Page 65 of Give In to Me
My finger, which is currently tracing a loop on the lid of my coffee cup, stills.
“They’re back,” he says, quieter. “That’s good. Right?”
I look at David, who noticed when my circles stopped and carried granola bars for me like medicine and dragged me to Bucky’s and wiped milkshake off my face and never once asked me to explain the thing he could see breaking me from the outside. Who’s now asking if my circles coming back is good, because he understands, in his uncomplicated David way, that the circles are the barometer and their return means the weather has changed.
“It’s good,” I say.
He nods. Finishes his protein bar. We walk.
THE WOMAN IS STANDINGnear the campus gates.
I notice her because she doesn’t belong. The same instinct that let me clock Luciano’s men in the lecture hall—the wrong shoes, the wrong stillness, the misfit between the person and the place—fires now, registering details before my conscious brain catches up. She’s older than a student. Late twenties, maybe thirty. Tall, sharp-featured, wearing a leather jacket and boots with heels that would snap on the cobblestone paths, and her hair is blown out with the kind of precision that costs money and time and saysI came here to be seen.
She’s not alone. Two other women flank her, slightly behind, the formation of people who follow. I’ve seen women like them before—at the edges of campus, at his public lectures, at the faculty events where Luciano stands behind his armor and they circle with their hungry eyes and their lip gloss. The groupies. The ones who know who he was and find the danger attractive, who track him across the city like he’s something to be collected.
The woman in front sees me.
Her eyes do something fast—a scan, a calculation, the up-and-down that women do to other women when they’re measuring a threat. She takes in my cotton dress, my sensible flats, my coffee cup, my bag, my face. And her expression changes.
Recognition.
Not of me specifically. Of what I’m to him. Someone told her, or she saw something, or the network of people who orbit his public life passed along the information that the professor has been seen with a girl. A girl in a blue dress. A girl who doesn’t look like someone he would choose.
She steps forward. Onto the path. Into my way.
“You’re her.”
Her voice carries. It’s meant to. Two students walking past slow down, glance over. A boy on a bench looks up from his phone.
David, beside me, goes still. I feel his posture shift—the easy, slouching David replaced by the one who played defensive end and notices things.
“I’m sorry?” My voice is polite. Nebraska polite. The voice Martha Lively raised.
“You’re the girl.” The woman’s mouth curls. Not a smile. A shape that has contempt in it and something else underneath, something rawer. “Luciano Salvatore’s little farm girl. That’s what they’re saying.”
My circle stops. My finger presses flat against the coffee cup lid.
David takes a half-step forward. I put my hand on his arm. Light. A touch that saysI’ve this.
He looks at me. I look back. He reads something on my face that makes him nod, once, and step back, and I love him for it—for the restraint, for the trust, for the understanding that this isn’t his fight even though every instinct in his body is telling him to step between me and this woman with her leather jacket and her sharp mouth.
“I’m Elsa,” I say.
“Charmaine.” She says it like it should mean something. Like the name carries weight in rooms I haven’t been in. “I’ve knownLucianofor years. We all have.” A gesture at the women behind her, who are watching with the attentive stillness of an audience.“We know what he is. What his family was. We know the world he comes from.”
My hand tightens on my coffee cup. Not because I’m afraid. Because the way she says Luciano—his first name, familiar, possessive—makes something hot and sharp flare behind my ribs that I didn’t know lived there.
“And you.” Charmaine takes another step. Close now. Close enough that I can smell her perfume, something heavy and floral that’s nothing like old books and Italian warmth and clean cotton. “Some hick farm girl from nowhere? You think you’re what he needs? Luciano Salvatore could haveanyone.”
The quad has gone quiet around us. More students have stopped. A cluster near the science building, two girls on the path behind Charmaine, the boy on the bench now fully watching. This is what Charmaine wanted—the audience, the public spectacle, the stage where she can perform her outrage and make me small.
I look at her.
She’s beautiful. Striking in a way that demands attention, with cheekbones that could cut glass and eyes lined in dark pencil and a mouth that knows exactly how to wound. She’s everything I’m not—polished, sharp, dressed for battle—and she’s standing in front of me telling me I’m not enough for the man who pressed his face into my neck and shook and let me hold him through it.
Something settles in my chest. Not anger. Not hurt. Something quieter, something that feels like the moment you step off a porch into weather you’ve been watching through a window and discover it’s not as cold as it looked.
“I’m sorry you’re hurting,” I say.
