26. Calliope #2
The words pull my gaze to him. Something in my chest twists, not cleanly, not comfortably. “I need the space to be that,” I say. “I need to walk into the room as a professor, not as someone everyone is trying to keep from cracking.”
Dash sets one mug on the table within my reach and keeps the other in his hand.
“I can drive you,” Dash says. “Theo can ride with us, and I’ll bring him straight back here once you’re inside.
Sloane and Idris can follow and stay in the lot unless you ask for them.
That way you know where everyone is, and Theo doesn’t have to spend the morning wondering whether you vanished. ”
Theo’s head lifts at that, hair falling into his eyes. “I can go,” he says, voice hoarse and immediate. His fingers tighten around my robe, panic flaring so fast I feel it in the tendons of his hand. “I can be quiet. I won't make trouble.”
“Oh, Star,” I whisper, and the ache of him nearly takes me out. I cup his face, careful with the swollen skin beneath his eyes. “That isn't why. You aren't trouble.”
His mouth trembles. “I don't want you to leave where I can't see you.”
“I know.” I press my forehead to his. “I am going to a faculty meeting. I will come back after. Dash’s house has my robe, my cardigan, and the bed I slept in. You can make it smell like us while I am gone.”
Theo’s breath catches on the word us. His eyes flick toward Sloane, then Idris, then back to me. He looks too tired to fight himself and too scared to stop trying.
Dash comes closer only enough to put the second mug on the table near Theo, though it smells like plain hot water instead of coffee.
“You can come with me to the kitchen while she gets ready,” he tells Theo, voice low and practical.
“You can choose which blanket goes on her bed.
You can also sit outside the bathroom door and be miserable if that feels more honest. Both options keep you in the house she's coming back to.”
Theo stares at him for a long second, then lowers his face back into my stomach with a defeated sound. It is agreement, or the closest thing his body can manage.
The next half hour happens in careful pieces.
I eat half a slice of toast because Idris puts the plate within reach and says nothing about the eggs.
Sloane sits on the floor with his hands wrapped around a mug he does not drink from, watching only when I am not looking back.
Dash finds my blazer from the hook near the extension door and leaves it folded over the chair instead of holding it out like I need dressing.
Theo follows me to the bedroom and sits on the floor outside the bathroom while I wash my face, one hand under the door with his fingers resting against the tile.
When I come out, he looks up at me like I have returned from somewhere farther than a sink. I kneel long enough to kiss his forehead, and he closes his eyes under my mouth. “You will come back here,” he says carefully, making it a statement because a question would cost him too much.
“I will come back here,” I answer.
I hop into Dash’s car as Theo curls in the back seat with my cardigan trapped beneath his cheek, watching me in the mirror whenever he thinks I won't notice. Sloane and Idris follow in Sloane’s truck, keeping enough distance that the rearview mirror does not feel crowded.
Dash keeps both hands relaxed on the steering wheel.
He does not fill the quiet until the silence has stopped feeling like something I have to perform inside.
“They are terrified,” he says eventually.
“In case you were wondering what all that restraint means.
They are afraid one wrong word will put you back behind a door they can't open.”
“They should be,” I say, looking out the window as the first brick buildings of Halston come into view. “I spent three months thinking they decided I was not worth the trouble of a phone call. I am not fixed because the documents were fake.”
“I know.” His voice stays steady, but there is a thread underneath it I recognize now as anger held carefully out of my way. “You are the one holding the match this time. That is a different kind of weight.”
The faculty lot is half full when we pull in.
Dash parks near the humanities building but not at the closest spot, leaving enough distance for me to decide how much of the walk I can manage before anyone sees my face.
Sloane’s truck stops two rows back. The engine shuts off. Neither he nor Idris gets out.
Theo leans forward between the seats, one hand gripping the edge of the console. “You will come back to the house.”
I turn far enough to touch his wrist. “I will come back.”
He studies my face, then lets Dash guide him back against the seat. The promise follows me when I open the door.
I look at them through the side mirror, then at the building ahead of me.
Inside those doors, I am Calliope Monroe, PhD.
I talk about ethics and literature with surgical precision.
I argue over syllabus language and budget allocations and whether a required text earns its place through challenge or tradition.
Outside those doors, my bond still aches under my shirt, and the men who didn't reach me in time are waiting in a truck because I asked them not to come closer.
“I’ll take Theo straight back to the house once you’re inside,” Dash says. “Sloane and Idris will stay in the lot unless you ask for them. When the meeting ends, you can ride back with them or call me to return. You don't have to decide that part now.”
I nod. My fingers aren't quite steady as I reach for the door. Dash touches my hand once, quick and grounding, then lets go before the contact can become another thing to untangle. “Professor Monroe,” he says, and the title steadies me more than sweetheart would have.
The air-conditioned chill of the building hits my face like cold water. My shoes click against the hallway tile, and the ordinary sound nearly makes me laugh because my life has become so strange that the hallway to a faculty meeting feels like a dare.
The meeting is already half assembled when I arrive.
Dr. Mendez is sorting handouts near the head of the table.
Allison from composition gives me a small wave.
Someone has brought muffins in a cardboard bakery box, and the smell of sugar and lemon hangs over the room like there is no such thing as forged letters, failed keys, or police reports with stolen names.
I take my usual chair and for nearly an hour, I manage to seem normal.
I nod through budget approvals. I take a pen from the bottom of my bag and underline a sentence in the curriculum packet even though I have already read it twice.
I argue for keeping a specific text in the ethics module because discomfort isn't the same as harm when the classroom gives students the tools to name what unsettles them.
My voice is steady. My posture holds. I even manage to ask Dr. Mendez whether the department intends to clarify the assessment language before adjunct contracts are finalized.
It is ordinary, mundane, beautiful machinery. The kind of life I built with my own hands. The kind Garrett tried to turn into a hiding place and a punishment.
Under the table, my fingers keep finding my shoulder.
The bond bite is quiet beneath my shirt, but quiet no longer feels the same as dead.
It has edges now. It hums faintly when I think of Sloane waiting in the lot, flares low when I remember Idris sitting with his hands visible, and aches when Theo’s face rises in my mind from the bathroom floor, determined to believe I will come back because I said I would.
None of that tells me what to do. It only tells me the lie is losing its monopoly on my body.
When the meeting breaks, the hour of pretending has used up more of me than I expected.
People stand. Chairs scrape. Papers slide into folders.
Someone asks if I am settling in all right, and I hear myself say I am, thank you, the words polished enough to pass inspection.
By the time I step into the hallway, my skin feels too tight around my bones.
Sunlight flashes hard off the parked cars when I push through the building doors. The wind has teeth, sharp enough to cut under my blazer, and I stop on the top step because my knees don't trust themselves yet.
Sloane is leaning against the tailgate of his truck with a cardboard coffee carrier in one hand.
He sees me immediately. His whole body reacts, but he does not run over.
He does not call my name across the lot.
He pushes away from the truck slowly, his coat open in the cold, and waits where I can decide whether the ten feet between us stays ten feet.
Idris stands near the driver’s side door, arms at his sides instead of crossed, watching the perimeter with the controlled focus of a man who is trying to protect without turning protection into a spectacle.
I walk toward them because standing still feels harder.
Halfway there, the shaking starts in my knees.
It climbs fast, burning through the last of the professional mask I wore inside.
My satchel strap digs into my shoulder. My throat tightens.
I feel suddenly small in the open air, like a ghost who spent an hour pretending she still remembered how to haunt her own life.