Chapter 23
Amy
He is already there when I walk in.
Back row, corner seat, the usual configuration. Hood up. No notebook.
He looks at me when I come through the door.
I glance back.
Something has shifted between us, and I feel it in the way it lands differently than it did a week ago. It carries a different weight and means something that I can’t name.
I take my seat. Sixth row. Middle. I uncap my pen.
I can feel the heat of his stare for the entire lecture.
Professor Harlan is talking about attachment theory today, which is either cosmically hilarious or the universe being efficient.
He talks about the neurological basis of secure and insecure attachment, about how the patterns we form in early relationships become templates that the nervous system carries into every subsequent connection.
How the body learns what love feels like before the mind can evaluate whether it is good for you.
How a nervous system calibrated for fear will sometimes mistake intensity for safety because intensity is what it was taught to recognize.
I write it all down.
I write, the body learns before the mind can evaluate. Intensity is not always danger.
I sit with that for a moment.
Then I write, sometimes it’s just him.
I close the notebook before anyone can see it.
***
After the lecture, I don’t rush out.
I have been rushing out of rooms since I arrived at Kenyan.
But today, I take my time packing my bag, and when I straighten, he stands at the end of my row, waiting, with the patience of someone who knows I’m not going to rush even before I did.
I walk toward him.
We fall into step together quietly, which is also new, the easiness of it, the absence of negotiation. Two people who have established, without a single explicit conversation, how they move through a space together.
“Did you sleep?” I ask.
He’s quiet for a moment. “Some,” he replies.
“That is more than before,” I say.
He looks at me sideways. “Yes.”
We walk.
After a while, I point out, “I stopped it because you were there.”
He knows I mean the nightmare.
He takes his time considering things, which I have learned to read as respect rather than evasion. He is not performing thoughtfulness. He is actually thinking.
“Maybe,” he says finally. “Or maybe you stopped it because you are stronger than the thing causing it. I was just close enough that you could feel the difference between here and there.”
I look at him.
“That is not a small thing,” I say.
“No,” he agrees. “It is not.”
We have reached the fork in the hallway where our routes diverge. His next class is in the north building, mine in the east.
His expression is the unguarded one, the one that costs him something, the one I have only seen in the gray predawn dark and in doorways and in moments he doesn’t anticipate being looked at directly.
“Tonight,” he says. “If the nightmare—”
“I know,” I say.
He’ll come.
He turns and walks toward the north building, and I stand at the fork and watch him go.
I think about the body learning before the mind can evaluate, and I think about the way his arm feels across my waist in the dark, and I think about his mouth. I think my nervous system is recalibrating, marking him as safe for some reason.
I turn and walk toward the east building.
I’m smiling, and I do not make any effort to stop.