Chapter 2
THE NOTE IS WAITING on my desk after class.
No signature. No please. Just three words and a time, written in ink so dark it looks like it bled through from the other side of something.
I stare at it for a full ten seconds while students stream past me, while David says something about the dining hall, while my finger traces a circle on the corner of the paper so fast it nearly burns.
Then I fold the note carefully, tuck it into my notebook, and walk to my next class with his handwriting pressed against my sternum like a coal.
I’m thirteen minutes early, which is a choice I’ll regret for the rest of my natural life, because now I’ve thirteen minutes to stand in this hallway and think about what’s waiting on the other side of that door and my circles are getting smaller and faster and I’m drawing them on my own wrist like a person who has lost all connection to rational behavior.
His door is dark wood. Heavy. The nameplate reads Prof.
D. Salvatore in brass letters that don’t need to be polished because of course they don’t, because nothing about this man is allowed to tarnish.
Through the door I can smell old books and something else, something warm and Italian that I’ve spent two years pretending doesn’t make my pulse change rhythm.
At 3:52 I knock.
At 3:52 and one second, I hear: “Come in.”
Two words. His voice, muffled through wood, still does something to the base of my spine that would be medically concerning if I described it to a doctor.
I open the door. I step inside. And the first thing I notice, before the bookshelves or the window or the warm amber of late afternoon, is that he’s standing.
Behind his desk, but standing. Not leaning, not sitting, not in any of the composed positions I’ve catalogued over two years of watching him from the third row.
He’s on his feet and there’s an energy coming off him that I can feel from the doorway, something coiled and restless, and his jacket is off.
Draped over the back of his chair. Just the white shirt, and his sleeves aren’t rolled today, and for some reason that feels more alarming than if he had been holding a weapon.
“Close the door.”
I close the door. The click of the latch is very loud.
His office is smaller than I expected. Or maybe it just feels smaller because he’s in it and the air has changed, thickened into something I have to work through like wading.
Bookshelves on two walls, floor to ceiling, leather spines and cracked covers and titles in Italian and English and what might be German.
A single window behind him. His desk between us, wide and dark, covered in stacked papers so neatly aligned that my own study habits look feral.
He hasn’t spoken. He’s looking at me, and I realize with a jolt that this is the second time in my life he’s looked directly at me, and I was right, back in that lecture hall, when I thought if he ever actually looked at me I would forget how to be a person.
I’ve forgotten how to be a person.
“Miss Lively.” His voice is different at this distance. In the lecture hall it’s a broadcast, aimed at the back wall, calibrated for two hundred. Here, in this small room with the door closed and the afternoon going gold outside his window, it’s just for me. Lower. Closer.
“Professor Salvatore.”
My voice is even, which is a minor miracle that I attribute entirely to my parents, who raised me to be polite in the face of natural disasters.
He studies me. I don’t know what he’s looking for. His eyes move across my face with an attention that feels like fingertips, and I have to lock my knees to keep standing because no one has ever looked at me like that. Not once. Not ever. Like I’m a page in a language he’s trying to translate.
“Sit down.”
There’s a chair in front of his desk. Wooden, no cushion, institutional. I sit. My hands find my lap, and my finger immediately starts circling the inside of my left wrist, and I watch his eyes drop to the motion and track it, and oh. Oh, my stars. He’s watching my hands.
“You seemed distracted in my lecture today.”
It’s not a question. He doesn’t ask questions he already knows the answers to.
“Yes.” I should probably elaborate. I should probably come up with some academic excuse involving research stress or sleep deprivation or literally anything other than the truth.
But I’m a terrible liar. Mama says my face goes transparent when I try, like holding a letter up to the sun. So I just say it again: “Yes.”
His jaw tightens. That muscle, the one I noticed from the podium.
Up close it’s worse. Up close, everything about this man is worse.
The angle of his cheekbones, the darkness of his eyes, the faint shadow along his jaw where he either shaved this morning or didn’t quite, and I can’t think about that, I can’t think about him shaving in the morning, because my circle has become so fast it’s basically a vibration.
“Why.”
One word. No inflection. Just the word, placed in front of me like a stone on a game board, and he waits.
I could lie. I could say the coursework is heavy, that I’m worried about my thesis, that I didn’t sleep well.
Any of those would work. He might even let them work, might accept a comfortable fiction and send me on my way, back to the third row, back to my circles, back to the safe and aching distance I’ve kept for two years.
But his men were in that lecture hall. And his men were in that alley. And the distance between those two facts is zero, and we both know it, and I’m from Nebraska and we don’t lie well and we don’t lie often and I’m not going to start now.
“I recognized them.” My voice comes out quieter than I intend. “The men at the back of the hall. Your men.”
His face doesn’t change. Not a flicker. He stands behind his desk like something carved from the same dark wood and I watch him not react, and the not-reacting is worse than any reaction would be, because it means he was ready for this.
He expected it. He saw it on my face in the lecture hall and he wrote a note and he waited and now here we are.
“And what,” he says, “do you think you recognized?”
“An alley off Lexington. Two years ago.” My circle has stopped. My finger is pressed flat against my wrist. “I was eighteen. I had just gotten to New York. Three men cornered me, and then your men were there, and they said their boss saw me having trouble while they were stuck in traffic.”
Silence. The kind that has texture, that fills the corners of a room and pushes against the windows.
“I looked up from them to you today, and I knew.” My voice is very small now, but it doesn’t shake. “You were the boss.”
