Chapter 155: THE WORD PLEASE

George POV

His apartment was on the fourteenth floor.

He had been standing at the window for forty minutes.

The city moved below him the way it always moved — constant and indifferent and completely uninterested in anything happening on the fourteenth floor of a building it could not see into. He had always liked this about cities. The anonymity of them. The specific freedom of being a variable that the city had not assigned a value to.

He had a glass of water on the window ledge that he had not touched.

His phone was beside it.

The photograph was still open on the screen.

His source at Thornfield was a third-year who owed him two favors from before his expulsion and who had sent the photograph with no context, just the image, which was the arrangement they had. Context was his job. He looked at the photograph and supplied his own context from what he knew about Thornfield's social geography and the specific body language of the people in it.

Piper Abbott.

Walking back from somewhere off campus. The clinic on Alderman Street, based on the direction she was coming from. Which told him something. Which confirmed the thing the photograph of her at the dining hall three weeks ago had suggested and which he had been filing as a suspicion until he had something more concrete.

He looked at the photograph for a long time.

He had been doing a lot of things since he was expelled. Attending the tutor sessions his parents had arranged. Playing the expected role in the expected way. Managing the situation the way he had managed every situation for as long as he could remember — with calculation and patience and the specific performance of whatever was required.

He had not been thinking about Piper Abbott.

That was the thing he kept telling himself. He had not been thinking about her. She was a situation that had resolved. She was the previous chapter.

He had been thinking about her every day.

He had been thinking about the night on the east terrace when the cereus opened. He had been thinking about the way she laughed at things he said that were not designed to be funny, the genuine kind of laugh that meant she had found something real in something he had built as a performance. He had been thinking about that laugh in the specific way you thought about a thing you had damaged and could see the damage clearly and could not stop seeing it.

He looked at the photograph.

He looked at the clinic's street.

He picked up his phone.

He typed: I know.

He looked at it. He typed: Call me.

He looked at that.

He typed: Please.

He stared at the word.

He had sent texts to forty-seven people in the past year in various contexts — operational, social, strategic. He had asked for things. He had directed things. He had managed things. He had never once written the word please because please was what you used when you were not certain the other person would comply, when you were asking instead of arranging, when you had no leverage and no plan and nothing to offer except the asking.

He had leverage on most people.

He had no leverage on Piper Abbott.

He sent the text.

He put the phone face-down on the window ledge.

He looked at the city.

She was not going to call. He knew she was not going to call. She had no reason to call him and several reasons not to and she was Piper Abbott who was warmer and more capable and more genuinely decent than anyone he had spent time with in years, which was the thing he had understood sometime around November and had not known what to do with since.

He picked up the glass of water.

He drank it.

He looked at his phone face-down on the window ledge.

He had used the word please and he was not going to take it back and she was not going to call.

He looked at the city.

He thought about the cereus. The way it had opened. White and sudden and completely indifferent to being watched.

He put the glass down.

He went to bed.

He did not sleep.

Author's Note: Jordan sat on the tile without asking and Piper said I'm keeping it and Jordan said okay and that was everything.