Begging on His Knees

On our oneyear anniversary, I sat alone in the clinic, still bleeding.

My boyfriend was across town at a Korean BBQ joint, digging burn cream out of his kit for the new girl in his lab. She'd blistered one finger.

He hadn't answered a single text in a month. I called to end it. He said, "Fine." Seven years later, in London, the coldest man I'd ever known came apart at the sight of me.

He shoved through a packed room, his voice shaking, and asked if he could have one more chance. I turned around and took another man's hand. He used to have three rules for me.

No clinging. No matching profile pics. Never going Instagramofficial. Now it was his turn to wait. And this time, I didn't have to take a single step toward him. Chapter 1 "Wait.

Nate has a girlfriend?" Whoever answered didn't even bother to muffle it.

A full year together, and his own roommates had no idea I existed. "Nathaniel, it's our oneyear anniversary.

Want to go out?" I chewed my lip, deleted it, rewrote it, sat on it forever before I finally hit send. Ten minutes. Nothing. An hour. The whole afternoon.

I sent one more. "Haha, no worries if you're busy!" The chat window stayed empty. Colette hugged a pillow to her chest, furious on my behalf. "Vivi.

Do you seriously like him this much? He's a glacier. I can't even watch this." She'd had a thing for Nathaniel once. The campus heartthrob, the guy every girl wanted.

Then he froze her out too, and she backed off. When we got together, she'd tried to warn me. "A man that cold is a block of ice. You'll never thaw him.

You'll just get burned." By evening I still hadn't heard back. Calls went nowhere. I gave in and called his roommates. It took them a second to place me at all.

Oh, right, the girlfriend. Then someone said he'd gone to see his advisor. Nathaniel kept a low profile. When he'd agreed to date me, he'd looked almost putupon about it.

Then that rare flicker of a smile. He'd ruffled my hair. "You've chased me long enough. I guess I'll date you." Gone in a second. Then came the rules. No clinging.

No matching profile pics. No going Instagramofficial. I was too happy back then to notice these were the bare minimum of being with someone.

Which is how, a year later, I ended up right where I was. I jogged over to his advisor's office. Nathaniel was walking out just as I got there. With a girl. Side by side.

A thick stack of papers in his arms. Her hair was in a simple ponytail, barely any makeup, and the two of them were laughing about something. He was smiling.

A real one. "Nate!" I called. He stopped. The smile slid off his face like it had never been there. Back to ice. "What are you doing here?" "You didn't answer my texts.

Did you forget, today's our—" His face went blank. Even when I got the word anniversary out, nothing moved behind his eyes. He'd forgotten.

He'd actually forgotten. "Wait, this is your girlfriend?" The girl clapped her hands, practically bouncing, lit up like she'd stumbled onto something wonderful. "She's so pretty!" I wasn't the only one looking at her.

Nathaniel's eyes had landed on her face too, like he couldn't quite help it. And then I placed her. His old mentor's niece.

Her parents died in a crash years back, and the man had left her in Nathaniel's care. Now she was in his lab. His junior, the new girl he couldn't stop bringing up. A year with him.

And I had never once seen that look on his face. Right now it belonged to someone else. Chapter 2 "We'll see. Right now I'm getting food with Poppy.

I've got a lab report to finish after." He pushed his rimless glasses up with one finger. Flat.

Like it cost him nothing. "Then I'll come with you!" I said quickly, watching him turn to go. "Not a good idea.

We'll be going over data the whole time." "I won't get in the way!" "Genevieve." His face went serious.

He only ever used my full name when he was about to lose patience. "What's the first rule?" No clinging. "But," I said, "we're supposed to be dating." He didn't answer.

I just stood there and watched him walk off with Poppy. She looked back at me on her way out. There was something like pity in her eyes.

Colette was always going off about Nathaniel, swearing he'd end up alone. But nobody could deny the pull he had.

The freshman welcome show was the usual lineup of forgettable acts, half the performers dragged up there by the student council. Then the last band came on.

Purple light swept across the yard and cut into the dark, and the halfasleep crowd woke up all at once. The light caught the bass player's profile. Nathaniel.

He wasn't looking at anyone. Just sunk into it, playing like none of us were there. Focused. Untouchable. Handing everything he never said out loud over to the strings.

Something reckless surfaced in his face. The girls down front screamed themselves hoarse. Ninetyfive percent of it was for him. And I couldn't look away.

It wasn't even the first time I'd heard him play. I never stuck with anything in my life. But liking Nathaniel lasted my whole senior year of high school.

Quietly, where no one could see, I clawed my way into Columbia. His first choice.

After the show, watching the wall of girls crowding him for his number, something in my chest went tight with panic. I made up my mind on the spot: I was going after Nathaniel.

That chase took three years. Landing him didn't feel like "getting the whole world," the way my highschool diary had promised. If anything, my luck fell apart.