He’s so still. The late afternoon picks out the edge of his jaw, the hollow beneath his cheekbone, the place where his collar meets his neck. His hands are at his sides. Not in his pockets, not clasped, just there, and his fingers are straight, which tells me something, though I’m not sure what.
“Miss Lively.”
“Professor.”
“What you think you know about me is incomplete.”
“I know that.”
“Incomplete and potentially dangerous.”
“I know that too.”
His eyes narrow. Not with anger. With something I can’t read, something caught between calculation and a rawer thing he’s not letting through.
I hold his gaze because my father taught me that you look people in the eye when they’re telling you something important, even if your hands are shaking, even if you want to run, even if the person in front of you is so beautiful it makes your chest feel like a barn with the doors blown open.
I stand up. Not because I want to leave. Because sitting while he’s standing makes me feel like a student, and right now I’m not a student. I’m the girl from the alley.
“Thank you,” I say. “For that night. I never got to say that to the right person.”
He flinches. It’s so small I would’ve missed it if I weren’t standing six feet away with every nerve in my body tuned to his frequency. A flinch that lives only in his eyes, a contraction, and it’s gone before it fully arrives.
“You should go.”
I nod. I pick up my bag. I turn toward the door. My hand reaches for the handle.
The air changes behind me.
I don’t hear him move. That’s what I’ll think about later, lying awake in my apartment, staring at the ceiling. I don’t hear a single footstep on the hardwood, not the shift of weight or the brush of fabric. One moment there’s six feet of empty office behind me and the next moment there isn’t.
His hand lands on the door above my head. Flat, fingers spread, holding it shut.
I don’t turn around. I can’t. Because his arm is beside my ear and his body is behind me, not touching me, not anywhere close to touching me, but so near that I can feel the warmth of him through the back of my dress, and his scent is everywhere now.
Not just the old books and the subtle Italian thing.
Soap. Starch. Clean cotton heated by skin.
And beneath all of it, something that’s just him, something that has no name and no category, and my finger is frozen against my own wrist.
“Whatever you think you know.” His voice is at my ear. Low. Not a whisper. Something worse than a whisper, something with weight and gravel and a current beneath it that I feel in my teeth. “You’re wrong.”
Every rational cell in my body is running a cost-benefit analysis that comes up red, flashing, warning, because the man behind me is a head taller and twice my weight and connected to people who made three men disappear from an alley like smoke.
But I turn around.
The door is against my back. His hand is above my head.
His face is right there, closer than any face has ever been to mine, and I can see things I’ve no right to see at this distance.
A scar, thin, white, curving along his left temple into his hairline.
The exact shade of his eyes, which aren’t black, as I thought from the third row, but the darkest brown I’ve ever seen, like coffee before the cream, like good earth after rain.
His jaw clenched so tight a muscle is jumping in his cheek like a second pulse.
He’s looking down at me with an expression that I’ll spend the rest of the evening trying to name and failing. It’s not anger. It’s not warning. It’s something older than both, and it looks like it’s costing him to stand this close and costing him more to think about stepping away.
Six inches between us. Maybe less. I can feel his shirt against the front of my dress if I let myself lean forward even a fraction, and I won’t lean forward, I won’t, but every cell in my body is pulling toward him like iron toward a magnet and my hands are shaking at my sides and I’ve never been kissed and I’ve never wanted anything the way I want him to close this space.
“I would never hurt you, Professor.”
I don’t plan to say it. It just comes, the way true things do, rising from the same place my mother’s exclamations live, from somewhere beneath thought, somewhere that doesn’t know how to be anything but honest.
His face breaks.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. A hairline crack running through all that granite, and I watch it happen from six inches away.
His eyes change. The muscle in his jaw stops jumping.
His lips part and close and part again and he doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t say a single word, but something behind his expression shifts, and for one second I see it.
The man behind the professor. The man behind the armor and the suits and the silence. A man who looks like he just heard something he wasn’t prepared for, in a language he thought he had forgotten.
Then it’s gone. He steps back. His hand drops from the door. The six inches become two feet, three, four, and the air between us goes cold where his warmth was.
“Come here.” He says it from behind his desk, where he’s retreated like the wood and paper can protect him. His voice is rough. Changed. “Sit down.”
I don’t sit. I stand by the door with my hand on the handle and my heart doing things that would alarm a cardiologist. “Why?”
“Because I’m asking you to.”
“That’s not why.”
His eyes meet mine, and it seems like he’s almost smiled.
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
We look at each other across the length of his office. The afternoon has gone from gold to amber. Somewhere beyond the door, the building is emptying, footsteps fading, doors closing one by one. We’re running out of daylight.
“You should go, Miss Lively.”
This time he means it. I can hear it in the way he turns my name into a barricade between us. Student. Professor. The proper distance, the one that’s supposed to keep people safe.
“Yes,” I say. “I should.”
I open the door. He doesn’t stop me this time. The hallway is flat and cold after the warmth of his office.
My legs carry me to the stairwell. They carry me three steps down before they decide they’re done, and I sit, hard, on cold concrete, my back against the wall, my bag sliding off my shoulder.
“Oh, my stars.”
It comes out as a whisper, halfway between a prayer and a laugh, and I press my forehead to my knees because I need a minute, I need several minutes, I need possibly the rest of the semester to recover from what just happened in that office.
Being that close to him was like standing inside a thunderstorm.
And the terrifying, wonderful, completely impossible truth that I carry with me all the way home, past the campus gates and through the subway turnstile and up four flights of stairs to my apartment where the ceiling still has the water stain that looks like Iowa:
I never want to come inside.