Page 58 of Give In to Me
“I earned my place, Professor Cuthbert.” My voice carries no heat. No tremor. No anger she can write into a report and file alongside the F she fabricated and the formal review she manufactured. “I’m sorry if that makes you uncomfortable.”
Eight words. I give them to her the way my father gives a handshake—firm, direct, and final.
I turn. I walk to the door. My hand finds the handle and I open it and I step into the hallway, and the fluorescent hum rushes in like cold water after a held breath.
He’s standing against the far wall.
Luciano is leaning against the hallway wall six feet from Agnes Cuthbert’s office door with his arms at his sides and his jaw set tight. He isn’t crossing his arms. He isn’t in a suit jacket—just the white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, forearms bare, and the vein I’ve been privately aware of since freshman year is standing out under his skin.
He heard. The walls in this building are old, the doors are thin, and Agnes Cuthbert’s voice carries the way a scalpel carries—sharp and clean and designed to reach exactly as far as she intends.
He heard all of it.
Our eyes meet. In the fluorescent corridor, with Agnes’s door still open behind me, with my back straight and my chin up and my hands at my sides and no circles, no circles anywhere, his eyes find mine and I see what’s in them.
Fury. The same banked, cold fury I saw after Agnes’s department meeting, but worse now, deeper, with something raw behind it that looks like it’s been building for weeks.
And beneath the fury, something that looks like shame.
He straightens off the wall, not looking at me as he walks past me. The door closes behind him as he walks into Agnes’s office.
I DON’T STAY.
I should. Some part of me wants to press my ear to the door and listen to whatever is happening on the other side of it. But whatever he’s doing in that office is his, and whatever I need todo next is mine, and those are separate things, and I learned that the hard way in a bathroom stall three weeks ago.
I walk out of the building. Across the quad.
The campus garden is on the far side, tucked between the science building and the chapel. It’s not much—a square of green with iron benches and hedges that need trimming and a few trees that are just beginning to remember what leaves are. It’s April. The semester is running out. The trees are bare in a way that looks temporary, skeletal branches holding the shape of something that’s about to come back.
I sit on a bench. My bag beside me. My coat buttoned. The air is cool and damp and smells like wet earth, which is the closest New York gets to Nebraska, and I close my eyes and I breathe.
My hand is resting on the arm of the bench. Iron, cold, painted green and chipping.
My finger moves.
I don’t decide to do it. My body decides, the way it decided in an alley off Lexington when I was eighteen and terrified and my hands found the brick wall and started tracing circles to convince myself I was still whole. The motion comes from the same place—below thought, below will, from whatever part of me knows how to keep going when the rest has stalled.
One circle. On the cold iron. Slow. Unsteady.
Then another.
The circles are back.
They’re not the tight, frantic loops of the avoidance, and they’re not the warm, wide arcs of the joy window. They’re somethingnew. Something that shakes a little and doesn’t close cleanly and keeps going anyway, the circles of a girl who sat in a woman’s office and was told she was nothing and walked out without bending and is now sitting on a bench in a garden drawing circles because her hands remember who she is even when the rest of her isn’t sure.
I draw them, and I breathe, and the garden is quiet around me, and I don’t cry.
HIS FOOTSTEPS ARE DIFFERENT.
I hear them on the gravel path before I see him, and I know they’re his because I’ve spent two years learning the rhythms of this man’s body—the pace of his lectures, the silence of his approach in an office, the weight of his stride in a hallway. These footsteps are slower than his lecture pace. Heavier. The footsteps of a man who has just done something that cost him and is walking toward something that might cost him more.
I don’t open my eyes. My finger keeps its circle on the iron armrest, and I let him come to me, because he came. He’s here. After three weeks of nothing, afterthis is doneandMiss Livelyand the pulled surveillance and the white knuckles on a steering wheel I didn’t see, he’s here, and I won’t make this easy for him.
He sits on the bench.
Not beside me. At the far end, a full arm’s length between us, the distance of a man who isn’t sure he’s allowed to close it. I feel the bench shift under his weight. I smell him—soap, starch, the Italian thing, and beneath it something new, something sharp and metallic that I think might be adrenaline.
Whatever he said to Agnes left marks on him too.
