Page 59 of Give In to Me
I open my eyes. He’s sitting with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped, his head slightly bowed. His sleeves are still rolled. His forearms are braced on his thighs, and I can see the tension in his hands, the way his fingers are laced tight, the knuckles pale.
“I heard what she said to you.”
“I know.”
“I went in after you left.” His voice is low. Stripped of its usual structure. Something that’s trying to hold a shape and failing. “She won’t be a problem anymore.”
“What did you say to her?”
“The truth.” A pause. His hands tighten. “About what happens to people who threaten someone I—” He stops. Corrects. “Someone under my protection.”
The almost-word hangs between us.Someone I—.He caught it, pulled it back, replaced it with something safer, and I heard the original, and he knows I heard it, and neither of us acknowledges it, because we’re sitting on a bench in a garden and there are things that need to be said before that word gets to exist out loud.
“You pushed me away.” Not an accusation. A fact. I lay it on the bench between us the way he lays sentences on a desk—quiet, exact.
“Yes.”
“You called me Miss Lively.”
“Yes.”
“You said it was done.”
His jaw locks.
“I lied.”
Two words. He just gave me two words that dismantle every wall he built in that office three weeks ago.
I lied.
I look at him. He’s still looking at the ground, still hunched forward, hands clasped, and I’ve never seen him like this. Not in the lecture hall, not behind his desk, not standing at his window telling me about his father. This is something else. A man with nothing holding him up.
“You owe me more than that.”
He nods. Once. His hands unclasp and reclasp, and I watch him gather something—not composure, not control, but courage, the specific kind that it takes to sit beside someone you’ve hurt and show them why.
“In my father’s house, there was a room.” His voice has dropped one painful notch lower. “Below the main floor. Stone. Cold in the summer. He called it the schoolroom. I was five the first time he brought me there.”
My circle slows.
“He taught me how pain works. Not in the abstract. Not from a book.” His eyes stay on the ground. His hands are white at the knuckles. “I learned what a body does when it breaks. I learnedthe sounds. I learned where to cut and where not to cut and how long a person can stay conscious and why that matters.”
My finger stops.
“By the time I was eight, he stopped teaching and started testing.” A pause. Long. The garden is very quiet. “I passed every test.”
My chest aches. Not the warm pull of proximity and want. This ache has no warmth in it. It lives behind my ribs like something swallowed wrong, hard and sharp, and I press my hand flat on the iron armrest and I hold it there because if I reach for him now he’ll stop talking, and he needs to finish.
“There was a woman in the house. One of the servants. She had been there before my mother died.” His voice shifts. Something enters it that wasn’t there a moment ago—a thread of tenderness so thin it’s almost invisible, woven through the horror like a vein of gold in dark rock. “She was the only person who was kind to me. When he was done with the schoolroom, she would bring me food. She never spoke about what she heard. She just brought the food and sat with me until I could eat it.”
He hasn’t named her. I notice this the way I notice everything about this man—instinctively, completely. He hasn’t said her name, and the omission is deliberate, and it tells me something about what’s coming.
“My father had another son.”
My finger, pressed flat against the iron, twitches.
“Eight years younger than me. Different mother. He kept the boy in a separate part of the house, away from the schoolroom, awayfrom me. I don’t know if he intended to train him the way he trained me. I didn’t wait to find out.”
