Page 41 of Give In to Me
The moment lasts two seconds. Maybe three. Long enough for my lungs to forget their job and every lie I’ve told Martha and David and myself for the past three weeks to thin out until I can see right through them. I’m fine. I’m busy. I’m managing. None of it’s true. None of it’s been true since his mouth was on mine and his hand was shaking and his voice broke on my name.
He looks away. Not like the first time in the lecture hall, not that yielding, that giving ground. This is different. This is a man pulling his gaze off something that burns.
Not toward my table. Not toward the counter. He crosses the room in that way of his, every movement carrying a weight that makes people shift in their chairs without knowing why, and he sits at a table against the far wall and opens a book.
A book.
He sits six tables away from me and opens a book and doesn’t read it.
I know he’s not reading because I’m watching him the way I’ve always watched him, and his eyes aren’t tracking lines on a page. They’re fixed on a single point. His hand is resting on the table, perfectly still, and that stillness is the tell, because in lecture mode he’s fluid, pacing, sharp. This rigid is a man fighting something.
“Elsa.” David’s voice was stiff. “Do you know him?”
I turn back to David. My face must be doing something unfortunate because his eyebrows are halfway up his forehead.
“He’s my professor.”
“That’s your cybersecurity guy? Professor Salvatore?” David glances past me, then back. “He’s just... sitting there.”
“He’s reading.”
“That man isn’t reading.” David stares past me. “He’s staring at a book and looking at you every four seconds. I’m counting.” He leans back in his chair. “Should I be concerned?”
“No.”
“Because I said I would keep an eye on things, and that man has been looking at you since he walked in, and I may build spreadsheets about girls but I know what it looks like when someone can’t take their eyes off a person.”
My circle has stopped. My finger is pressing into the table, hard, and my heart is hammering so fast I’m worried David can hear it.
“It’s fine, David. He’s just getting coffee.”
He hasn’t ordered coffee.
David opens his mouth, closes it. Nods. Picks his cup back up. “Okay. If you say so.” A pause. “But Lively? That man isn’t here for the espresso.”
We stay for forty-five minutes. I know this because I count. David talks. I respond. My voice sounds normal to my own ears, and I say the right things, and I nod, and I even manage another laugh when he tells me about his roommate’s failed attempt to cook pasta without boiling water first. But my skin is aware of every inch of space between my table and his table, and every time I reach for my cup my hand trembles, and my circles have stopped entirely because my body can’t process the small motor function of drawing loops while he’s sitting twenty feet away, not reading.
He never orders. He never takes off his coat. He turns a page once, at the thirty-minute mark, and the motion is so mechanical it’s almost funny, except nothing about this is funny, because I’ve been starving for three weeks and he just walkedinto my line of sight and my body is behaving like someone threw open the shutters on a room that’s been dark for too long.
At the forty-minute mark, I break my own rule. I glance.
He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the book, the one he’s not reading, and his coat collar is turned up and his hand on the table is curled loosely around nothing, and he looks tired. Not the academic kind of tired that sits under everyone’s eyes at midterms. A different kind. The kind that lives in the hollows of a face, in the way a man holds his shoulders when he’s carrying something he can’t put down.
Three weeks did this to him too.
The recognition hits me so hard I almost make a sound. His suit jacket, which normally fits like it was made for him, is fractionally looser across the shoulders. His face is sharper. The scar on his temple is more visible against skin that’s paler than it was a month ago.
Three weeks did this to him too.
I look away before he catches me. My hands are shaking. My coffee is cold. David is saying something about his batting grip and I nod and I smile and under the table my finger traces one frantic circle on my knee.
Back to David’s face. Hands locked around my cup. Spine straight, heart doing whatever it wants because I can’t manage it anyway.
At 3:45, David checks his phone and says he’s to get to practice. We stand. I gather my notebook, my bag, my coat. The tractor coat, which I’ve been wearing every day because its weight on my shoulders feels like being held and I need that right now.
“You sure you’re okay?” David asks at the door, and his face is so open and worried that I almost tell him everything.
“I’m fine. Go hit baseballs.”
