Page 50 of Give In to Me
She doesn’t look at me. She’s addressing the room, her gaze moving across the students with the impersonal sweep of someone conducting an inventory. But her words are aimed. Every sentence is a corridor with one door at the end, and I can see where they’re leading.
“Scholarship recipients at this university are held to the highest standard. Your funding isn’t a gift. It’s a recognition of merit, and it requires ongoing demonstration of that merit through your coursework, your conduct, and your professional integrity.”
My circle slows.
Conduct. Professional integrity.
“I want to be very clear.” Agnes sets down her papers. Her hands rest on the table, fingers laced, nails perfect. “There’s no room in this department for students who confuse proximity to their professors with academic achievement. Mentorship is a privilege, not a—” She pauses. Lets the pause do its work. “—personal arrangement.”
The room is quiet. The scholarship students are looking at their laps, their notebooks, the table, anywhere but at Agnes, because nobody wants to be the one her gaze lands on. But I feel it. The way I feel Luciano’s attention in a lecture hall, a weight that has nothing to do with sight. Agnes Cuthbert is talking to a room of twelve students, and every word is for me.
My finger has stopped. Pressed flat against the page.
“The dangers of professors who allow personal attachments to cloud their professional judgment are well documented.” Agnes picks up a pen, turns it once between her fingers. “And the dangers to the students involved—particularly young womenwho may mistake attention for something it isn’t—are equally well documented. I trust that everyone in this room understands the boundaries that exist for your protection.”
Someone two seats away shifts uncomfortably. A chair creaks. Dr. Malvar, in the corner, has gone very still.
My face is hot. My ears are ringing with a frequency that has nothing to do with sound and everything to do with the fact that Agnes Cuthbert just stood in a room full of my peers, and without saying my name, without pointing a finger, without breaking a single rule of professional decorum, implied that I’m sleeping with my professor.
I don’t look down. I don’t flinch. I sit in my chair with my back straight and my hands still and I look at Agnes Cuthbert the way my father looks at a storm coming across the flat.
Agnes’s eyes find mine. Just for a second. And she smiles, small, satisfied, the way a woman smiles when she’s confirmed something she already knew.
The meeting ends. Students file out. I stay in my chair, my notebook closed on my lap, and I wait until the room is empty because I need a moment and I won’t give Agnes Cuthbert the satisfaction of watching me waver.
HE’S WAITING IN THEhallway downstairs, near the exit, where the fluorescent tubes hum and the floor tiles are scuffed from decades of foot traffic. He’s leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, which I’ve never seen him do. Arms crossed is a barricade. Arms crossed is a man holding himself in.
He heard.
I know this the way I know his hands, the way his suit sits differently on his shoulders when he’s withdrawn. He was in the building. He heard Agnes’s speech, or someone told him, or his men reported it. Doesn’t matter how. What matters is the expression on his face, which isn’t the controlled mask I’ve learned to read or the openness I saw in the museum.
It’s fury.
Controlled. Banked. The kind that doesn’t burn hot but cold, the kind that sits behind a man’s eyes and turns everything it touches to arithmetic. He’s standing in a university hallway calculating the cost of what Agnes just did, and I can see the numbers running behind his expression.
“Luciano.”
His name in my mouth, in this hallway, where anyone could hear. I say it anyway because I said it against a gallery wall two nights ago and he trembled, and I won’t go back toProfessor Salvatore, not even here, not even now.
His jaw tightens. But he doesn’t correct me.
“My office.” Two words. Low. Clipped. Professional. A door closing in real time.
I follow him.
HIS OFFICE IS COLD.
Not the temperature; the radiator is ticking its familiar rhythm, the room is the same warm box of books and dark wood and the clock on the wall. But something in the atmosphere has changed, and I feel it the moment the door closes behind me.
He doesn’t sit behind his desk. He stands at the window, the way he stood the night he told me about his father. Back to me. Hands in his pockets. Shoulders carrying something heavier than a suit.
I sit in the wooden chair. The one with no cushion, the institutional one that I’ve sat in too many times now, each time for something different.
“The formal review.” His voice is flat. Aimed at the window. “I know about it.”
“I know you know.”
“And the meeting. What she said.”