I stared at the blank screen. Sent another one. "Done eating? Want to get off campus, walk around, catch a movie?" "Or tomorrow works if you're slammed.

I can square it with my advisor." Nothing came back, same as always. His last reply was three days old. A single "k" to a dumb cat video I'd sent. Did Nathaniel even like me?

And if he didn't, why was he with me at all? I was still turning it over when my foot came down on empty air. And I went straight down the stairs.

Chapter 3 When Colette saw my arms, all scraped raw, one knee split open and bleeding, she let out a shriek sharp enough to pop an eardrum. "How many times is this now? This year?

You've basically got a punch card for the clinic!" She hauled me up, cursing the whole way. The second I put weight on my foot, I sucked air through my teeth.

It hadn't been a short flight. More than scrapes. I'd twisted my right ankle too.

Colette slung my arm over her shoulder and resigned herself to it, grumbling the whole way there. "I swear you and Nathaniel are just cursed together. You were fine before him.

Healthy. Ate like a horse. Since you two got together? One fracture. Three fevers. Five falls.

Colds I've lost count of." "And now a sprained ankle on top of it." I gave a helpless little laugh. "Maybe I'm just unlucky?" She rolled her eyes. "It's the universe telling you to dump him." At the clinic, the doctor picked grit out of the wound.

The pain pushed tears up before I could stop them. Colette crossed her arms and huffed. "Serves you right." I glanced at my phone.

She'd taken photos and videos for me earlier, going for maximum pathetic, like she wanted to fire off eight hundred of them to Nathaniel. He still hadn't replied.

Something sat heavy in my chest, the same gray as the sky outside, thick with clouds, about to break. To take my mind off it, I scrolled. A video went past.

One line in it stuck with me: if you can't feel that someone loves you, it's because they don't. Stop lying to yourself.

Nathaniel had won the national biology olympiad in high school and gotten into Columbia on the strength of it, his name still up on the department's wall of honor.

He didn't waste warmth on girls. All he saw was data and experiments. Rational to the point of cold. That's how most people described him.

It had taken until now for me to really understand it. The injury turned me into the dorm's protected species. Even classmates I'd never spoken to texted to check on me.

A couple showed up with snacks and getwell cards. My actual boyfriend? Nothing. I saw him post on Instagram, some research writeup from his lab. Then a post from Poppy.

She'd added me a while back. Poppy: [Project's finally DONE!! Nate's treating us all to Korean BBQ.

Eating till I can't move, he said the whole thing's on him.] In the photo she was beaming, all that young energy aimed straight at the camera.

Behind her, off in the corner, a man sat at the table studying the menu. Nathaniel looked happy. A month had gone by.

Even I, with my famously weak immune system, had scabbed over and healed. He seemed to have forgotten I existed at all. I couldn't help myself.

Pathetically, I called him. "Done with your experiment?" "Mm." A month, and his voice was as cool as ever. Like mint in summer. Behind him, the roar of the BBQ place.

Poppy's laugh cut through it, clear and grating. "You're at the BBQ place?" "Mm." It was a nothing conversation.

Through the phone, I might as well have been talking to a block of ice. "I got hurt.

Did you know that?" "I know." "Do you even know I haven't seen you in a month?" Nathaniel said nothing. Silence on the line. I gave a bitter little smile.

What was the point of playing the victim to squeeze sympathy out of him?

Nathaniel didn't work that way. "Ah!" A sharp yelp from Poppy on the other end. "What happened?" Nathaniel asked.

The question came out fast, his voice climbing. "It's nothing, my hand just brushed the kettle." Her voice went small and pitiful, the kind that makes people want to shield her. "It's already blistering." "I've got a firstaid kit in the car.

There's burn cream in it. I'll grab it." And with that, Nathaniel stood. A chair scraped across the floor on his end. His voice went distant.

On my end, the doctor was pouring antiseptic straight into the raw part of my wound. He never did answer my question.

Chapter 4 "Nathaniel." I said it once, clipped. "What?" "Let's break up." "Why?" Genuinely puzzled. Through the phone I could picture it. The slight furrow of his brow.

That flicker of impatience. I made something up, even as my own heartbeat slammed like it wanted out of my chest. "Nothing. I just don't think we fit.

Maybe we're bad luck for each other." "Come on, what are you spacing out for?" someone near him pushed. He said, "Whatever you want." The line cut out.

By the time it registered, I lifted a hand to my face. It was already wet. All of it. I didn't sleep that night. Right as I was finally drifting off, my phone pinged me awake.

I had post notifications on for Nathaniel. He'd put something up. For once, he'd posted a whole photo dump.

The caption: [Had the best time tonight.] In the group shot, Poppy had her arms around his neck, cheeks flushed pink, clearly drunk. Nathaniel looked a little drunk too.

There was a smile in those usually flat eyes, and he hadn't pushed her off. Maybe he just doesn't push away the people he actually cares about.

Rule one, no clinging, had always included no touching in public