Page 36 of Give In to Me
“You were testing me?”
“I test all my students.”
“At golden hour? On a Thursday? While the building is empty?”
The silence that follows isn’t academic.
He holds my gaze across the desk. His office smells like it always does: old books and that subtle Italian warmth and the clean starch of his shirt. The building is quiet. So quiet I can hear the clock on his wall, which I’ve never noticed before, ticking with a patience that feels pointed.
My finger is tracing a circle on the arm of my chair. His eyes drop to it. Track the motion. Come back to my face.
“You should go,” he says. Third time he’s said this to me across two meetings in this office, and each time it’s meant the opposite.
“You keep saying that.”
“You keep not going.”
“Maybe I’m not very good at doing what I’m told.”
Something happens at the corner of his mouth. A ghost. A flicker. Not a smile, not even close to a smile, but the shadow of one, the place where a smile would be if this man ever smiled, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and it’s gone before I can hold it and my whole chest aches with the losing of it.
I stand up. I gather my proposal, his red handwriting facing up, and I tuck it into my bag, and I’m turning toward the door when he says:
“The spreadsheet.”
I stop. “What?”
“Your father’s spreadsheet. The one from 1998.”
“What about it?”
“Does it work?”
I turn back. He’s still sitting behind his desk, and there’s something in his voice that isn’t about spreadsheets at all.
“It keeps track of everything on the farm,” I say. “Every seed order, every equipment repair, every calf born in the spring. It’s clunky and the formatting is terrible and the formulas break if you look at them wrong. But yes. It works.”
“Good.” He stands, and for a moment his face is half in shadow, half in amber, and I can’t move. “Build that. Not the enterprise model. Build the thing your father would actually use.”
He’s giving me real advice. Good advice. Advice that means he listened to every word of my rant about corn and cattle, and somewhere beneath the testing and the granite and theMiss Lively, he heard me.
“Thank you, Professor.”
“Luciano.”
The word drops into the room and the clock on the wall keeps ticking and my circle stops and my lungs stop and the air holds us both very still.
He said his name. He offered it. Not Professor Salvatore, not the title and the barrier and the formality that keeps this thing between us inside its container. His first name, in his own voice, in the quiet of this emptying building.
“I should go,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
Neither of us moves.
The afternoon has deepened toward copper, and his face is close. I don’t remember him coming around the desk. I don’t remember the distance between us closing, but it’s closed, and he’s standing in front of me, and he’s close enough that I can see the scar on his temple and the exact darkness of his eyes and his jaw gone tight, that muscle, and his hands are at his sides and they aren’t relaxed.
“Elsa.” My name in his mouth. The way the vowels open. The Italian softening the L. No one has ever said my name like that.
