Page 39 of Give In to Me
“David makes me eat muffins.”
“That nice boy who carries your books?”
“That’s the one.”
“Well, you tell David I said thank you.” Another pause. Longer this time. I can hear Daddy in the background, the creak of his chair, and I know he’s listening even though he won’t take the phone. That’s how Robert Lively loves: from three feet away, with his ears open and his trust in his daughter like a rope he’s holding with both hands. “Elsa, honey. You’d tell me if something was wrong?”
I closemyeyes. My finger presses harder against my knee.
“Of course I would, Mama.”
The lie is so clean it barely costs me anything, and that’s how I know I’m in trouble, because lying to Martha Lively used to be the hardest thing in the world and today it slides out smooth as butter and I don’t even flinch.
THURSDAY. WEEK THREE.
The lecture hall is the same. The podium is the same. His voice is the same. I sit in the third row and take perfect notes and my handwriting has never been neater, because if I focus on the shape of each letter I don’t have to think about the shape of his mouth or the pressure of his hand in my hair or the sound he made when he kissed me, the sound that was lower and rougher than mine, trapped behind his teeth, the sound I hear every night before I fall asleep and every morning when I wake up.
My circles have changed. They’re tighter now. Faster. Small furious loops on the margin that wear through the paper. David noticed. Joe at the coffee counter noticed. I noticed, and I can’t stop.
After class, I go to the library. I stay until it closes, because my apartment is too quiet and the quiet fills up with things I don’t want to think about. I work on my thesis. The modular inventory framework is good. The scalability model is good. The section on security integration needs work, and the one person qualified to help me with it has cancelled his office hours for the third consecutive week, and I won’t ask him, I won’t go to his door, I won’t be the girl who begs.
He told me to get out. He said he was sorry. Both things were true at the same time, and I don’t know what to do with that.
The library closes at eleven. I pack my bag. I zip my coat, the one my parents sold a tractor to buy, thick and warm and too expensive for a farmer’s daughter and exactly right for a New York night in early spring when the wind comes off the river with teeth.
I push through the library doors and the cold hits my face and I start walking.
His car is at the curb.
Black. Long. Idling. The exhaust a pale ghost in the streetlight. I’ve never seen this car before, but I know whose it is the way I know things about him: instantly, in my body, before my brain catches up.
I stop. My bag is heavy on my shoulder. My coat is warm. My circle-drawing finger is pressed against the strap, and my heart is doing something fast and reckless and I think, for one wild second, that he’s inside. That he’s come for me. That three weeks of nothing was too much for him the way it’s been too much for me, and he’s here.
The back window rolls down.
Not Luciano. Joe.
His face is half in shadow, half in streetlight, and I recognize him immediately. Same dark hair, same build that doesn’t fit behind a coffee counter. He’s not wearing the barista apron. He’s wearing a suit. The suit fits him better than the apron did, and the wrongness of the coffee shop slides into a rightness that makes my stomach drop, because this is who Joe actually is. Not a barista. A soldier.
“Miss Lively.” His voice is polite. Careful. The same careful from the alley, two years ago, when a different man in a different suit said our boss saw you were having trouble. “The professor wanted to make sure you got home safely.”
I stare at the car. At the empty back seat. At the space where Luciano isn’t.
He sent his men. He cancelled his office hours and erased me from his lecture hall and treated melikeair for three weeks, andthen he sent his men to make sure I got home safe at eleven PM on a Thursday.
“Tell the professor,” I say, and my voice is even, my back is straight, and I’m my father’s daughter, “that I’ve been walking home alone for two years and I’ll manage.”
Joe looks at me. Something passes across his face. Not pity. Something closer to recognition, or maybe respect.
“Yes, miss.”
I turn. I walk. My flats hit the sidewalk in a rhythm that I force to stay even, step step step, and behind me the car idles and I know it’s going to follow me home because that’s what Luciano’s men do, they follow and they watch and they protect, and he won’t stop sending them no matter what I say.
Two blocks before my eyes blur.
Three blocks before I whisper, into the cold, to no one:
“Then why won’t you come yourself?”
