Page 37 of Give In to Me
I look up at him. I’m shaking. Not with fear. With the sheer physical reality of standing this close to a man I’ve wanted from such a hopeless distance for so long that the closeness itself feels like something my body doesn’t know how to process.
He lifts one hand. Touches my jaw. Just his fingertips, just the lightest pressure, tilting my face up, and his skin is warm and my skin is on fire and the contact is so small, so barely there, that it shouldn’t wreck me the way it does.
It wrecks me.
His mouth comes down on mine.
Not gently. Nothing about this is gentle. His hand slides from my jaw into my hair, fingers tangling, gripping, and his other hand finds the back of my chair and holds on like the furniture is the only thing keeping him anchored to the earth. His mouth is warm and tastes like coffee and something darker, something Italian, and I’ve never been kissed, I’ve never been kissed in my entire life, and the first time is this, is him, is Luciano kissing me like drowning, like the last breath before going under, like a man who held himself back for as long as he could and then couldn’t.
I make a sound against his mouth.
A small, helpless, involuntary sound that I’ll replay in mortified detail at three AM for the rest of my life, and his grip tightens in my hair and the sound he makes back is lower, rougher, trapped behind his teeth, and the clock is ticking and my hands are gripping the front of his shirt because he’s the only solid thing in the room.
The kiss deepens. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve no technique, no experience, no frame of reference for the way his mouth moves against mine or the way his hand in my hair tilts my head back or the way his body is rigid with restraint even as his mouth gives me everything. I’m twenty years old and I’ve never been touched like this, and what I lack in skill I make up for in the sheer honesty of wanting him so much that my hands are fisted in his shirt and I can feel his heart through the cotton and it’s beating as hard as mine.
He wrenches away.
The sound of it. The tearing-apart sound, like separating something that was fused. He steps back and his hand leaves my hair and the air where his mouth was goes cold and I stand there, blinking, my lips parted, my hands still half-raised toward a man who’s no longer there.
His hand is shaking. The one that was in my hair. He presses it flat against the desk and it’s still shaking and I can see the tremor from where I stand.
“Get out.”
His voice is wrecked. Raw. Not the spare, weighted voice of Professor Salvatore. This voice has no armor on it.
I pick up my bag. I don’t trust myself to speak. I walk to the door, and my hand is on the doorknob when I hear it.
“Elsa.”
I stop. I don’t turn around. If I turn around I’ll walk back to him and I’ll put my hands on his face and I’ll kiss him again and I’m not sure either of us would survive it.
His voice, barely audible. Like it’s costing him something vital to push the words out.
“I’m sorry.”
I open the door. The hallway is cold, and the click of the latch behind me is the loneliest sound in the world.
He said he’s sorry.
But his hands were shaking.
Chapter 5
THREE WEEKS.
That’s how long a person can go without something they didn’t know they needed and still function. Three weeks of Professor Salvatore standing behind his podium and looking through me, past me, around me, his gaze moving across the lecture hall with that impersonal sweep that used to be normal and is now a blade. Three weeks of clinical classes and cancelled office hours and a voice that wraps around words likefirewallandredundancyandfailsafeand never once, not once, settles on the girl in the third row.
He treats me like air.
I should be used to it. For two years before the recognition, I was invisible to him, and I was fine with that. Content, even. A girl with her circles and her quiet distance and her safe, impossible crush. But that was before he pressed his hand against a door above my head and said my name in Italian. Before he kissed me in a golden office and his hand shook against his desk and his voice cracked onI’m sorry.
You can’t unknow what his mouth feels like. You can’t go back to being furniture after someone has kissed you like you were the last real thing in the world.
And yet.
Tuesday. Third row. Notebook open. Circle moving on the margin, and I can feel every rotation in my wrist now, a smallrepetitive ache that I probably deserve. He enters at two minutes past the hour. He doesn’t look at me. He lectures on access protocols and his voice is immaculate and his suit is navy and his sleeves aren’t rolled up today and I hate that I notice, I hate that I’ve catalogued every variation of this man’s forearms over the course of two years and can now addwithdrawnto the taxonomy.
David passes me a note.Coffee after?
