“Saint,” she says, through her hands.
“Yes.”
She looks up. Her eyes are bright. “You remove everyone’s jaw.”
“I did not threaten anyone’s jaw. I sat down. His jaw made its own decisions.”
She laughs again. I watch her.
“I will try to be less obvious about it.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t try too hard.”
I pick up my book. I can’t read a single word of it because all I can think about is that I made her laugh.
Amy
It becomes a pattern.
Not the sitting down. He is marginally less blunt about it after our conversation, though marginally is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. But of finding reasons to approach me, and Saint finding reasons to be in the same vicinity, and the silent communication that passes between them when he arrives.
Saint never touches me in those moments to make his point. He doesn’t put his arm around me or take my hand or do any of the performative claiming that Roman used to do, the visible marking of territory that was always more about the audience than about me.
Saint simply appears. He sits. He looks. And something about the way he looks, the total, unhurried, absolute quality of his attention, communicates everything that needs to be communicated without a single word.
I find, to my own complicated feelings about this, that it works.
Not because I need the protection. Not because I cannot handle a man asking for my number in the campus coffee queue. But because there is an undeniable warmth in being the fixed point to which someone returns, the thing that brings Saint across a room without him being called.
I know what this is. I have read enough about trauma bonding and intermittent reinforcement and the ways that people who survived possessive relationships can mistake new possessiveness for safety.
But I also have eleven months of watching the difference.
Roman possessed me. He put his hands on me in public so other men would see his handprints. He controlled my access to other people, not because he was afraid of losing me but because control was the point. I was the vehicle, and control was the destination.
Saint doesn’t control me. He wants to, and I can see it. A man managing an instinct that runs very deep, but he does not. He sits down in dining halls, and he looks at men until they make their own decisions, and then he hands me coffee, and we argue about where he should sit in class.
He is not putting me in a cage. A cage doesn’t ask for your opinion. A cage doesn’t laugh at itself.
A cage doesn’t leave the door open and trust you to stay.
On a Friday evening, Liam from my literature class walks me back from the library.
I don’t ask nor encourage him. It simply happens the way things sometimes happen. We leave at the same time, we are going the same direction, the politeness of the situation creates a parallel walk that becomes a conversation that becomes twenty minutes of the most ordinary, pleasant, completely harmless exchange.
He is funny. He has read everything and has opinions about all of it. He makes me laugh.
At the fork near the dormitory, he says, “Could I get your number? In case I have a question about an assignment?”
I open my mouth three seconds before I hear the footsteps.
Saint comes around the corner of the colonnade, his hands in his pockets and his hood up against the cold, and stops when he sees us, with the expression of a man who has done a full analysis of this situation in approximately one second and has arrived at a conclusion.
Liam, to his credit, doesn’t budge. He looks between us. Then he looks at me with the expression of someone completing a puzzle they did not know they were working on.
“Ah,” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
