Gabriel's Inferno (Gabriel's Inferno #1)(51)

You won’t be doing that again. I’ll make sure of it.

Julia watched as he refused the coffee Christa bought for him and walked to the counter to order something else. She saw Christa’s shoulders trembling with rage.

Paul turned to Julia and sighed. “Now, where were we?”

She inhaled deeply and took a minute to focus before she did what she knew she needed to do. “I shouldn’t have kissed you. I’m sorry.” She looked down at her leather messenger bag, feeling very uncomfortable.

“I’m not sorry. I’m only sorry that you’re sorry.” Paul brought his face close to hers and smiled. “But it’s all right. I’m not upset or anything.”

“I don’t know what happened. I’m not usually like that — to just kiss someone.”

“I’m not just someone, am I?” He looked at her inquisitively. “I’ve wanted to kiss you for the longest time. Ever since that first seminar, I think. But that would have been too soon.”

He tried to persuade her to look at him, but she looked away. She looked toward another table and its two quarreling occupants. She sighed.

“Julia, the kiss doesn’t have to change anything. Think of it as a moment between friends. It doesn’t have to happen again, unless you want it to.” He searched her face, worriedly. “Would that make it better? If we left it like that?”

She nodded and squirmed. “I’m sorry, Paul. You’ve been nothing but nice to me.”

“You don’t owe me anything. I’m not looking for payment, here. I’m nice to you because I want to be. That’s why I bought you the cd. That’s why the poem reminds me of you. You inspire me.” He leaned closer so that he could whisper in her ear, acutely aware of the fact that a pair of angry sapphire eyes was suddenly focused on him. “Please don’t feel obligated to do anything that you don’t want to do. I’ll be your friend no matter what.”

He paused. “It was a friendly little kiss, instead of a hug. But from now on, we can stick to hugs, if you want. And one day, if you want more…”

“I’m not ready,” she breathed, somewhat surprised that she found honest words to say and found them so quickly.

“I know that. That’s why I didn’t kiss you back much, even though I wanted to. But it was very nice. Thank you. I know you’re careful about who you let yourself get close to. I feel honored that you kissed me.”

He patted her hand and smiled at her again. She opened her mouth to say something, but he beat her to it.

“I could break Christa’s neck for what she said to you. I won’t bother talking to her next time.” His eyes darted to The Professor’s table where he noticed with some relief that the angry sapphire eyes were now fixated on Christa, who was bowing her head and close to tears.

Julia shrugged. “I don’t care.”

“I care. I saw how she was looking at you. And I felt your reaction: you cringed. You f**king cringed, Julia. Why didn’t you tell her to go to hell?”

“I don’t do things like that if I can help it. I try not to lower myself to her level. Sometimes, I just feel so…so surprised that someone is being nasty to me, I can’t think. I’m speechless.”

“People are…nasty to you?” Paul began to get angry.

“Sometimes.”

“Emerson?” he whispered.

“He’s coming around. You saw him just then — he was nice.”

Paul nodded reluctantly. Professor Dick-erson.

Julia fidgeted with her hands. “I don’t mean to be all…St. Francis of Assisi or something, but anyone can shout obscenities. Why should I become like her? Why not think that sometimes — just sometimes — you can overcome evil with silence? And let people hear their hatefulness in their own ears, without distraction. Maybe goodness is enough to expose evil for what it really is, sometimes. Rather than trying to stop evil with more evil. Not that I’m good. I don’t think that I’m good.” She paused and looked over at Paul. “I’m not making any sense.”

He simply smiled. “Of course you’re making sense. We talked about this in my Aquinas seminar — evil is its own punishment. Look at Christa.

Do you think she’s happy? How could she be, behaving like that? Some people are so self-absorbed and deluded that all the shouting in the world wouldn’t be enough to convince them of their own shortcomings.”

“Or jog their memory,” Julia mumbled, gazing over at the other table and shaking her head.

The next day, she found herself in the Department of Italian Studies checking her mailbox before the Dante seminar. She was listening to the cd that Paul had given to her, which she’d finally agreed to accept and upload to her iPod. He was right; she’d fallen in love with the album immediately.

And she found that she could write her thesis proposal while listening to his music much better than while listening to Mozart. Lacrimosa  was far too depressing.

After days of finding nothing in her pigeonhole, she finally received some mail. Three pieces of mail, actually.

The first was an announcement of the rescheduling of Professor Emerson’s lecture, Lust in Dante’s  Inferno : The Deadly Sin against the Self. Julia made note of the new date and planned on asking Paul if he would accompany her to the lecture.