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)
“Don’t.” Still facing the window. “Whatever you’re feeling. Don’t.”
“You don’t get to tell me what to feel.”
My voice surprises us both. It comes out even, clear, with a certainty I didn’t plan. The words of Robert Lively’s daughter, who was raised to stand in the wind without bending.
He turns around.
The lamp catches half his face. The scar on his temple, the line of his jaw, those dark eyes that I first saw clearly from six inches away in this room. The other half is shadow. He looks at me across the desk and his expression is open in a way I’ve never seen on this man, and it scares me, not because of what’s in it but because of what it’s costing him to let me see it.
“He raised me to be what he was.” Each word placed with effort. “He taught me things no child should know. I wasn’t a son to him. I was a project. An instrument.”
My eyes are wet. I don’t wipe them. I let the tears sit on my face because hiding them would be a lie, and I’ve told enough lies lately. My finger is pressing into my knee so hard I’ll have a bruise tomorrow, and the office is so quiet I can hear the radiator ticking in the wall, a cousin of the one in my own apartment, and this man is standing in front of me telling me he was built to be a weapon and I’m sitting in his institutional chair in my hemmed dress and my sensible flats and I’ve never felt less adequate for anything in my life.
But I’m here. He asked me to be here. He said please.
“I left when I was fourteen. I ran.” His voice catches on ran, a tiny hitch that he corrects immediately, smoothing it over with the discipline of a man who has spent twenty-two years learning to keep his surface still. “What happened after I left is a longer story, and it’s not one I’m telling you tonight.”
Tonight. Not ever. Tonight. Which means he intends there to be other nights.
“I built something else. A company. A life. Something legitimate.” He pauses. His hand is resting on the back of his chair, and I watch his thumb press into the leather. “My men are the children of my father’s soldiers. They grew up the way I did. I brought them with me. Gave them another path.”
Joe. The man behind the coffee counter with the wrong shoes and the right instincts. A child of that world, pulled into a new one by the man standing in front of me.
“The teaching.” His jaw works. “I teach because the classroom is the one place where I have to be civilized for ninety consecutive minutes. Where the structure forces me to be what I’ve chosen to be instead of what I was made to be.” His eyes hold mine. “That’s the truth, Elsa. Not the version on my faculty page. The real one.”
The clock ticks. The campus is silent beyond the window. We’re the only two people in this building, possibly the only two people in the world, and the man across from me has just handed me his ugliest pieces and is standing there watching me hold them.
I stand up. My chair scrapes back. His eyes track the movement and I see him brace, see the flinch he’s preparing for, the disgust or the pity or the careful retreat that he expects from anyone who gets this close to what he was.
“You’re worth it.”
Three words. I say them looking directly at him, across the desk, in the lamplight, and I mean every syllable. Not I’m sorry for what happened to you, which would be condescension. Not it’s okay, which would be a lie. You’re worth it. The running. The building. The teaching. The saving of the children who grew up as he did. The please on a note under my door.
“Don’t cry for me,” he says, and his voice has gone rough at the edges.
“I’m not crying for you.” I press my fingertips to my cheek. They come away wet. “I’m crying because you told me. Because you trusted me with it.”
He crosses the room in two strides, and his hands come to my face, both of them, framing my jaw, his thumbs wiping the tears from my cheeks with a gentleness that doesn’t match anything I know about this man, and I’m looking up at him from eight inches away, six, four, and his eyes are wrecked, and his hands aren’t shaking this time.
This time they’re sure.
He kisses me.
Not the way he kissed me before, like he was drowning, desperate, a man losing a fight with himself. This is slow. His mouth finds mine and stays, and his hands hold my face like I’m something that might vanish if he grips too hard, and I taste salt from my own tears and the warmth of him and something that has no name, something that lives between the man he was and the man he’s choosing to be right now, in this room, with his lips on mine.