Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Chapter 2
THE NOTE IS WAITING on my desk after class.
Not typed. Not printed. Handwritten, in that angular European script that I could pick out of a lineup at forty paces: My office. 4 PM.
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.
At 3:47 PM I’m standing outside his office door.
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.”