Page 67 of Give In to Me
I sit on my bed with the phone in my hand. The screen still shows Sunday’s message, still open, still unanswered, the word that has been living against my hip for two days.
Sposami.
I said the English of it today out loud, in public, to a stranger, and the sky didn’t fall. I didn’t combust from the sheer reckless honesty of it.
My circle moves on the phone case. Slow now. Wide. The rhythm of peace.
I look at his word, the language his heart speaks when his control fails, and I type one word.
Yes.
Chapter 14
MY FINGER TRACES THEsame circle it always does.
Small, unhurried, moving along the margin of my notebook while Professor Salvatore’s voice fills the lecture hall like smoke. Low, accented, a voice that makes two hundred students go quiet before he’s finished his first sentence. The hall is packed today. Every seat taken, the back rows crammed with students who skipped half the semester and showed up for the last lecture because his final class is an event, a performance, the kind of thing people tell other people they were there for.
Third row. Same seat. Notebook open, pen ready, the blue dress with the small flowers that Mama hemmed last Christmas. My circle moves on the margin, and the paper is smooth under my fingertip—a fresh page, the last page of the last notebook I’ll fill in this class.
He’s wearing charcoal. The suit from the first day, or one cut from the same cloth, sharp and precise, every seam in place. His sleeves are rolled to the elbow. The vein on his forearm that I’ve been privately, mortifyingly aware of since September of my freshman year is visible from the third row, and I let myself look, because after today I won’t need to pretend I’m not looking.
David is beside me. His pen is moving with the easy rhythm of a man who has been ranking baseball players on the back of his syllabus for an entire semester and sees no reason to stop on the last day. He hasn’t said a word about the Charmaine incident. Hasn’t asked about theI love himthat I said on a Tuesday morning in front of thirty people. He just showed up today witha protein bar and a grin and saved me a seat, the way he has since the beginning, and when I sat down he said, “Last one, Lively,” and I said, “Last one, Burnes,” and that was enough.
The lecture is on trust architectures.
I know this because I’m listening, really listening, the way I listened on the first day when he talked about network architecture and layered defenses and concentric barriers, and I wrote in the margin he’s talking about himself and doesn’t know it. I scratched it out then. I wouldn’t scratch it out now.
“Every system we’ve discussed this semester has been built on the assumption that the outside is hostile.” His voice carries the hall without effort. He paces the way he always has—measured, no notes, the lecture built in real time. “Firewalls. Encryption. Access controls. We build walls because the world gives us reasons to.”
My circle slows.
“But the most resilient systems aren’t the ones with the highest walls.” He stops pacing. Stands at the front of the podium, the place he goes when he’s about to make a point that matters. “They’re the ones that have learned to let the right things in.”
My pen stops on the page.
“Trust architectures operate on a different principle than defensive ones. Instead of askingwhat am I protecting against, they ask what am I protecting, and who do I trust to help me protect it? The system doesn’t become weaker by opening a door. It becomes stronger, because the resources on the other side of that door were always part of the design. The system was incomplete without them.”
He’s not looking at me.
He hasn’t looked at me once. His gaze moves across the hall with the same impersonal sweep it always has—back rows, middle section, the cluster of students near the door who are already calculating how fast they can leave. Professional. Precise. Professor Salvatore, delivering his final lecture with the same composure he brought to the first.
But his words are aimed.
He’s talking about firewalls and encryption to two hundred students, and he’s talking about himself to one, and I sit in the third row and draw my circles and let his voice do what it’s always done to the space between my ribs.
“The courage required to build a trust architecture is fundamentally different from the courage required to build a wall.” His hand rests on the podium. Long fingers, still. “A wall asks you to be strong. A trust architecture asks you to be brave. It asks you to believe that the system you’ve built—the life you’ve designed—can survive the presence of another person inside it.”
David’s pen has stopped. I glance sideways. He’s not ranking baseball players. He’s looking at the podium with an expression I’ve never seen on him during a lecture—attentive, quiet, the face of a man hearing something he didn’t expect to hear in a cybersecurity class.
“Some of you will build walls.” Luciano’s voice has dropped. The voice of a professor who’s also a man who’s also standing in front of a room full of people and choosing, for the first time, to let the lecture and the truth be the same thing. “They’ll keep you safe. They’ll keep you isolated. And you’ll have to decide, at some point, whether safe and isolated is enough.”
My circle has stopped. My finger is pressed against the margin, holding still, because my hands want to shake and I won’t let them. Not here. Not in front of two hundred people.
“Some of you will learn to open doors.” A pause. His eyes move across the room. Pass me. Don’t stop. “And the person on the other side of that door will see everything—the architecture, the defenses, the places where the system is weakest. And you’ll discover that being seen isn’t the same as being compromised.”
Another pause.
“That’s the most important thing I can teach you. Not the protocols. Not the encryptions. The willingness to let someone in and trust that the system holds.”
