Page 53 of Give In to Me
Long enough for the shaking to stop. Long enough for my breathing to even out, for my hands to dry, for the cold tile to go numb under me. Long enough to hear footsteps in the hallway, distant, fading, doors closing one by one as the building empties.
I stand. My legs hold. I wash my face at the sink. The mirror shows me a girl with red eyes and a jaw set tight, and I look at her and I think: You’re Elsa Lively. You earned your placehere. You were somebody before he kissed you and you’ll be somebody after, and if Agnes Cuthbert thinks a letter on cream paper can take that from you, she’s never met a girl who watched her parents sell a tractor and swore she would make it worth it.
My finger lifts to the edge of the sink. One circle. Slow. Wobbly.
But it moves.
I pick up my bag. I straighten my dress. I walk out of the bathroom and down the hall and through the building doors and into the cold, and I don’t look at his office on the way past.
But I hear it through the door, through the wood, through the brass nameplate that I once traced with my eyes like a love letter I couldn’t send.
The sound of something breaking.
Not glass. Not furniture. Something worse. Something that sounds like a man’s fist hitting his own desk, once, hard, and then silence.
I keep walking.
Chapter 10
MY HANDS ARE STILL.
I notice this the way you notice the absence of a sound you’ve been hearing so long it became part of your breathing. My finger on the strap of my bag, flat. My finger on the edge of my coffee cup, flat. My finger on the margin of my notebook, where the paper is still worn thin from weeks of frantic loops, flat and motionless, resting on a surface that remembers what my hands have forgotten how to do.
I don’t draw circles anymore.
It’s Tuesday. Week two. I’m sitting in the third row of Professor Salvatore’s lecture hall with my notebook open and my pen moving in careful, upright letters, and my handwriting has never been better. Each word is neat, contained, every stroke deliberate, because if I focus on the shape of the letters I don’t have to focus on the shape of his mouth or the place on my wrist where his thumb drew a circle that might as well have belonged to another girl’s life.
He’s lecturing on threat assessment today. How systems identify danger. How the most sophisticated defenses are built not to block every threat but to distinguish between the ones that matter and the ones that don’t.
I write this down. All of it. Word for word.
I don’t look up.
THE FIRST SEPARATIONlasted three weeks, and it was a knife. This one is different. This one is anesthesia.
I get up in the morning. I shower. I put on a dress—not the blue one with the flowers, not yet, I can’t wear that one yet because his hand was in my hair when I was wearing it and the fabric remembers even if I’m trying not to. I put on the gray one, the one that doesn’t have memories attached to it, and I button my coat and I walk to campus and I go to class and I take notes and I eat when David puts food in front of me and I go to the library and I work on my thesis and I go home and I lie in bed and I stare at the Iowa-shaped water stain on my ceiling and I don’t cry.
I did my crying. On a bathroom floor, with my forehead on my knees, the day he called me Miss Lively and cut me clean. That was enough. I’m Robert and Martha Lively’s daughter, and we don’t cry twice about the same thing. We fix the fence and we get on with it.
Except the fence isn’t broken. I’m broken. And I don’t know how to fix that with wire and stubbornness, so I do the only thing I know how to do, which is show up, sit down, and be excellent at the things I can control.
My thesis is coming along. The modular framework is solid. The scalability model passes every test I’ve run. The security integration section, the one he gave me advice on, is the strongest part of the paper, and I hate that. I hate that the best part of my work carries his fingerprints, but I won’t cut it because it’s good, and I won’t sabotage good work to spite a man who isn’t worth the sabotage.
He’s worth it. He told me he wasn’t and I told him he was and I meant it. I still mean it. That’s the worst part.
Dr. Malvar reads my latest draft and tells me it’s exceptional. She doesn’t mention the formal review or the F that appeared on my record or the department meeting where Agnes Cuthbert wrapped a knife in policy language and aimed it at my throat. She just tells me the work is good and asks if I need anything, and I say no, and she nods, and I walk out of her office and my hands are still.
SUNDAY. 1:15 PM.
“Baby girl.” Mama’s voice, warm and flat and three thousand miles too far away. “How’s my city mouse?”
“Good, Mama. How’s Daddy’s hip?”
“Oh, he’s walking with character again. Went out to check the calves this morning and came back pretending he wasn’t wincing. I told him the calves don’t need checking at five AM and he said the calves disagree.”
I almost smile. The muscles try. They get halfway and stop, like a car that turns over but won’t catch.
“And you, sweetheart? You eating?”
