She thought for a moment.
“Touch him first,” she said. “On purpose. Not one of those accidental little brush-past moments you two do when you think no one notices. Sit closer. Kiss him like you mean it. Put your hand on his chest, his neck, his face. Anywhere that says I am here, I am not running, and yes, you can absolutely kiss me harder.”
Heat rushed into my face.
Nora, encouraged by my embarrassment, kept going.
“And if you want to be really clear, when he kisses you, make a sound. Men lose all remaining common sense over that.”
“Oh my God.”
“I’m helping.”
“You’re horrifying.”
She reached for her cereal again. “Also, if he’s decent—and for the record, I think he is—he’ll meet you where you are. You don’t have to leap on him like a raccoon on unattended trash. You just have to give him something to answer.”
That made me pause.
Underneath Nora being Nora, there was something unexpectedly kind in that.
You don’t have to leap. You just have to give him something to answer.
She must have seen me thinking, because her voice softened a little.
“It’s okay to not know how,” she said. “You’re learning. That doesn’t make you broken. It just means this one gets to be different.”
I looked down at the lilies again, blinking harder than I needed to.
“You really are annoyingly perceptive for someone who just suggested genital assault.”
Nora smiled around another spoonful of cereal.
I carried the flowers back to my room and set them carefully beside the other two bouquets crowding my desk. I sat down and opened my thesis document on the laptop.
The cursor blinked at me from the middle of a sentence I didn't finish. Something about dependency structures. How the people with the most information were often the last to use it, because using it meant dismantling the thing they had built their safety around.
I wrote that paragraph weeks ago, before Pietro, before Boston started to feel like something other than a place I had fled to.
I read it again now.
I was writing about Florence, but I was writing about myself. I had changed my name and moved three thousand miles, and I was still terrified to go home because some part of me still believed Adam's proximity made me smaller. Still believed the story he told me about what I was worth. I spent two years writing a thesis about exactly this mechanism. And I had still been living inside it.
I looked at the capybara cup on the edge of my desk. Pale green. Absurd. Sent by a man who had listened to me mention once, in passing, that I liked capybaras, and filed that away thenacted on it at six in the morning because it was the kind of thing he did. Because I was the kind of person he paid attention to.
One cannot call a man a tyrant when he sends physicians to your wife and asks after your children by name.
Pietro was not Adam.
And I was not the woman Adam had spent three years trying to convince me I was.
I had the evidence. I had been collecting it without knowing it. The archive. The thesis. The fact that I got myself here, alone, and did not fall apart. The fact that I stood in that library and bartered a book from a stranger and made him nearly smile and had not once made myself smaller to do it.
I was Emily Hart.
I had built her from the ground up, and she was someone who went home for her sister's surgery.
I picked up my phone and called Sophie before I could think myself back out of it.
