Page 61 of Give In to Me
His fingers fold over mine, trapping the circle inside his fist, and my hand is caught in his grip and his knuckles are white again but this time it’s different, this time he’s holding on, and his other hand comes up and covers both of ours, and he’s holding my hand the way you hold something you almost lost and just got back.
He lifts my hand.
Brings it to his mouth. Presses his lips to my knuckles. Eyes closed. Jaw tight. His mouth warm and still against my skin, not a kiss exactly, or not only a kiss—a seal, a vow, a man pressing his mouth to the hand that just drew a circle on his open palm and found him worth holding.
He doesn’t speak.
He has no words left. The man who lectures without notes, who sayscome hereandget outandthis is done—that man is sitting on a bench in a garden with his lips against my knuckles and his hands around mine and nothing left to say.
We sit. The garden holds us. The trees are bare above, and somewhere inside them, behind the bark and the dead-looking branches, something green is building toward a surface it hasn’t reached yet.
My hand stays in his. His mouth stays on my knuckles. My circle lives inside his fist, trapped and warm.
And the silence between us isn’t empty. It’s the fullest thing I’ve ever heard.
Chapter 12
HIS APARTMENT ISN’Twhat I expected.
I don’t know what I expected. Something cold, maybe. Glass and steel and surfaces that wipe clean. The apartment of a man who has spent his life making sure nothing sticks.
But the door opens, and the first thing I notice is the warmth. Not temperature—atmosphere. Dark wood floors, deep colors, walls lined with books in Italian and English and what might be German. A leather chair by the window that has the cracked, softened look of something that has been sat in for years. His coat is draped over the arm of it, which means he was sitting there before I arrived, and the image of him sitting alone in that chair waiting for me makes my chest ache.
“You’re staring.”
His voice, behind me. He closed the door and I didn’t hear it. I never hear him.
“Your apartment has books.”
“Most apartments have books.”
“Yours has more.” I turn around, and he’s leaning against the door with his arms at his sides and his sleeves rolled and something new on his face—not quite the controlled mask, not quite a smile, but closer to a smile than I’ve ever seen. The expression from the garden bench. Still learning how to stay. “It looks like your office. But bigger. And it smells better.”
The corner of his mouth moves. Closer every time.
I’m wearing the blue dress.
I put it on this morning with hands that shook, standing in front of my closet in my apartment with Iowa watching from the ceiling. The gray one was right there—safe, memory-free, the dress of the wilderness. But my hand reached past it, and my fingers closed on the blue cotton with the small flowers that Mama hemmed last Christmas, and I buttoned it and I cinched the belt and I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought:I’m done wearing the color of not-him.
His eyes tracked the dress the moment I walked in. I saw the recognition cross his face—a flicker, fast—and he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, and the blue flowers said everything.
IT’S BEEN THREE DAYSsince the garden bench.
Three days since he sat at the far end of an iron seat and told me about a stone room and a stolen baby and a man who teaches because he’s afraid of what he is when he stops. Three days since I drew a circle on his palm and he closed his fist around it and pressed his mouth to my knuckles and had no words left.
Three days of fragile, rebuilt normalcy. He texted the first night—not Italian, not a napkin, just a message at 10:14 PM: Your scholarship is reinstated. Agnes signed the paperwork this morning.
I stared at it for a long time. Then I typed:And the F?
Removed from your record. Dr. Malvar has been notified.
I imagined Agnes in her office, with her lilies and her brass lamp, signing forms with a hand that trembled. I imagined what he said to her behind that closed door, what words he chose, what register of his voice he used.
I didn’t ask him what he said. Some doors are better left closed.
The second text came a minute later: Your thesis defense has been rescheduled. You’ve two additional weeks.
And then, twenty seconds after that, a third: Come to dinner. Saturday. My apartment.
