Chapter 19
Amy
Iam not looking for him.
I want to be clear about that.
I’m in the common room on the third floor of the east academic building because it has the best light for reading after four o’clock, and because Rose told me about it last week and she was right.
I have two hundred pages of behavioral theory to get through before next Thursday, and the library is full.
I’m here for the light and the quiet and the reading. Not for anything else.
Saint is at the far end of the room by the window when I walk in.
I see him before he sees me, which has never happened before. He always knows first, always has the quality of someone aware of every variable in the room before anyone else.
But tonight he is not watching the door.
He is watching the girl sitting across from him, which means his attention is elsewhere, which means I have approximately three seconds to decide whether to stay or go before he looks up, and the decision gets complicated.
I stay.
I sit at the table nearest the door, which is the correct choice for approximately six reasons and also faces the window.
The girl is beautiful. Dark hair, in layers.
The kind of mouth that men talk about. She has her hand on the table between them, not touching him, but close, positioned in the way you position a hand when you’re about to do anything a man asks.
She is laughing. Saint says something that makes her laugh harder.
I open my textbook.
I find myself re-reading the same sentence four times.
I look up because I can’t help myself. He is doing the same thing he always does, which is exist in the space with that absolute self-contained stillness while the world arranges itself around him.
The girl with the dark hair leans forward now, and her other hand has moved three inches closer to the edge of the table.
I keep telling myself I am absolutely reading about the neurological underpinnings of trauma response and not watching any of this.
The sentence I keep reading is: “The nervous system encodes threat through sensory association, creating involuntary physiological responses to stimuli that have been linked to prior danger.”
I read it a fifth time.
I understand every word, yet I cannot tell you what any of them mean right now.
He looks up right when I do.
Not at the room or the door but directly at me, as if he knew the precise location of my seat before he raised his eyes. Which is entirely possible, and I am choosing not to examine it in my head right now.
I look at my textbook.
I feel his gaze for four seconds.
I count them.
Then I hear the low sound of his voice, not the words, just the timbre, that deep, unhurried frequency that moves through a room like weather. And then a pause, and the girl laughs again, softer this time.
I turn a page.
Twenty minutes later, I pack up my bag with the brisk, purposeful energy of someone who has somewhere to be and is absolutely not leaving because Saint is getting his ego stroked, when I hear the chair.
Not hers. His.
His footsteps cross the room. He doesn’t go toward the door. He comes toward me, and I know this without looking because I have developed, against my will and better judgment, a finely calibrated awareness of where he is at any given moment.
Right now, he is closing the distance between the window and my table at a pace that suggests he is not in a hurry because he has already decided how this ends.
I pull my bag onto my shoulder.
He stops two feet away. Not close enough to crowd me but close enough that I would have to actively step around him to leave.
I look up.
My mistake. Looking up at Saint from close range is always a mistake, yet I do it anyway.
He looks at me the way he always looks at me, like I am the only fixed point in the room. Not like the girl at the table. Not the way he was sitting with her, easy and present and available.
This is different.
This is the look that has been keeping me awake at unreasonable hours for the past weeks, the one I have no clean clinical name for.
“You were watching,” he says. It isn’t an accusation.
“I was reading,” I say, staring at the hard lines of his jaw.
His mouth does the almost thing. Not quite a smile. The anterior to a smile.
“You read the same page for twenty minutes.”
“I was reading slowly.”
He looks at me. A long, unhurried look, the kind that takes inventory.
“She is in my economics lecture,” he says. “She wanted help with a problem set.”
“I don’t care, and I didn’t ask,” I say.
“No,” he agrees. “You didn’t.”
The room has gone very quiet around us. I am aware of the textbook in my bag, the table behind me, the door to my left, and that I have not moved despite having approximately three clear routes of exit available.
“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. What I 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.
I’m still watching him.
“I know it was you,” I blurt. “Marcus.”
Something shifts in his face. Not surprise. Something quieter.
“I know it was you in that alley,” I add. “I don’t know what you did or how badly you hurt him. I don’t know if I should be afraid of that.”
He holds my gaze. “Are you? Afraid of that.”
I think about it honestly. “No,” I say.
He nods. Once. Slowly.
The space between us has contracted without either of us moving, or maybe I have moved, or maybe he has.
But approximately eighteen inches now exists between my face and his chest, and I can feel the warmth of him from here.
“You should sleep,” he says. His voice is low and careful.
“I know,” I say.
He doesn’t move.
I don’t close the door.
The eighteen inches become twelve. I am not entirely sure who is responsible for that.
“Saint.” I say his name directly to him for the first time. Not in my head. Not in a notebook. Out loud, to his face, in the doorway of my room at night.
He goes very still.
The kind of still that is not absence but the opposite, the stillness of something at full attention.
I reach up, and I put my hand flat against his chest. Over his sternum.
Just my palm. Just the warmth of him through the fabric, and his heartbeat underneath hard muscles, steady, slower than mine, steady in the way that everything about him is steady, that maddening, inexhaustible patience of a man who has decided he can wait and means it.
“Thank you,” I murmur.
He looks down at my hand on his chest. Then up at my face.
The expression that crosses his face is the most unguarded thing I have ever seen on him, brief, involuntary, there and gone in under a second. But I see it.
I take my hand back, step back into my room, and close the door.
On the other side of it, I press my back against the wood, and I slide down until I am sitting on the floor with my knees pulled up and my heart hammering and my palm still warm from his heartbeat.
I tip my head back against the door, and I breathe.
In the hallway, I hear him standing there for a long time, like he can sense my inner turmoil through the door.
Then his footsteps, slow and deliberate, go back toward the stairs.
I close my eyes.
And for the first time, it feels like the beginning of something rather than the end.