Chapter 6
DAVID IS TELLING ME about the girl in his economics class, and I’m laughing.
Not the polite, paper-thin laugh I’ve been handing out for three weeks like a girl making change at a register.
A real one. The kind that starts somewhere behind my ribs and catches me off guard, because David has just said, with absolute sincerity, that he’s been timing how long it takes this girl to smile at him versus how long she smiles at the teaching assistant, and he’s built a spreadsheet.
“A spreadsheet,” I say.
“Don’t judge me, Lively. Your father built a spreadsheet for cattle. I’m building one for love.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s exactly the same thing. I’m tracking inputs and outputs.
Smile frequency. Duration. Whether she makes eye contact before or after the TA says something funny.
” He picks up his coffee, takes a sip, sets it down with the easy confidence of a man who thinks he’s onto something. “Data doesn’t lie.”
“David. You can’t spreadsheet a human being into liking you.”
“Watch me.”
And I laugh again. A real one. It hurts a little, the way moving hurts after you’ve been still for too long, muscles remembering a range of motion they’d started to forget.
The coffee shop is warm and close and smells like espresso and burnt sugar, and David is sitting across from me in his backward baseball cap, and for the first time in three weeks, I feel like a person instead of a wound walking around in a cotton dress.
It’s Wednesday. The barista is Jeff, which means the coffee is slightly too strong and the foam is uneven, but I don’t mind, because Jeff is actually a barista and not a soldier in an apron, and there’s something restful about drinking coffee made by someone who isn’t surveilling me.
My notebook is open on the table. My circles are still tight.
Still fast. But my hand has slowed while David talks, the loops widening without my permission, and I let them, because the alternative is to sit in my apartment and stare at the Iowa-shaped water stain on my ceiling and think about a man who kissed me like I was the last real thing in the world and then erased me.
Three weeks and four days. Not that I’m counting.
I’m absolutely counting.
My dress is looser than it was a month ago.
The blue one, the one with the small flowers that Mama hemmed for me last Christmas.
I’ve cinched the belt tighter and I’ve been eating David’s muffins and I’ve been telling Martha on Sundays that everything’s fine, and the lies come so easy now that I barely recognize the girl telling them.
The Elsa Lively who arrived in New York two years ago with her too-trusting face and her tractor coat and her circle-drawing fingers couldn’t have lied to Martha Lively without choking on it.
This version of me does it every Sunday at 1:15 PM and hangs up the phone and sits in the quiet and doesn’t cry.
I should be proud of that. I’m not.
But today David dragged me out of the library and into this coffee shop and ordered me a sandwich I didn’t ask for and started talking about his economics girl, and somewhere between the smile-frequency data and the TA comparison metrics, my chest loosened.
Not all the way. Just enough to let a laugh through.
“Okay, but here’s the problem,” David says, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, his face arranged into an expression of deep strategic concern. “She laughed at one of my jokes yesterday. Unprompted. No TA involvement. That’s a data point, right? That means something?”
“It means she thought you were funny.”
“But was it a like funny or a friend funny? Because there’s a difference, and my spreadsheet doesn’t have a column for—”
The door opens.
I don’t look up. People come and go from this coffee shop all afternoon, students and professors and the occasional bewildered tourist who wandered too far from the main campus tour. The door opens, cold air pushes in, the door closes. Background noise. Normal.
But something in the room changes.
I feel it before I understand it. A shift in the temperature, not of the air but of the attention. The barista stops wiping the counter. Two girls at the corner table go quiet mid-sentence. Even David pauses, his coffee cup halfway to his mouth, his eyes tracking something behind me.
“Whoa,” David says, low. “Okay.”
I turn around.
Luciano is standing in the doorway of a campus coffee shop in the humanities building, and he’s looking at me.
Not at the room. Not at the counter or the menu board or the cluster of students who have collectively stopped breathing.
At me. Across twenty feet of bad lighting and mismatched chairs and the persistent smell of burnt sugar, his eyes find mine and hold, and every cell in my body remembers what it felt like to have his hand in my hair and his mouth on mine and his voice cracking on I’m sorry.
