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“This is what I do,” I say quietly.

“So it seems.”

I lift my eyes.

He’s watching me the way he watched me on Monday night, right before I pulled my hand back and ran. There’s no mask on him now. I don’t know when it slipped. I don’t know if he knows it has. There’s heat in his gaze, one that burns with the amber striations I can see in his eyes at this close distance, and that same heat seems to travel down my scalp, down the back of my neck and then my spine, and I have to fight the urge to shiver. The way he stares at me feels like stepping into a hot bath on a frigid night. It feels like surrendering.

But that’s the last thing I need to do.

“If anyone else had seen what I saw on just our first class together,” he says, “you’d have been questioned for a long time.”

And that’s exactly why I can’t surrender to him, no matter how he makes my body feel.

I look down at my hands. “I know.”

“But I’m not anyone else.”

I swallow hard. “I know that too.”

He nods once, slowly, and his gaze drops back to the book. The silence that follows is a different silence than the one before. It’s become more of a comfort than a storm.

I let myself breathe.

Then I let myself look at him properly, because he isn’t looking at me, and because I’d been wanting to for weeks and hadn’t been able to without the risk of being caught. In the soft lamplight of the library, his face is less carved than it is in the crypts. There’s a small white scar at his temple I hadn’t seen before, running up into his hairline. There’s grey in the stubble along his jaw, a few more threads of grey at his temple fading into the thick, rich brown. I understand why he runs his hands through it so much because I bet it feels incredible. His mouth, which I’d thought of as hard, seems softer now. For a brief moment I wonder what his lips would feel like pressed against mine.

I shift my hand on the table, adjust myself in the chair which creaks.

He notices. His eyes come back up to mine.

“Am I making you nervous?”

The question is bold.

I swallow again, my mouth suddenly dry as cotton. “No.”

“Are you certain?”

“Why do you ask?”

He gives a half-shrug and looks off. “I don’t know. Just something I noticed. You were startled when you first came in, in the last few minutes you’ve grown nervous. I can’t help but feel it’s because of me.” He pauses as he meets my eyes. “I’d rather I didn’t make you feel that way.”

“You don’t,” I say quickly. “I just…I guess I…” I rub my lips together, not wanting to finish the sentence, and let out an awkward laugh. “You’re awfully observant, aren’t you?”

“It’s a character flaw,” he says with a stiff smile.

“A flaw? I would think it would only help you as a teacher.”

He sighs again, his pencil tapping against the book once more. “It does, usually. But I envy people who can be in a room without reading it,” he says, quietly. “Who hear a hello and take it as a hello. I notice…everything. Too much. The pause before someone speaks, the way they don’t quite look at the person they’re answering, the breath they held before saying they were fine. I can’t turn it off. I never could. I can never stop reading the room. I can never stop…looking.”

“That sounds exhausting,” I say.

“Oh, it is. Though I must admit, it has come in handy. I can usually tell when someone is lying. Or about to lie.”

Oh, great.

“And I usually know someone’s next moves. When I was a boxer, it helped me to be a step ahead of the other guy, and in boxing that step counts for a lot.”

“You were a boxer?” I ask, eyes wide. Boxing to me is a vaguely barbaric sport and one concentrated on the mainland, never popular on the islands. I guess because everyone knows each other and any fights are usually settled in a brawl behind the Oystercatcher Inn.