the podium. Up close it’s worse. Up close, everything about this man is worse. The angle of his cheekbones, the darkness of his eyes, the faint shadow along his jaw where he either shaved this morning or didn’t quite, and I can’t think about that, I can’t think abouthimshaving in the morning, because my circle has become so fast it’s basically a vibration.
“Why.”
One word. No inflection. Just the word, placed in front of me like a stone on a game board, and he waits.
I could lie. I could say the coursework is heavy, that I’m worried about my thesis, that I didn’t sleep well. Any of those would work. He might even let them work, might accept a comfortable fiction and send me on my way, back to the third row, back to my circles, back to the safe and aching distance I’ve kept for two years.
But his men were in that lecture hall. And his men were in that alley. And the distance between those two facts is zero, and we both know it, and I’m from Nebraska and we don’t lie well and we don’t lie often and I’m not going to start now.
“I recognized them.” My voice comes out quieter than I intend. “The men at the back of the hall. Your men.”
His face doesn’t change. Not a flicker. He stands behind his desk like something carved from the same dark wood and I watch him not react, and the not-reacting is worse than any reaction would be, because it means he was ready for this. He expected it. He saw it on my face in the lecture hall and he wrote a note and he waited and now here we are.
“And what,” he says, “do you think you recognized?”
“An alley off Lexington. Two years ago.” My circle has stopped. My finger is pressed flat against my wrist. “I was eighteen. I had just gotten to New York. Three men cornered me, and then your men were there, and they said their boss saw me having trouble while they were stuck in traffic.”
Silence. The kind that has texture, that fills the corners of a room and pushes against the windows.
“I looked up from them to you today, and I knew.” My voice is very small now, but it doesn’t shake. “You were the boss.”
He’s so still. The late afternoon picks out the edge of his jaw, the hollow beneath his cheekbone, the place where his collar meets his neck. His hands are at his sides. Not in his pockets, not clasped, just there, and his fingers are straight, which tells me something, though I’m not sure what.
“Miss Lively.”
“Professor.”
“What you think you know about me is incomplete.”
“I know that.”
“Incomplete and potentially dangerous.”
