Page 47 of Rage
“I should go,” I say.
He doesn’t step aside.
“Amy,” he says. And hearing my name in his voice does the involuntary thing I have been refusing to name for weeks.
I tip my chin up slightly because I will not let him see me flinch from the sound of my own name.
“What?” I say.
He looks at me for another long moment. Then he reaches past me, slowly, telegraphing the movement the way you telegraph movement around someone who has a history of flinching, and he picks up the book I left on the table.
He holds it out. “You forgot this.”
I take it, feeling stupid for not noticing.
Our fingers don’t touch. I make sure of that.
And somehow, not touching is worse than touching would have been. The deliberateness of the distance. The care of it. The desire for it to happen, but knowing that if it did, one of the walls I’ve built would come crashing down.
I don’t wait to find out and leave.
In the hallway, I stop and press my back against the cold stone wall and breathe through my nose in long, controlled intervals.
I tell myself very firmly that what I am feeling is not jealousy, because jealousy requires a claim, and I have no claim. WhatI am feeling is not longing, because longing requires hope, and hope is the thing I have been most careful about.
I try to tell myself I don’t find him attractive, that his hair is too long, that he is built too big and not my type, but I’m lying to myself because those are the things I like about him the most every time we are in the same room.
I press my thumb against my left forearm through my sleeve and rub at the tiny raised scars as I walk to my dorm.
At eleven fifteen, he is outside my door.
I know this because I hear him. Not a knock, he never knocks. Just his presence outside my door that has a shape to it. The only way a man of his size could.
I’m sitting on my bed with my knees pulled up, my notebook open, and the lamp on. I have been sitting here since I got back, writing in compressed shorthand and telling myself it is processing, not about him.
I finally get the courage to get up and open the door.
He looks at me, takes in the lamp, the notebook on the bed, the fact that I am in my last-resort oversized sweatshirt that I wear only when I have given up on the performance of being fine, and he says nothing.
I say nothing.
We look at each other in the doorway, the building is quiet, and there is approximately three feet of space between us, doing a tremendous amount of work.
“Why are you here?” I ask.
He looks at me for a long moment.
The lamp in my room throws light across one side of his face, leaving the other in shadow. He looks exactly like what he is, something that came from the dark and has not entirely left it.
“Because you closed the door before you finished leaving,” he says.
I stare at him.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he does something he’s never done. He lifts his hand, slowly, with the same care he used reaching past me for the book, and he brushes a strand of hair back from my face. One strand. The back of his knuckles barely makes contact with my cheekbone. The touch lasts less than two seconds. My nervous system registers it like a struck chord—not a threat or danger—but something that moves through me in a wave from the point of contact outward. The resonance of his touch I have been bracing against for weeks finally arrives.
He drops his hand.
