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)
PROFESSOR SALVATORE enters the hall at exactly two minutes past the hour, as he always does, and two hundred students snap to attention like iron filings around a magnet.
He doesn’t look at me.
I knew he wouldn’t. I prepared for it. I sat in my third-row seat and opened my notebook and started my circle and told myself that whatever happened in that office was a sealed room, separate from this hall, and that Professor Salvatore in lecture mode is a different creature entirely from the man who pressed his hand against a door above my head and said you’re wrong in a voice that made my ribs feel too small.
He doesn’t look at me, and it’s fine.
The lecture is on encryption protocols today. His voice is the same. Low, accented, filling the room with that effortless authority that makes everyone sit up straighter. He paces the front of the hall with his hands behind his back, his suit dark gray, his posture carrying that silent command I now understand in a way I didn’t two weeks ago.
Not once does his gaze settle on the third row, and it’s fine, and my circle is going so fast on the margin of my notebook that the paper is starting to wear thin.
Twenty minutes in, I catch him.
It’s not his eyes. His eyes are aimed at the middle distance, at the back wall, at the projected slide behind him. His gaze is moving across the room as it always does, scanning, impersonal, the general surveying his field.
But his attention is on my hands.
I can feel it. I know how that sounds, how unscientific and irrational and thoroughly un-provable that is, but I feel it the way you feel someone standing behind you in a dark room. A weight that has nothing to do with sight. My finger is tracing its circle on the margin, and his body, pacing at the front of the hall, is oriented toward me by two degrees. Maybe three. A fraction so small that no one else in this room would notice, because no one else in this room has spent two years memorizing the angles of this man’s body.
His eyes are on the room. His attention is on my hands.
I slow the circle. Make it wider. Let my finger drag.
His jaw tightens. That muscle, the one I saw from six inches away in his office, the one that jumps when he’s holding something back. It flexes once, quick, and his pacing hitches. Not a stumble. Not even a pause. Just a fraction of a second where his stride loses its rhythm, and then it’s back, smooth, and he’s talking about key exchange algorithms and his voice hasn’t changed at all.
But I saw it.
I look up from my notebook. He’s facing the class now, mid-sentence, and our eyes meet.
One second. Two.
Quieter than the first time. This is two people who sat across from each other in a small office and said things that can’t be unsaid, looking at each other in a room full of people who have no idea that the air between the podium and the third row is carrying a frequency only we can hear.
He looks away first. Second time.
My finger resumes its circle. Slower now. The paper is warm from friction.
David, beside me, writes something on the corner of his syllabus and tilts it toward me: You okay?
I write back: Fine.
He writes: You keep doing that thing with your hand.
My circle has migrated from the notebook margin to the surface of the desk, my finger tracing the same path over and over, and I didn’t even notice.
Hands in my lap. Finger finds my knee. Starts again.
At the front of the hall, Professor Salvatore has resumed his lecture. His back is to the class, writing on the board, and his handwriting is the same angular European script that was on the note he left me, and I wonder if he knows I kept it. I wonder if he knows it’s folded inside the back cover of my notebook right now, three words and a time in ink so dark it looks like it came from somewhere deeper than a pen.
Probably not. Probably he wrote it and forgot it and moved on with his life, because he’s a man who moves on and I’m a girl in his third row with a circle habit and a crush that has evolved from hopeless to something worse.
Something with teeth.
AFTER CLASS, I’VE FORTY-five minutes before my next seminar. I go to the campus coffee shop, the one in the humanities building with the bad lighting and the good espresso, and I order my usual and sit by the window and open my laptop and pretend to work on my thesis.
The barista is new.
I notice because I come here three or four times a week and I know the rotation: Maya on Mondays and Wednesdays, the boy with the ear gauges on Tuesdays, the tired graduate student on Fridays. But today it’s someone I’ve never seen. A man. Late twenties, maybe early thirties, with dark hair and a build that doesn’t quite fit behind a coffee counter. He made my latte without asking my order, which is strange, because I’ve never been here on a Thursday before.