Page 31 of Give In to Me
“I know that too.”
His eyes narrow. Not with anger. With something I can’t read, something caught between calculation and a rawer thing he’s not letting through. I hold his gaze because my father taught me that you look people in the eye when they’re telling you something important, even if your hands are shaking, even if you want to run, even if the person in front of you is so beautiful it makes your chest feel like a barn with the doors blown open.
I stand up. Not because I want to leave. Because sitting while he’s standing makes me feel like a student, and right now I’m not a student. I’m the girl from the alley.
“Thank you,” I say. “For that night. I never got to say that to the right person.”
He flinches. It’s so small I would’ve missed it if I weren’t standing six feet away with every nerve in my body tuned to his frequency. A flinch that lives only in his eyes, a contraction, and it’s gone before it fully arrives.
“You should go.”
I nod. I pick up my bag. I turn toward the door. My hand reaches for the handle.
The air changes behind me.
I don’t hear him move. That’s what I’ll think about later, lying awake in my apartment, staring at the ceiling. I don’t hear a single footstep on the hardwood, not the shift of weight or the brush of fabric. One moment there’s six feet of empty office behind me and the next moment there isn’t.
His hand lands on the door above my head. Flat, fingers spread, holding it shut.
I don’t turn around. I can’t. Because his arm is beside my ear and his body is behind me, not touching me, not anywhere close to touching me, but so near that I can feel the warmth of him through the back of my dress, and his scent is everywhere now. Not just the old books and the subtle Italian thing. Soap. Starch. Clean cotton heated by skin. And beneath all of it, something that’s just him, something that has no name and no category, and my finger is frozen against my own wrist.
“Whatever you think you know.” His voice is at my ear. Low. Not a whisper. Something worse than a whisper, something with weight and gravel and a current beneath it that I feel in my teeth. “You’re wrong.”
Every rational cell in my body is running a cost-benefit analysis that comes up red, flashing, warning, because the man behind me is a head taller and twice my weight and connected to people who made three men disappear from an alley like smoke.
But I turn around.
The door is against my back. His hand is above my head. His face is right there, closer than any face has ever been to mine, and I can see things I’ve no right to see at this distance. A scar, thin, white, curving along his left temple into his hairline. The exact shade of his eyes, which aren’t black, as I thought from the third row, but the darkest brown I’ve ever seen, like coffee before the cream, like good earth after rain. His jaw clenched so tight a muscle is jumping in his cheek like a second pulse.
He’s looking down at me with an expression that I’ll spend the rest of the evening trying to name and failing. It’s not anger. It’snot warning. It’s something older than both, and it looks like it’s costing him to stand this close and costing him more to think about stepping away.
Six inches between us. Maybe less. I can feel his shirt against the front of my dress if I let myself lean forward even a fraction, and I won’t lean forward, I won’t, but every cell in my body is pulling toward him like iron toward a magnet and my hands are shaking at my sides and I’ve never been kissed and I’ve never wanted anything the way I want him to close this space.
“I would never hurt you, Professor.”
I don’t plan to say it. It just comes, the way true things do, rising from the same place my mother’s exclamations live, from somewhere beneath thought, somewhere that doesn’t know how to be anything but honest.
His face breaks.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. A hairline crack running through all that granite, and I watch it happen from six inches away. His eyes change. The muscle in his jaw stops jumping. His lips part and close and part again and he doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t say a single word, but something behind his expression shifts, and for one second I see it.
The man behind the professor. The man behind the armor and the suits and the silence. A man who looks like he just heard something he wasn’t prepared for, in a language he thought he had forgotten.
Then it’s gone. He steps back. His hand drops from the door. The six inches become two feet, three, four, and the air between us goes cold where his warmth was.
“Come here.” He says it from behind his desk, where he’s retreated like the wood and paper can protect him. His voice is rough. Changed. “Sit down.”
I don’t sit. I stand by the door with my hand on the handle and my heart doing things that would alarm a cardiologist. “Why?”
“Because I’m asking you to.”
“That’s not why.”
His eyes meet mine, and it seems like he’s almost smiled.
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
We look at each other across the length of his office. The afternoon has gone from gold to amber. Somewhere beyond the door, the building is emptying, footsteps fading, doors closing one by one. We’re running out of daylight.
