Page 34 of Give In to Me
I look up from my notebook. He’s facing the class now, mid-sentence, and our eyes meet.
One second. Two.
Quieter than the first time. This is two people who sat across from each other in a small office and said things that can’t be unsaid, looking at each other in a room full of people who have no idea that the air between the podium and the third row is carrying a frequency only we can hear.
He looks away first. Second time.
My finger resumes its circle. Slower now. The paper is warm from friction.
David, beside me, writes something on the corner of his syllabus and tilts it toward me:You okay?
I write back:Fine.
He writes:You keep doing that thing with your hand.
My circle has migrated from the notebook margin to the surface of the desk, my finger tracing the same path over and over, and I didn’t even notice.
Hands in my lap. Finger finds my knee. Starts again.
At the front of the hall, Professor Salvatore has resumed his lecture. His back is to the class, writing on the board, and his handwriting is the same angular European script that was on the note he left me, and I wonder if he knows I kept it. I wonder if he knows it’s folded inside the back cover of my notebook right now, three words and a time in ink so dark it looks like it came from somewhere deeper than a pen.
Probably not. Probably he wrote it and forgot it and moved on with his life, because he’s a man who moves on and I’m a girl in his third row with a circle habit and a crush that has evolved from hopeless to something worse.
Something with teeth.
AFTER CLASS, I’VE FORTY-five minutes before my next seminar. I go to the campus coffee shop, the one in the humanities building with the bad lighting and the good espresso, and I order my usual and sit by the window and open my laptop and pretend to work on my thesis.
The barista is new.
I notice because I come here three or four times a week and I know the rotation: Maya on Mondays and Wednesdays, the boy with the ear gauges on Tuesdays, the tired graduate student on Fridays. But today it’s someone I’ve never seen. A man. Late twenties, maybe early thirties, with dark hair and a build thatdoesn’t quite fit behind a coffee counter. He made my latte without asking my order, which is strange, because I’ve never been here on a Thursday before.
He knew my order.
My circle, which had been tracing the rim of my coffee cup, stops.
The barista is wiping down the counter, not looking at me. His movements are competent, casual, unremarkable. Except for his shoes. His shoes are wrong. They’re too good for a campus barista, the leather too fine, and they’re the same quality as the shoes on the man with the newspaper, the man at the library, the man outside the dining hall.
I pick up my coffee. Take a sip. It’s perfect. Exactly the way I like it, which is information I’ve never shared with anyone at this counter because I’m from Nebraska and we don’t make complicated coffee orders, we just saylatte, pleaseand accept whatever arrives.
He looked up my order. Or he watched me order it. Or someone told him.
By all rights, I should mind.
Another sip. Thesis document open. Not minding at all.
THE EMAIL ARRIVES AT4:17 PM.
Dear Miss Lively,
I would like to schedule a brief meeting to discuss your academic progress and the status of your scholarship review. Please reportto my office at your earliest convenience, and no later than end of day Friday.
Warm regards, Professor Agnes Cuthbert Department Chair
I read it twice. Three times. The words are perfectly polite. Perfectly professional.Academic progress. Scholarship review.Nothing in this email would raise a flag with anyone who didn’t know that my scholarship has been in good standing since freshman year, that my GPA hasn’t dipped below a 3.8, that my thesis advisor submitted a glowing progress report last month.
But I know.
I know becausewarm regardsfrom Professor Cuthbert is the academic equivalent of a knife wrapped in silk. I know because she’s the department chair and she controls my scholarship and my thesis committee and my entire academic future, and the timing of this email, three days after I was seen leaving Luciano Salvatore’s office at half past four in the afternoon, isn’t a coincidence.
