Page 33 of Give In to Me
My circle stutters.
“What about him?”
“I’ve seen him before. And the one at the library yesterday, and the dude outside the dining hall on Tuesday.” David crumples his protein bar wrapper, tucks it in his pocket. His jaw has set in a way I’ve never seen on him, squarer, more serious. Protective. “They’re not students.”
“No,” I say. “They’re not.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
The earnestness in his voice makes my chest ache. David Burnes, who has known me for two years and never once asked me to be anything other than exactly who I’m, is worried about me. And I can’t tell him the truth, because the truth involves a professor and a secret and an alley and a set of feelings so complicated they’d need their own zip code.
“I’m fine, David. They’re not a problem.”
“They’refollowingyou.”
“They’re not following me. They’re just... around.”
“Elsa.” He stops walking. I stop too. He faces me with that open, earnest expression that makes it impossible to brush him off. “If someone is bothering you, I can help. I’m not, like, tough oranything, but I’m big and I played defensive end in high school and I can look very intimidating when I want to.”
I picture David squaring up against one of Luciano’s men and the image is so absurd and so sweet that I have to press my lips together to keep from laughing.
“I appreciate that. Truly. But I’m okay.”
He studies me for a long moment. Then he nods, the way good people nod when they’ve decided to trust you even though they don’t fully believe you. “Okay. But I’m keeping an eye on it.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to. I want to.” He puts his cap back on, adjusts it. “That’s what friends do, Lively.”
We walk the rest of the way to the lecture hall in silence, and I think about how lucky I’m to have someone uncomplicated in my life, because the complicated part is about to walk into a room and ruin my vital signs for the next ninety minutes.
PROFESSOR SALVATOREenters the hall at exactly two minutes past the hour, as he always does, and two hundred students snap to attention like iron filings around a magnet.
He doesn’t look at me.
I knew he wouldn’t. I prepared for it. I sat in my third-row seat and opened my notebook and started my circle and told myself that whatever happened in that office was a sealed room, separate from this hall, and that Professor Salvatore in lecture mode is a different creature entirely from the man who pressedhis hand against a door above my head and saidyou’re wrongin a voice that made my ribs feel too small.
He doesn’t look at me, and it’s fine.
The lecture is on encryption protocols today. His voice is the same. Low, accented, filling the room with that effortless authority that makes everyone sit up straighter. He paces the front of the hall with his hands behind his back, his suit dark gray, his posture carrying that silent command I now understand in a way I didn’t two weeks ago.
Not once does his gaze settle on the third row, and it’s fine, and my circle is going so fast on the margin of my notebook that the paper is starting to wear thin.
Twenty minutes in, I catch him.
It’s not his eyes. His eyes are aimed at the middle distance, at the back wall, at the projected slide behind him. His gaze is moving across the room as it always does, scanning, impersonal, the general surveying his field.
But his attention is on my hands.
I can feel it. I know how that sounds, how unscientific and irrational and thoroughly un-provable that is, but I feel it the way you feel someone standing behind you in a dark room. A weight that has nothing to do with sight. My finger is tracing its circle on the margin, and his body, pacing at the front of the hall, is oriented toward me by two degrees. Maybe three. A fraction so small that no one else in this room would notice, because no one else in this room has spent two years memorizing the angles of this man’s body.
His eyes are on the room. His attention is on my hands.
I slow the circle. Make it wider. Let my finger drag.
His jaw tightens. That muscle, the one I saw from six inches away in his office, the one that jumps when he’s holding something back. It flexes once, quick, and his pacing hitches. Not a stumble. Not even a pause. Just a fraction of a second where his stride loses its rhythm, and then it’s back, smooth, and he’s talking about key exchange algorithms and his voice hasn’t changed at all.
But I saw it.
