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)
His jaw tightens. That muscle, the one I noticed from the podium. Up close it’s worse. Up close, everything about this man is worse. The angle of his cheekbones, the darkness of his eyes, the faint shadow along his jaw where he either shaved this morning or didn’t quite, and I can’t think about that, I can’t think about him shaving in the morning, because my circle has become so fast it’s basically a vibration.
“Why.”
One word. No inflection. Just the word, placed in front of me like a stone on a game board, and he waits.
I could lie. I could say the coursework is heavy, that I’m worried about my thesis, that I didn’t sleep well. Any of those would work. He might even let them work, might accept a comfortable fiction and send me on my way, back to the third row, back to my circles, back to the safe and aching distance I’ve kept for two years.
But his men were in that lecture hall. And his men were in that alley. And the distance between those two facts is zero, and we both know it, and I’m from Nebraska and we don’t lie well and we don’t lie often and I’m not going to start now.
“I recognized them.” My voice comes out quieter than I intend. “The men at the back of the hall. Your men.”
His face doesn’t change. Not a flicker. He stands behind his desk like something carved from the same dark wood and I watch him not react, and the not-reacting is worse than any reaction would be, because it means he was ready for this. He expected it. He saw it on my face in the lecture hall and he wrote a note and he waited and now here we are.
“And what,” he says, “do you think you recognized?”
“An alley off Lexington. Two years ago.” My circle has stopped. My finger is pressed flat against my wrist. “I was eighteen. I had just gotten to New York. Three men cornered me, and then your men were there, and they said their boss saw me having trouble while they were stuck in traffic.”
Silence. The kind that has texture, that fills the corners of a room and pushes against the windows.
“I looked up from them to you today, and I knew.” My voice is very small now, but it doesn’t shake. “You were the boss.”
He’s so still. The late afternoon picks out the edge of his jaw, the hollow beneath his cheekbone, the place where his collar meets his neck. His hands are at his sides. Not in his pockets, not clasped, just there, and his fingers are straight, which tells me something, though I’m not sure what.
“Miss Lively.”
“Professor.”
“What you think you know about me is incomplete.”
“I know that.”
“Incomplete and potentially dangerous.”
“I know that too.”
His eyes narrow. Not with anger. With something I can’t read, something caught between calculation and a rawer thing he’s not letting through. I hold his gaze because my father taught me that you look people in the eye when they’re telling you something important, even if your hands are shaking, even if you want to run, even if the person in front of you is so beautiful it makes your chest feel like a barn with the doors blown open.
I stand up. Not because I want to leave. Because sitting while he’s standing makes me feel like a student, and right now I’m not a student. I’m the girl from the alley.
“Thank you,” I say. “For that night. I never got to say that to the right person.”
He flinches. It’s so small I would’ve missed it if I weren’t standing six feet away with every nerve in my body tuned to his frequency. A flinch that lives only in his eyes, a contraction, and it’s gone before it fully arrives.
“You should go.”
I nod. I pick up my bag. I turn toward the door. My hand reaches for the handle.
The air changes behind me.
I don’t hear him move. That’s what I’ll think about later, lying awake in my apartment, staring at the ceiling. I don’t hear a single footstep on the hardwood, not the shift of weight or the brush of fabric. One moment there’s six feet of empty office behind me and the next moment there isn’t.
His hand lands on the door above my head. Flat, fingers spread, holding it shut.
I don’t turn around. I can’t. Because his arm is beside my ear and his body is behind me, not touching me, not anywhere close to touching me, but so near that I can feel the warmth of him through the back of my dress, and his scent is everywhere now. Not just the old books and the subtle Italian thing. Soap. Starch. Clean cotton heated by skin. And beneath all of it, something that’s just him, something that has no name and no category, and my finger is frozen against my own wrist.