Chapter 3
THE MAN IN THE DARK suit is leaning against the science building when I come out of my morning class, and he’s pretending to read a newspaper.
A newspaper. In this century. On a college campus where the closest anyone gets to print media is a flyer for improv night stapled to a telephone pole.
I almost laugh. Almost. Because it’s been three days since the office, and I’ve spotted his men four times now.
Twice outside the library. Once near the dining hall, nursing a coffee with the intensity of someone who has never in his life ordered a latte voluntarily.
And now this one, with his newspaper and his expensive shoes and his complete inability to blend in with a student body that lives in hoodies and existential dread.
They’re watching me.
That should bother me. Being surveilled, invaded, watched.
A twenty-year-old woman tracked across her own campus by men who answer to a man who cornered me against his office door three days ago with his hand above my head and his voice at my ear and a look in his eyes that I still haven’t recovered from.
It should bother me.
It doesn’t.
Because every time I see one of them, my traitorous heart does the same stupid, hopeful calculation: he sent them.
He’s thinking about me. Whatever wall he put up when he said You should go, Miss Lively, whatever barricade he built from formality and distance, he couldn’t stop himself from sending his men to make sure I’m okay.
He commands everything. He can’t seem to command this.
My finger traces a circle on the strap of my bag, and I walk past the man with the newspaper without looking at him, and I let the warmth of that thought carry me across the quad even though I know, I know, that it’s dangerous and delusional and exactly the sort of thinking that gets farm girls from Nebraska in trouble.
“Elsa. Hey. Elsa!”
David falls into step beside me, slightly out of breath, his baseball cap on backward and a protein bar hanging from his mouth like a cigar. He’s wearing a jersey from whatever team he loves this week and he looks so aggressively normal that I want to hug him.
“You’re smiling,” he says, suspicious. “You never smile before ten AM.”
“I smile plenty before ten.”
“You smile politely before ten. That was a real one. What happened?”
“Nothing happened. It’s a nice day.”
It’s forty-two degrees and overcast. David gives me a look that says he has opinions about this claim.
We walk in companionable silence for a minute.
David is good at silence. He doesn’t fill it with noise or questions, just matches my pace and eats his protein bar and exists in that easy, uncomplicated space he occupies.
My father would like David. My father likes anyone who can be quiet without being awkward.
“Hey.” David’s voice drops. Casual, but I know him well enough to hear the edge beneath it. “That guy by the science building. The one with the newspaper.”
My circle stutters.
“What about him?”
“I’ve seen him before. And the one at the library yesterday, and the dude outside the dining hall on Tuesday.” David crumples his protein bar wrapper, tucks it in his pocket. His jaw has set in a way I’ve never seen on him, squarer, more serious. Protective. “They’re not students.”
“No,” I say. “They’re not.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
The earnestness in his voice makes my chest ache.
David Burnes, who has known me for two years and never once asked me to be anything other than exactly who I’m, is worried about me.
And I can’t tell him the truth, because the truth involves a professor and a secret and an alley and a set of feelings so complicated they’d need their own zip code.
“I’m fine, David. They’re not a problem.”
“They’re following you.”
“They’re not following me. They’re just... around.”
“Elsa.” He stops walking. I stop too. He faces me with that open, earnest expression that makes it impossible to brush him off.
“If someone is bothering you, I can help. I’m not, like, tough or anything, but I’m big and I played defensive end in high school and I can look very intimidating when I want to. ”
I picture David squaring up against one of Luciano’s men and the image is so absurd and so sweet that I have to press my lips together to keep from laughing.
“I appreciate that. Truly. But I’m okay.”
He studies me for a long moment. Then he nods, the way good people nod when they’ve decided to trust you even though they don’t fully believe you. “Okay. But I’m keeping an eye on it.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to. I want to.” He puts his cap back on, adjusts it. “That’s what friends do, Lively.”
We walk the rest of the way to the lecture hall in silence, and I think about how lucky I’m to have someone uncomplicated in my life, because the complicated part is about to walk into a room and ruin my vital signs for the next ninety minutes.
PROFESSOR SALVATORE enters the hall at exactly two minutes past the hour, as he always does, and two hundred students snap to attention like iron filings around a magnet.
He doesn’t look at me.
I knew he wouldn’t. I prepared for it. I sat in my third-row seat and opened my notebook and started my circle and told myself that whatever happened in that office was a sealed room, separate from this hall, and that Professor Salvatore in lecture mode is a different creature entirely from the man who pressed his hand against a door above my head and said you’re wrong in a voice that made my ribs feel too small.
He doesn’t look at me, and it’s fine.
The lecture is on encryption protocols today.
His voice is the same. Low, accented, filling the room with that effortless authority that makes everyone sit up straighter.
He paces the front of the hall with his hands behind his back, his suit dark gray, his posture carrying that silent command I now understand in a way I didn’t two weeks ago.
Not once does his gaze settle on the third row, and it’s fine, and my circle is going so fast on the margin of my notebook that the paper is starting to wear thin.
Twenty minutes in, I catch him.
It’s not his eyes. His eyes are aimed at the middle distance, at the back wall, at the projected slide behind him. His gaze is moving across the room as it always does, scanning, impersonal, the general surveying his field.
