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)
A newspaper. In this century. On a college campus where the closest anyone gets to print media is a flyer for improv night stapled to a telephone pole.
I almost laugh. Almost. Because it’s been three days since the office, and I’ve spotted his men four times now. Twice outside the library. Once near the dining hall, nursing a coffee with the intensity of someone who has never in his life ordered a latte voluntarily. And now this one, with his newspaper and his expensive shoes and his complete inability to blend in with a student body that lives in hoodies and existential dread.
They’re watching me.
That should bother me. Being surveilled, invaded, watched. A twenty-year-old woman tracked across her own campus by men who answer to a man who cornered me against his office door three days ago with his hand above my head and his voice at my ear and a look in his eyes that I still haven’t recovered from.
It should bother me.
It doesn’t.
Because every time I see one of them, my traitorous heart does the same stupid, hopeful calculation: he sent them. He’s thinking about me. Whatever wall he put up when he said You should go, Miss Lively, whatever barricade he built from formality and distance, he couldn’t stop himself from sending his men to make sure I’m okay.
He commands everything. He can’t seem to command this.
My finger traces a circle on the strap of my bag, and I walk past the man with the newspaper without looking at him, and I let the warmth of that thought carry me across the quad even though I know, I know, that it’s dangerous and delusional and exactly the sort of thinking that gets farm girls from Nebraska in trouble.
“Elsa. Hey. Elsa!”
David falls into step beside me, slightly out of breath, his baseball cap on backward and a protein bar hanging from his mouth like a cigar. He’s wearing a jersey from whatever team he loves this week and he looks so aggressively normal that I want to hug him.
“You’re smiling,” he says, suspicious. “You never smile before ten AM.”
“I smile plenty before ten.”
“You smile politely before ten. That was a real one. What happened?”
“Nothing happened. It’s a nice day.”
It’s forty-two degrees and overcast. David gives me a look that says he has opinions about this claim.
We walk in companionable silence for a minute. David is good at silence. He doesn’t fill it with noise or questions, just matches my pace and eats his protein bar and exists in that easy, uncomplicated space he occupies. My father would like David. My father likes anyone who can be quiet without being awkward.
“Hey.” David’s voice drops. Casual, but I know him well enough to hear the edge beneath it. “That guy by the science building. The one with the newspaper.”
My circle stutters.
“What about him?”
“I’ve seen him before. And the one at the library yesterday, and the dude outside the dining hall on Tuesday.” David crumples his protein bar wrapper, tucks it in his pocket. His jaw has set in a way I’ve never seen on him, squarer, more serious. Protective. “They’re not students.”
“No,” I say. “They’re not.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
The earnestness in his voice makes my chest ache. David Burnes, who has known me for two years and never once asked me to be anything other than exactly who I’m, is worried about me. And I can’t tell him the truth, because the truth involves a professor and a secret and an alley and a set of feelings so complicated they’d need their own zip code.
“I’m fine, David. They’re not a problem.”
“They’re following you.”
“They’re not following me. They’re just... around.”
“Elsa.” He stops walking. I stop too. He faces me with that open, earnest expression that makes it impossible to brush him off. “If someone is bothering you, I can help. I’m not, like, tough or anything, but I’m big and I played defensive end in high school and I can look very intimidating when I want to.”
I picture David squaring up against one of Luciano’s men and the image is so absurd and so sweet that I have to press my lips together to keep from laughing.
“I appreciate that. Truly. But I’m okay.”
He studies me for a long moment. Then he nods, the way good people nod when they’ve decided to trust you even though they don’t fully believe you. “Okay. But I’m keeping an eye on it.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to. I want to.” He puts his cap back on, adjusts it. “That’s what friends do, Lively.”
We walk the rest of the way to the lecture hall in silence, and I think about how lucky I’m to have someone uncomplicated in my life, because the complicated part is about to walk into a room and ruin my vital signs for the next ninety minutes.