He’s wearing a dark coat over his suit. His hair is slightly disordered, which I’ve never seen.
His hair is always perfect, exact, never out of place.
But today there’s a piece of it that’s fallen across his forehead, and it makes him look younger, almost human, and I want to push it back with my fingers and I’m gripping my coffee cup so hard my knuckles ache.
Three weeks and four days of nothing, and now he’s here.
Standing in the doorway of my coffee shop on a Wednesday, when he’s never been here on a Wednesday, when he has no reason to be in the humanities building at all because he teaches in the technology wing, and his eyes are on mine and I can’t move.
The moment lasts two seconds. Maybe three.
Long enough for my lungs to forget their job and every lie I’ve told Martha and David and myself for the past three weeks to thin out until I can see right through them.
I’m fine. I’m busy. I’m managing. None of it’s true.
None of it’s been true since his mouth was on mine and his hand was shaking and his voice broke on my name.
He looks away. Not like the first time in the lecture hall, not that yielding, that giving ground. This is different. This is a man pulling his gaze off something that burns.
Not toward my table. Not toward the counter. He crosses the room in that way of his, every movement carrying a weight that makes people shift in their chairs without knowing why, and he sits at a table against the far wall and opens a book.
A book.
He sits six tables away from me and opens a book and doesn’t read it.
I know he’s not reading because I’m watching him the way I’ve always watched him, and his eyes aren’t tracking lines on a page.
They’re fixed on a single point. His hand is resting on the table, perfectly still, and that stillness is the tell, because in lecture mode he’s fluid, pacing, sharp. This rigid is a man fighting something.
“Elsa.” David’s voice was stiff. “Do you know him?”
I turn back to David. My face must be doing something unfortunate because his eyebrows are halfway up his forehead.
“He’s my professor.”
“That’s your cybersecurity guy? Professor Salvatore?” David glances past me, then back. “He’s just... sitting there.”
“He’s reading.”
“That man isn’t reading.” David stares past me. “He’s staring at a book and looking at you every four seconds. I’m counting.” He leans back in his chair. “Should I be concerned?”
“No.”
“Because I said I would keep an eye on things, and that man has been looking at you since he walked in, and I may build spreadsheets about girls but I know what it looks like when someone can’t take their eyes off a person.”
My circle has stopped. My finger is pressing into the table, hard, and my heart is hammering so fast I’m worried David can hear it.
“It’s fine, David. He’s just getting coffee.”
He hasn’t ordered coffee.
David opens his mouth, closes it. Nods. Picks his cup back up. “Okay. If you say so.” A pause. “But Lively? That man isn’t here for the espresso.”
We stay for forty-five minutes. I know this because I count.
David talks. I respond. My voice sounds normal to my own ears, and I say the right things, and I nod, and I even manage another laugh when he tells me about his roommate’s failed attempt to cook pasta without boiling water first. But my skin is aware of every inch of space between my table and his table, and every time I reach for my cup my hand trembles, and my circles have stopped entirely because my body can’t process the small motor function of drawing loops while he’s sitting twenty feet away, not reading.
He never orders. He never takes off his coat.
He turns a page once, at the thirty-minute mark, and the motion is so mechanical it’s almost funny, except nothing about this is funny, because I’ve been starving for three weeks and he just walked into my line of sight and my body is behaving like someone threw open the shutters on a room that’s been dark for too long.
At the forty-minute mark, I break my own rule. I glance.
He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the book, the one he’s not reading, and his coat collar is turned up and his hand on the table is curled loosely around nothing, and he looks tired.
Not the academic kind of tired that sits under everyone’s eyes at midterms. A different kind.
The kind that lives in the hollows of a face, in the way a man holds his shoulders when he’s carrying something he can’t put down.
Three weeks did this to him too.
The recognition hits me so hard I almost make a sound. His suit jacket, which normally fits like it was made for him, is fractionally looser across the shoulders. His face is sharper. The scar on his temple is more visible against skin that’s paler than it was a month ago.
Three weeks did this to him too.
I look away before he catches me. My hands are shaking. My coffee is cold. David is saying something about his batting grip and I nod and I smile and under the table my finger traces one frantic circle on my knee.