Page 45 of Give In to Me
“I know.”
Neither of us moves.
His forehead stays on my shoulder. My fingers stay in his hair. His hand stays on my thigh, warm and still, and the clock ticks and my heartbeat fills the room and I’m sitting on his desk with my dress pushed up and his face pressed into my skin and it’s the most intimate moment of my life, not because of where his hand is but because of the war I can feel him fighting and the fact that he came to me, tonight, and opened doors he’s spent his whole life keeping shut.
I feel his mouth move against my collarbone. A word, or the ghost of one, Italian, too soft to catch.
Then he steps back.
The cold where his body was is a physical thing. He retreats behind his chair, both hands on the back of it, and he looks at me sitting on his desk with my dress still askew and my face still wet and my hair where his fingers pulled it loose. His expression isn’t regret. Not shame. Awe, edged with a terror that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with how much I’ve just seen.
“Go home, Elsa.”
It’s notget out.It’s not the cracked, desperate dismissal from the first time. This is tender. This is a man who’s asking me to leave because if I stay he won’t be able to stop, and the stopping matters to him because I matter to him, and the distinction between those two dismissals is everything.
Off the desk. I straighten my dress, pick up my bag. My notebook is inside it, holding his notes, his napkin, the paper trail of his unraveling.
I walk to the door. I don’t look back, because if I look back I’ll climb into his arms and he’ll let me and neither of us is ready for what comes after that.
My hand turns the lock. The click is very loud.
“Elsa.”
I stop. My hand on the door.
“Tomorrow.” One word. A promise disguised as a schedule.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
I open the door and step into the hallway.
THE CORRIDOR IS DIM. Emergency lighting, that greenish institutional glow that makes everything look like the inside of an aquarium. My footsteps are loud on the tile, louder than they should be, and my face is still wet from crying, and my skin is still warm where his hand was, and I’m walking through a university building at nine PM with the taste of a man on my lips and the weight of his history on my shoulders and I’ve never felt more alive or more terrified.
Three steps from the stairwell, I see her.
Agnes Cuthbert is standing at the end of the corridor.
She’s perfectly still. Her coat is buttoned, her bag over one shoulder, her posture carrying the same rigid composure she brings to faculty meetings and scholarship reviews and every other moment where she holds someone’s future in her manicured hands. She’s standing outside the door to thedepartment offices, which are ten feet from his office, and she’s looking at me.
Then at his closed door.
Back to me.
Something moves across her face. Not surprise. Agnes Cuthbert doesn’t do surprise. This is recognition, confirmation, the final piece of a puzzle she’s been assembling since she sent me that email aboutexternal distractionsand warm regards.
She smiles.
It’s the coldest thing I’ve ever seen on a human face, colder than the wind off the river, colder than three weeks of silence, colder than an empty back seat where Luciano wasn’t.
“Working late, Miss Lively?”
Four words. Perfectly pleasant. Perfectly poisonous. Her voice carries the same silk-wrapped blade as her emails, and she lets the question hang in the corridor between us, lets it fill the greenish light, lets me understand exactly what she’s seen and exactly what she intends to do with it.
“Goodnight, Professor Cuthbert,” I say, and my voice doesn’t shake, and my back is straight, and I’m my father’s daughter.
I walk past her. Down the stairs. Out into the cold.
My hands don’t start shaking until I reach the sidewalk.
