Page 32 of Give In to Me
“You should go, Miss Lively.”
This time he means it. I can hear it in the way he turns my name into a barricade between us. Student. Professor. The proper distance, the one that’s supposed to keep people safe.
“Yes,” I say. “I should.”
I open the door. He doesn’t stop me this time. The hallway is flat and cold after the warmth of his office.
My legs carry me to the stairwell. They carry me three steps down before they decide they’re done, and I sit, hard, on cold concrete, my back against the wall, my bag sliding off my shoulder.
“Oh, my stars.”
It comes out as a whisper, halfway between a prayer and a laugh, and I press my forehead to my knees because I need a minute, I need several minutes, I need possibly the rest of the semester to recover from what just happened in that office.
Being that close to him was like standing inside a thunderstorm.
And the terrifying, wonderful, completely impossible truth that I carry with me all the way home, past the campus gates and through the subway turnstile and up four flights of stairs to my apartment where the ceiling still has the water stain that looks like Iowa:
I never want to come inside.
Chapter 3
THE MAN IN THE DARKsuit is leaning against the science building when I come out of my morning class, and he’s pretending to read a newspaper.
A newspaper. In this century. On a college campus where the closest anyone gets to print media is a flyer for improv night stapled to a telephone pole.
I almost laugh. Almost. Because it’s been three days since the office, and I’ve spotted his men four times now. Twice outside the library. Once near the dining hall, nursing a coffee with the intensity of someone who has never in his life ordered a latte voluntarily. And now this one, with his newspaper and his expensive shoes and his complete inability to blend in with a student body that lives in hoodies and existential dread.
They’re watching me.
That should bother me. Being surveilled, invaded, watched. A twenty-year-old woman tracked across her own campus by men who answer to a man who cornered me against his office door three days ago with his hand above my head and his voice at my ear and a look in his eyes that I still haven’t recovered from.
It should bother me.
It doesn’t.
Because every time I see one of them, my traitorous heart does the same stupid, hopeful calculation: he sent them. He’s thinking about me. Whatever wall he put up when he saidYou should go, Miss Lively, whatever barricade he built from formality and distance, he couldn’t stop himself from sending his men to make sure I’m okay.
He commands everything. He can’t seem to command this.
My finger traces a circle on the strap of my bag, and I walk past the man with the newspaper without looking at him, and I let the warmth of that thought carry me across the quad even though Iknow, I know, that it’s dangerous and delusional and exactly the sort of thinking that gets farm girls from Nebraska in trouble.
“Elsa. Hey. Elsa!”
David falls into step beside me, slightly out of breath, his baseball cap on backward and a protein bar hanging from his mouth like a cigar. He’s wearing a jersey from whatever team he loves this week and he looks so aggressively normal that I want to hug him.
“You’re smiling,” he says, suspicious. “You never smile before ten AM.”
“I smile plenty before ten.”
“You smilepolitelybefore ten. That was a real one. What happened?”
“Nothing happened. It’s a nice day.”
It’s forty-two degrees and overcast. David gives me a look that says he has opinions about this claim.
We walk in companionable silence for a minute. David is good at silence. He doesn’t fill it with noise or questions, just matches my pace and eats his protein bar and exists in that easy,uncomplicated space he occupies. My father would like David. My father likes anyone who can be quiet without being awkward.
“Hey.” David’s voice drops. Casual, but I know him well enough to hear the edge beneath it. “That guy by the science building. The one with the newspaper.”
