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)
“Whatever you think you know.” His voice is at my ear. Low. Not a whisper. Something worse than a whisper, something with weight and gravel and a current beneath it that I feel in my teeth. “You’re wrong.”
Every rational cell in my body is running a cost-benefit analysis that comes up red, flashing, warning, because the man behind me is a head taller and twice my weight and connected to people who made three men disappear from an alley like smoke.
But I turn around.
The door is against my back. His hand is above my head. His face is right there, closer than any face has ever been to mine, and I can see things I’ve no right to see at this distance. A scar, thin, white, curving along his left temple into his hairline. The exact shade of his eyes, which aren’t black, as I thought from the third row, but the darkest brown I’ve ever seen, like coffee before the cream, like good earth after rain. His jaw clenched so tight a muscle is jumping in his cheek like a second pulse.
He’s looking down at me with an expression that I’ll spend the rest of the evening trying to name and failing. It’s not anger. It’s not warning. It’s something older than both, and it looks like it’s costing him to stand this close and costing him more to think about stepping away.
Six inches between us. Maybe less. I can feel his shirt against the front of my dress if I let myself lean forward even a fraction, and I won’t lean forward, I won’t, but every cell in my body is pulling toward him like iron toward a magnet and my hands are shaking at my sides and I’ve never been kissed and I’ve never wanted anything the way I want him to close this space.
“I would never hurt you, Professor.”
I don’t plan to say it. It just comes, the way true things do, rising from the same place my mother’s exclamations live, from somewhere beneath thought, somewhere that doesn’t know how to be anything but honest.
His face breaks.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. A hairline crack running through all that granite, and I watch it happen from six inches away. His eyes change. The muscle in his jaw stops jumping. His lips part and close and part again and he doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t say a single word, but something behind his expression shifts, and for one second I see it.
The man behind the professor. The man behind the armor and the suits and the silence. A man who looks like he just heard something he wasn’t prepared for, in a language he thought he had forgotten.
Then it’s gone. He steps back. His hand drops from the door. The six inches become two feet, three, four, and the air between us goes cold where his warmth was.
“Come here.” He says it from behind his desk, where he’s retreated like the wood and paper can protect him. His voice is rough. Changed. “Sit down.”
I don’t sit. I stand by the door with my hand on the handle and my heart doing things that would alarm a cardiologist. “Why?”
“Because I’m asking you to.”
“That’s not why.”
His eyes meet mine, and it seems like he’s almost smiled.
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
We look at each other across the length of his office. The afternoon has gone from gold to amber. Somewhere beyond the door, the building is emptying, footsteps fading, doors closing one by one. We’re running out of daylight.
“You should go, Miss Lively.”
This time he means it. I can hear it in the way he turns my name into a barricade between us. Student. Professor. The proper distance, the one that’s supposed to keep people safe.
“Yes,” I say. “I should.”
I open the door. He doesn’t stop me this time. The hallway is flat and cold after the warmth of his office.
My legs carry me to the stairwell. They carry me three steps down before they decide they’re done, and I sit, hard, on cold concrete, my back against the wall, my bag sliding off my shoulder.
“Oh, my stars.”
It comes out as a whisper, halfway between a prayer and a laugh, and I press my forehead to my knees because I need a minute, I need several minutes, I need possibly the rest of the semester to recover from what just happened in that office.
Being that close to him was like standing inside a thunderstorm.
And the terrifying, wonderful, completely impossible truth that I carry with me all the way home, past the campus gates and through the subway turnstile and up four flights of stairs to my apartment where the ceiling still has the water stain that looks like Iowa:
I never want to come inside.
Chapter 3
THE MAN IN THE DARK suit is leaning against the science building when I come out of my morning class, and he’s pretending to read a newspaper.