Chapter 29
Saint
She finds me on the roof of the east building.
Not many people know about the roof. There is a maintenance access door on the fifth floor that the facilities staff stopped locking two years ago, and the roof itself is flat and wide, giving you the whole campus spread out below: the quad, the fountain, the chapel, the dormitory wings.
I have been coming here in the early evenings when the pressure inside the building gets too dense, and I need the relief of the open sky.
I hear the door before I see her.
I turn.
She stands in the doorway in her coat, the wind pulling at her hair, looking at me with an expression I have not seen on her before. Not the careful neutral one she wears when she is processing something.
Something else.
I don’t speak. I wait.
I don’t want to say the wrong thing that pushes her away.
She crosses the roof toward me. The evening light is going gold, and the campus below is doing its ordinary things, and she walks across the flat gray surface of someone who has decided what they came to say and is not going to lose it on the way.
She stops in front of me.
“You saw my photograph two years ago,” she says.
“Yes.”
“And the list?”
“That came later,” I tell her. “Three weeks before you arrived. The file. The index. The part where the Order turned your loneliness into a number.”
Her mouth tightens.
“But the photograph came first?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Why remember me?”
I look at her because there is no honest way to make this sound sane. “Because you looked like someone who had been surviving alone for too long. And I knew what that felt like.”
And I was in a room where I could not do anything about anything, so I did the only thing I could do, which was decide.”
“You were in a cell,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Deciding, from a white room, about someone you had never met.”
“Yes. I know how that sounds.”
She shakes her head slowly. “It sounds like you,” she says.
The wind moves between us.
“I’m still angry. About the list. About not being told. I’m going to be angry about it for a while longer, and I need you to know that.”
“I understand.”
“And I need you to not manage it. Do not fix it. Don’t arrive at my door with something designed to make it smaller.”
“I won’t.”
She looks at me for a long moment. The gold evening light is across her face, and her eyes are dark and direct, and she is the most honest thing I have looked at in years.
Then she steps forward, and she puts both her hands flat on my chest—not one palm but both hands this time, over my sternum, the way you hold something you are deciding to keep—and she tips her chin up and looks at me.
“I’m not running,” she says. “I want you to know that. I know what this is, and I know what you are, and I am not running.”
Something happens in my chest under her hands.
I reach up and cover her hands with mine.
“Okay.”
She exhales. The campus goes gold below us.
And I tell her about my past.
We stand on the roof in the evening wind. I hold her hands against my chest and look at her. This is what years of waiting for something right feels like from the other side.
It feels like enough to burn the world down for.
And I intend to.
“Does this mean I’m fair game for anyone else?”
I decide to tell her the truth, even if it’s something I’ll have to deal with.
“Yes.”
“And the other women?”
Fuck. This is not a conversation I want to have with her.
“What about them?”
“I’m not an idiot. I also have ears.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“Did you think about them in your cell too? Am I one of many on a stupid list?”
I didn’t know what the fuck I was going to do when I saw her or if she would even like me. Regret sits between us like a wall being built brick by brick. Anything I say will just add another brick, but all I can manage is a vague answer.
“No.”
She gets up, and for the first time, I feel the cruel wave of fear. She’s pulling away. I can feel it. She thinks I used her and I’m playing a game.
“I gotta go.”
The worst part is, I don’t blame her.
I sit on the roof for hours, not knowing how to fix her perception of me.
I’ve never been close to someone. All I’ve ever had is sex—meaningless interactions with faceless women to appease my biological need as a man.
But with her, it’s different.
She awakens something inside my chest I can’t name but need to feel. I try to distract myself like Azriel wanted. College girls who don’t care where I came from or how unhinged I am. Prey. All they see is a mysterious guy with a muscular body and slick words.
And all I can think about is her.
Before them and after them, it’s always her.