Page 40 of Give In to Me
Chapter 6
DAVID IS TELLING MEabout the girl in his economics class, and I’m laughing.
Not the polite, paper-thin laugh I’ve been handing out for three weeks like a girl making change at a register. A real one. The kind that starts somewhere behind my ribs and catches me off guard, because David has just said, with absolute sincerity, that he’s been timing how long it takes this girl to smile at him versus how long she smiles at the teaching assistant, and he’s built a spreadsheet.
“A spreadsheet,” I say.
“Don’t judge me, Lively. Your father built a spreadsheet for cattle. I’m building one for love.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s exactly the same thing. I’m tracking inputs and outputs. Smile frequency. Duration. Whether she makes eye contact before or after the TA says something funny.” He picks up his coffee, takes a sip, sets it down with the easy confidence of a man who thinks he’s onto something. “Data doesn’t lie.”
“David. You can’t spreadsheet a human being into liking you.”
“Watch me.”
And I laugh again. A real one. It hurts a little, the way moving hurts after you’ve been still for too long, muscles remembering a range of motion they’d started to forget. The coffee shop is warmand close and smells like espresso and burnt sugar, and David is sitting across from me in his backward baseball cap, and for the first time in three weeks, I feel like a person instead of a wound walking around in a cotton dress.
It’s Wednesday. The barista is Jeff, which means the coffee is slightly too strong and the foam is uneven, but I don’t mind, because Jeff is actually a barista and not a soldier in an apron, and there’s something restful about drinking coffee made by someone who isn’t surveilling me.
My notebook is open on the table. My circles are still tight. Still fast. But my hand has slowed while David talks, the loops widening without my permission, and I let them, because the alternative is to sit in my apartment and stare at the Iowa-shaped water stain on my ceiling and think about a man who kissed me like I was the last real thing in the world and then erased me.
Three weeks and four days. Not that I’m counting.
I’m absolutely counting.
My dress is looser than it was a month ago. The blue one, the one with the small flowers that Mama hemmed for me last Christmas. I’ve cinched the belt tighter and I’ve been eating David’s muffins and I’ve been telling Martha on Sundays that everything’s fine, and the lies come so easy now that I barely recognize the girl telling them. The Elsa Lively who arrived in New York two years ago with her too-trusting face and her tractor coat and her circle-drawing fingers couldn’t have lied to Martha Lively without choking on it. This version of me does it every Sunday at 1:15 PM and hangs up the phone and sits in the quiet and doesn’t cry.
I should be proud of that. I’m not.
But today David dragged me out of the library and into this coffee shop and ordered me a sandwich I didn’t ask for and started talking about his economics girl, and somewhere between the smile-frequency data and the TA comparison metrics, my chest loosened. Not all the way. Just enough to let a laugh through.
“Okay, but here’s the problem,” David says, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, his face arranged into an expression of deep strategic concern. “She laughed at one of my jokes yesterday. Unprompted. No TA involvement. That’s a data point, right? That means something?”
“It means she thought you were funny.”
“But was it a like funny or afriendfunny? Because there’s a difference, and my spreadsheet doesn’t have a column for—”
The door opens.
I don’t look up. People come and go from this coffee shop all afternoon, students and professors and the occasional bewildered tourist who wandered too far from the main campus tour. The door opens, cold air pushes in, the door closes. Background noise. Normal.
But something in the room changes.
I feel it before I understand it. A shift in the temperature, not of the air but of the attention. The barista stops wiping the counter. Two girls at the corner table go quiet mid-sentence. Even David pauses, his coffee cup halfway to his mouth, his eyes tracking something behind me.
“Whoa,” David says, low. “Okay.”
I turn around.
Luciano is standing in the doorway of a campus coffee shop in the humanities building, and he’s looking at me.
Not at the room. Not at the counter or the menu board or the cluster of students who have collectively stopped breathing. At me. Across twenty feet of bad lighting and mismatched chairs and the persistent smell of burnt sugar, his eyes find mine and hold, and every cell in my body remembers what it felt like to have his hand in my hair and his mouth on mine and his voice cracking onI’m sorry.
He’s wearing a dark coat over his suit. His hair is slightly disordered, which I’ve never seen. His hair is always perfect, exact, never out of place. But today there’s a piece of it that’s fallen across his forehead, and it makes him look younger, almost human, and I want to push it back with my fingers and I’m gripping my coffee cup so hard my knuckles ache.
Three weeks and four days of nothing, and now he’s here. Standing in the doorway of my coffee shop on a Wednesday, when he’s never been here on a Wednesday, when he has no reason to be in the humanities building at all because he teaches in the technology wing, and his eyes are on mine and I can’t move.
