Page 68 of Give In to Me
Silence follows, the kind that holds his entire audience captive.
“That concludes the semester.” His voice is normal again. Professional. The mask back in place, smooth and perfect, and if I hadn’t spent two years memorizing this man’s face I might believe it was never off. “Thank you for your attention. Your final grades will be posted by Friday.”
The hall moves. Chairs scrape. Bags zip. The ambient noise of two hundred students who have just been released from their last obligation rises around me—voices, laughter, the particular bright energy of people who are done, who are walking out of this room and into summer and the next thing.
David stands. Looks at me. Looks at the podium. Back at me.
“Lively.”
“Go.”
He holds my gaze for a moment. Then he nods, and the nod contains everything—the whole semester, the whole friendship, all of it—and he picks up his bag and his backward cap and his protein bar wrapper, and he walks out of the lecture hall.
The room empties.
It takes three minutes. The back rows go first, then the middle, then the front, students flowing past me on both sides, and I sit in my seat in the third row with my notebook open and my pen down and my finger tracing one slow circle on the margin, and I don’t move.
The last student passes. The door at the top of the hall closes. The sound of footsteps fades.
Quiet.
The lecture hall is enormous when it’s empty. The fluorescent hum fills the silence, and the rows of desks stretch upward and away, and the podium stands at the front with its microphone and its light, and behind it, he’s standing with his hands at his sides, looking at me.
He’s looking at me the way he looked at me the first time. That day when his eyes reached the third row and stopped. Except he’s not looking away. And the expression on his face isn’t guarded or startled or controlled.
It’s the face from the garden bench. Open. Unarmored.
“The semester is over, Miss Lively.”
His voice in the empty room. Low. The words placed with care, and he’s using that name one last time, because after this it won’t be needed.
“Yes, Professor.”
My circle is moving on the margin, slow, wide, the rhythm of peace.
“You’re no longer my student.”
“No.”
The word falls into the empty hall. Settles. The fluorescent hum holds it.
He steps out from behind the podium.
He walks to the third row.
Down the center aisle, past the front row, past the second, and he stops at my desk, and he’s standing in front of me, and his eyes are dark and warm and his mouth is doing the thing it’s been trying to do since the garden bench—not the almost-smile, not the ghost of one, but the thing itself, small and unguarded, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
“Then come home with me.”
Five words. And every time he’s ever saidcome herebuilds into this, into come home with me, said in an empty lecture hall at the end of a semester by a man who’s standing at the third row looking at the girl who sat there for two years drawing circles and watching him with the quiet, immovable certainty that he was worth it.
I stand.
I’m shaking. My notebook slides closed on the desk. My bag is on the floor. My hands are at my sides and I’m shaking, and I don’t try to stop it.
He’s shaking too.
His hands at his sides have a tremor in them. This man, who doesn’t shake, who doesn’t crack, who has spent his whole life learning control, is standing in front of me in an empty lecture hall with his hands trembling and his smile on his face and his armor off.
