Chapter 51
Saint
I’m aware that I’m not rational about her.
I have not been rational about her for longer than she has known I exist, and the not-rationality has simply changed character over time, from deliberate obsession of a man in a white room with nowhere to put it, to the present.
The daily reality of watching someone exist in a world that keeps producing men who have not yet learned that she is not available.
I know she would push back on that framing.
She has her own thoughts about availability and what it means and who gets to define it, and she is not wrong.
She is almost never wrong about the things that matter, but the feeling is not something I’m able to argue myself out of, and I have stopped trying.
Theo from Behavioral Psych. I have known about Theo for eleven days.
I have known about every man on this campus who has looked at her for longer than three seconds since she arrived. I have a mental file. Zero would call it a threat matrix. I call it due diligence.
None of them is Victor. None of them is her ex, Roman. But none of them is the kind of danger that requires intervention beyond the kind I performed this morning, which was simply sitting down.
And I’m going to keep sitting down.
That evening, she’s in the bedroom at the desk working, and I’m on the bed with a book I’m not reading, which has become a new domestic arrangement of our situation. She works. I occupy the same space. We exist in parallel without requiring anything from the other except presence.
I find this more settling than I expected. I spent years wanting nothing but space and silence and the removal of all external variables, and now the best version of quiet I know is a room with her in it.
She turns around from her desk. She looks at me with the expression she gets when she has decided to say something.
“How many?” she asks.
I mark my page. “How many what?”
“Men. That you have decided are a problem.”
I think about the mental file. About Theo and the two men in her economics seminar, and the third year who has offered to carry her bag twice.
“A few,” I reply.
Her eyes narrow. “Define a few.”
“Several,” I say.
“Saint.”
The way she says my name is not angry, not amused, but something precisely between the two.
I close the book entirely. “Some men on this campus look at you,” I say, “the way men look at things they intend to take. Like Prey. And others look at you the way men look at things they want to impress. I don’t have the same feelings about both, but I have feelings about both.”
She is quiet for a moment. “And which category was Theo?”
“The second. Which is why he is still walking around with his jaw intact.”
She stares at me. Then she puts her face in her hands and makes a sound that, after a moment, I identify as a laugh, not the polite kind, the real kind, the one that comes from somewhere she does not always let people reach.
I watch her laugh. Something in my chest does the thing it does.
“Saint,” she says, through her hands.
“Yes.”
She looks up. Her eyes are bright. “You remove everyone’s jaw.”
“I did not threaten anyone’s jaw. I sat down. His jaw made its own decisions.”
She laughs again. I watch her.
“I will try to be less obvious about it.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t try too hard.”
I pick up my book. I can’t read a single word of it because all I can think about is that I made her laugh.