But his attention is on my hands.
I can feel it. I know how that sounds, how unscientific and irrational and thoroughly un-provable that is, but I feel it the way you feel someone standing behind you in a dark room.
A weight that has nothing to do with sight.
My finger is tracing its circle on the margin, and his body, pacing at the front of the hall, is oriented toward me by two degrees.
Maybe three. A fraction so small that no one else in this room would notice, because no one else in this room has spent two years memorizing the angles of this man’s body.
His eyes are on the room. His attention is on my hands.
I slow the circle. Make it wider. Let my finger drag.
His jaw tightens. That muscle, the one I saw from six inches away in his office, the one that jumps when he’s holding something back.
It flexes once, quick, and his pacing hitches.
Not a stumble. Not even a pause. Just a fraction of a second where his stride loses its rhythm, and then it’s back, smooth, and he’s talking about key exchange algorithms and his voice hasn’t changed at all.
But I saw it.
I look up from my notebook. He’s facing the class now, mid-sentence, and our eyes meet.
One second. Two.
Quieter than the first time. This is two people who sat across from each other in a small office and said things that can’t be unsaid, looking at each other in a room full of people who have no idea that the air between the podium and the third row is carrying a frequency only we can hear.
He looks away first. Second time.
My finger resumes its circle. Slower now. The paper is warm from friction.
David, beside me, writes something on the corner of his syllabus and tilts it toward me: You okay?
I write back: Fine.
He writes: You keep doing that thing with your hand.
My circle has migrated from the notebook margin to the surface of the desk, my finger tracing the same path over and over, and I didn’t even notice.
Hands in my lap. Finger finds my knee. Starts again.
At the front of the hall, Professor Salvatore has resumed his lecture.
His back is to the class, writing on the board, and his handwriting is the same angular European script that was on the note he left me, and I wonder if he knows I kept it.
I wonder if he knows it’s folded inside the back cover of my notebook right now, three words and a time in ink so dark it looks like it came from somewhere deeper than a pen.
Probably not. Probably he wrote it and forgot it and moved on with his life, because he’s a man who moves on and I’m a girl in his third row with a circle habit and a crush that has evolved from hopeless to something worse.
Something with teeth.
AFTER CLASS, I’VE FORTY-five minutes before my next seminar. I go to the campus coffee shop, the one in the humanities building with the bad lighting and the good espresso, and I order my usual and sit by the window and open my laptop and pretend to work on my thesis.
The barista is new.
I notice because I come here three or four times a week and I know the rotation: Maya on Mondays and Wednesdays, the boy with the ear gauges on Tuesdays, the tired graduate student on Fridays.
But today it’s someone I’ve never seen. A man.
Late twenties, maybe early thirties, with dark hair and a build that doesn’t quite fit behind a coffee counter.
He made my latte without asking my order, which is strange, because I’ve never been here on a Thursday before.
He knew my order.
My circle, which had been tracing the rim of my coffee cup, stops.
The barista is wiping down the counter, not looking at me.
His movements are competent, casual, unremarkable.
Except for his shoes. His shoes are wrong.
They’re too good for a campus barista, the leather too fine, and they’re the same quality as the shoes on the man with the newspaper, the man at the library, the man outside the dining hall.
I pick up my coffee. Take a sip. It’s perfect. Exactly the way I like it, which is information I’ve never shared with anyone at this counter because I’m from Nebraska and we don’t make complicated coffee orders, we just say latte, please and accept whatever arrives.
He looked up my order. Or he watched me order it. Or someone told him.
By all rights, I should mind.
Another sip. Thesis document open. Not minding at all.
THE EMAIL ARRIVES AT 4:17 PM.
Dear Miss Lively,
I would like to schedule a brief meeting to discuss your academic progress and the status of your scholarship review. Please report to my office at your earliest convenience, and no later than end of day Friday.
Warm regards, Professor Agnes Cuthbert Department Chair
I read it twice. Three times. The words are perfectly polite.
Perfectly professional. Academic progress.
Scholarship review. Nothing in this email would raise a flag with anyone who didn’t know that my scholarship has been in good standing since freshman year, that my GPA hasn’t dipped below a 3.
8, that my thesis advisor submitted a glowing progress report last month.
But I know.
I know because warm regards from Professor Cuthbert is the academic equivalent of a knife wrapped in silk.
I know because she’s the department chair and she controls my scholarship and my thesis committee and my entire academic future, and the timing of this email, three days after I was seen leaving Luciano Salvatore’s office at half past four in the afternoon, isn’t a coincidence.
My finger presses flat against my laptop trackpad. No circle. Just pressure.
I read the email one more time. The last line snags on something, a thorn I almost missed:
I trust you understand the importance of maintaining the standards that earned you your place here. It’d be a shame for any... external distractions to compromise what I’m sure is a very promising future.
External distractions.
I close the laptop. My coffee has gone cold. The barista who isn’t a barista is watching me from behind the counter, and for the first time since I started spotting Luciano’s men around campus, their presence doesn’t feel like warmth.
It feels like proof.
Proof that someone else noticed too.