Chapter 1 #2
He accepts this. David always accepts things. It’s one of the nicest and most occasionally frustrating things about him.
I look back at the podium. Professor Salvatore is writing something on the board now, his back to the hall, his handwriting angular and European in a way that has caused me a truly embarrassing amount of private distress.
His shoulders are straight. His posture carries an authority that has nothing to do with academia and everything to do with whatever made those men jump out of their SUVs on a Tuesday night for a stranger in an alley.
My circles used to be peaceful. A thinking habit, something my hands did while my mind wandered through cornfields and daydreams and the quiet fantasies of a girl too sensible to ever act on them.
Right now my circles aren’t peaceful. Right now my finger is pressed against the margin of my notebook and I’m not drawing anything at all.
He turns back to face the hall.
Two hundred students look at him the way they always do, that blend of fear and fascination that follows him through every room he enters. The girl three seats left has given up pretending to take notes. A boy in the front row is sitting up straighter.
But I’m not looking at him the way I always do.
For two years I’ve watched him with the aching, deliberate distance of a girl who knows her place.
Third row, cotton dress, circles in the margins, the quiet certainty that a man like this exists in a different atmosphere.
I’ve looked at him with longing and admiration and the sweet, safe impossibility of a crush that never has to go anywhere.
I’m not looking at him like that now.
I’m looking at him with knowledge. With the electric, terrifying awareness that the man behind this podium is connected to the men in this room who are connected to the night that split my life into before and after.
He’s scanning the hall. He does this, methodical, moving from section to section. He doesn’t look at individual students. He surveys the room the way a general surveys a field, and his gaze passes over me as it always does, quick and impersonal, another face in the third row.
Except this time it doesn’t pass.
His eyes reach me and stop.
I don’t know what he sees. I don’t know what my face is doing.
Something terrible, probably, something that announces I JUST FIGURED SOMETHING OUT in neon letters across my forehead.
I try to arrange my expression into something resembling normal academic attention and I fail, completely, because my heart is slamming against my ribs and my finger is still frozen against the page and every nerve ending in my body is lit up like the Fourth of July over the prairie.
His eyes hold mine. One second. Two.
He’s never looked at me before. Not really.
Not like this. In two years of sitting in his third row, I’ve been furniture.
I’ve been one face in a sea of faces, and I’ve been fine with that, grateful for it, even, because if Luciano Salvatore ever actually looked at me I would probably forget how to be a person, and—
He’s looking at me.
His expression changes. Barely visible. If I weren’t someone who has spent two years studying him, I would miss it entirely.
He knows.
I don’t know how. I don’t know what he reads on my face that tells him the ground just opened beneath me, but he reads it. With an instinct that operates faster than thought.
He knows I just figured something out.
The moment stretches. The lecture hall continues around us, laptops clicking, someone coughing, David’s pen scratching his baseball rankings, and none of it reaches me.
There’s this man looking at me from behind his podium, and there’s the girl from Nebraska who just realized that her hopeless, impossible, two-year crush saved her life in an alley when she was eighteen, and between us there’s a wire pulled so tight I can feel it humming in my teeth.
He looks away first.
In two years, I’ve watched him win every staring contest with every student, every colleague, every suited donor at every faculty event.
He doesn’t yield eye contact. But he turns from me now.
Back to the board, back to his lecture, back to the layers of security he’s been teaching us to build.
And his hand, the one holding the dry-erase marker, has a tension in it that wasn’t there before.
My chest unlocks.
No. That’s not right. I’ve been fine this whole time. I must have been. But my lungs feel new, like they just remembered what they’re for, and when the air hits the bottom of my chest it trembles there, uncertain.
I look down at my notebook. My circle is a dent in the page, a small pressed wound where my finger pushed too hard. Beside it, my notes have stopped mid-sentence: concentric barriers—breach of one layer doesn’t—
Doesn’t what?
I press my pen to the page. My hand is still. I’m a girl who gets A’s and goes to church on Sundays and calls her parents every week and has never been kissed. I’m a girl who handles things. I can handle this.
Except that my eyes drift back to the podium, where Professor Salvatore has resumed his lecture with his usual immaculate composure, his voice wrapping around words like vulnerability and exposure and the cost of leaving the core unprotected, and I know with a certainty that settles into my bones like weather:
Nothing is going to be the same.
His men are still there. I can feel them at the back of the hall, two dark, silent shapes at the edge of my awareness. And at the front, their boss, his back to me now, writing on the board with a hand that I watched, I watched, hold that marker with a grip that wasn’t there ten minutes ago.
He looked away first.
And the worst part—the part that should frighten me but doesn’t—is that when our eyes met, when he looked at me and I looked at him and the whole room fell away:
I wasn’t afraid of him.
Not even close. What terrified me was how much I wanted him to look at me again.