Page 60 of Rage
He shakes his head. “Don’t think. Just…be careful. With him. He is not a simple, Amy.”
“Why are you warning me?”
“Because I like you, Amy.”
Before I can respond, he turns and walks back across the quad.
I watch him go and think about what he said. About whether I’m afraid of him liking me or if this is part of a game.
But I’m not afraid.
That is either the bravest thing I have ever realized or the most dangerous.
Saint is not hunting me. He’s protecting me. He has to be.
Amy
Ifind my corner table in the library on a Wednesday afternoon and tell myself I am going to read for two hours without thinking about him.
I manage eleven minutes.
The library is quiet at this hour, the post-lunch lull before the late-afternoon rush, when the cubicles fill up with people who have deadlines and the desperate focus of students who have left things too long.
My corner is in the back of the second floor, behind the periodicals section that nobody uses, flanked by two tall shelves that create a pocket of privacy I have come to depend on.
I open my textbook. I read the first paragraph twice.
Then I hear her.
From somewhere near the stairwell, her voice carries in the library hush. Soft and directed at someone she is hoping to find.
She moves slowly through the stacks, checking the cubicles as she passes.
I know before I see her that it is the economics girl.
I know because the way she is looking for someone, lands in my stomach the way it has been landing since the common room. Something that I have been very scrupulous about not calling jealousy settles into my chest.
I look at my textbook, trying to push the thought away.
She moves into the periodicals section. I can see her now through the gap between shelves—dark hair, careful movements, her eyes scanning the cubicles one by one. Looking for him.
Coming toward my corner without knowing I am here.
I should say something.
I should cough, or move, or give her the normal social signal that the space is occupied, but I don’t.
I sit very still, and I watch her come, and I feel the thing in my chest that I am not calling jealousy do its precise, unwelcome work.
And then the air in my corner changes.
I feel it before anything else, the shift that my nervous system has learned to read as him.
The pressure.
The warmth.
The sense of something large and deliberate occupying the space directly behind me.
