Page 66 of Give In to Me
Charmaine’s face flickers. A crack in the performance, fast, sealed. “Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry you’re hurting.” My voice is even. Warm, even. The voice of a girl who grew up watching her father talk to frightened animals—calm, certain, no sudden movements. “I can see that you care about him. And I understand what it feels like to want someone who doesn’t see you. I lived in that for two years.”
“You don’t know anything about—”
“But he’s not a trophy.” I don’t raise my voice. I don’t need to. The quad is so quiet I can hear the breeze moving through the trees that are just starting to remember what leaves are. “He’s not a name or a legacy or a dangerous man you can collect. He’s a person. He’s the best person I’ve ever known. And I love him.”
The words come out the way true things do—from the place beneath thought, beneath planning, from the same place that saidyou’re the man who saved meon a garden bench with his fist closed around my circle.
I love him.
I’ve never said it out loud before. Not to David, not to Martha, not to the ceiling that looks like Iowa, not to Luciano himself. The word has lived inside me for so long that saying it now, here, to a stranger on a Tuesday, feels like setting something free that I didn’t know I was caging.
Charmaine stares at me.
Her mouth opens. Closes. The contempt on her face is fighting something, and losing, because Charmaine came here preparedfor a fight—for defensiveness, for tears, for the satisfying spectacle of a small-town girl crumbling—and instead she got sincerity, and sincerity is the one weapon she has no counter for.
“You—” She stops. Her jaw works. The women behind her shift, uncertain, the audience realizing the show has gone off-script.
“I hope you find someone who sees you,” I say. “You deserve that.”
Charmaine’s eyes go bright. Not with tears—she’s not the kind of woman who cries in public—but with something that flashes through before she can catch it. Surprise. And beneath the surprise, in the half-second before she rebuilds her armor: the look of a person who has just been treated with a kindness they didn’t expect and don’t know what to do with.
She turns on her expensive heel. The two women follow. They walk toward the campus gates, and Charmaine’s spine is rigid and her stride is fast and she doesn’t look back.
The quad exhales. Students start moving again. The boy on the bench goes back to his phone. The world resumes its normal business, and I’m standing on a path with my coffee going cold and my hand still resting on David’s arm and my heart beating so hard I can feel it in my wrists.
“Holy Toledo,” I whisper.
David is looking at me with an expression I’ve never seen on him during all our months of friendship. Something that looks like admiration and amusement and a deep, uncomplicated pride.
“Lively.”
“Burnes.”
“For a girl who doesn’t curse, you sure know how to destroy someone.”
A laugh comes out of me. Shaky, startled, real. The kind that hurts in the best way, like stretching a muscle that’s been tight for weeks.
“I didn’t destroy anyone.”
“You told her you hoped she finds someone who sees her. While she was trying to rip you apart in front of thirty people.” David shakes his head. His grin has arrived, full and wide and David. “That’s the most devastating thing I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve seen a guy strike out on three pitches at the bottom of the ninth.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s exactly the same thing. Total annihilation delivered with grace.” He picks up his bag. Adjusts his cap. “Also—did you just tell that woman you love Professor Salvatore?”
My face goes hot. My circle, which had started again on the coffee cup at some point during the conversation, speeds up.
“I need to go.”
“That’s not a denial, Lively.”
“Goodbye, David.”
“That’s also not a denial!”
I’m already walking. Across the quad, past the science building, past the bench where the boy has resumed his phone-scrolling. I just said I love him out loud, in public, on a Tuesday, to a stranger, and it’s true. It’s been true since before I had words for it.
