Page 1 of Give In to Me
Chapter 1
DIONNE SAID HIS NAMElike it was nothing.
“Julian, this is my sister Katy. Katy, Julian Ventura. We were at school together.”
They were standing on the terrace at Haven Country Club, the jacaranda throwing purple shadows across the stone, and Dionne had one hand on Katy’s shoulder, casual, sisterly, already turning back to her iced tea. It was Katy’s eighteenth birthday. Dionne had picked her up that morning in the black Audi that smelled like leather and the good perfume and had saidI’m taking you to lunch, my treat, somewhere special.Haven Country Club, where a cobb salad cost more than Katy’s weekly grocery budget and the members wore watches that could pay off Amy’s medical debt. It was the nicest thing Dionne had ever done for her, and Katy had spent the first twenty minutes just trying not to touch anything.
Then Dionne spotted an old university friend crossing the terrace and waved him over, and the whole thing was supposed to be a nothing introduction, ten seconds of social choreography between courses.
Katy glanced up.
He was tall. Dark-haired. He had blue eyes, which shouldn’t have mattered. Katy had seen blue eyes before, on boys at school and actors on screens and the old man who ran the laundromat on Fig and who always saved her a dryer. Blue eyes were blue eyes. She knew this. She was eighteen years old today, as ofseven that morning, and sensible about most things, and she knew that the color of a person’s eyes wasn’t a reason for the floor to tilt.
But his eyes weren’t the blue she knew. They were the blue at the center of a gas flame, hot and pale and ringed with something darker, and when they settled on her face, she felt every nerve in her body stand up and pay attention.
He regarded her for one second.
Maybe two.
And then his whole face went taut.
It was fast. If she’d blinked she would have missed it, but she didn’t blink, because her body had locked into place the moment his eyes met hers and blinking was no longer a function her nervous system was willing to perform. His gaze dropped from her eyes to her mouth. It stayed there for a beat too long, then tracked lower, to her throat, to the collar of her dress, and came back up. When his eyes met hers again, they were darker. The pale blue had gone hot, the pupils blown wide, and the expression on his face was something she’d never seen directed at her before, something she didn’t have a name for because she was eighteen and had never been assessed like she was the answer to a question a man hadn’t wanted to ask.
It lasted less than two seconds. Then his expression shuttered, so fast it was like a door slamming. In its place was a face so neutral it could have been carved from the terrace stone.
“Nice to meet you,” he said. Low voice. Unhurried. Perfectly composed, as if nothing had just happened behind his eyes.
But something had.
Katy had caught it.
“Hi,” she managed.
That was it.
Hi.
One syllable.
She was a person who saidhito people she liked andsorryto people she bumped into and once went an entire school dance without speaking to anyone because the music was loud and she didn’t know where to put her hands. She wasn’t the girl who had a good line ready. She wasn’t the girl who had any line ready. She was the girl who stood there with her heart slamming against her ribs and a feeling blooming inside her chest like a flower opening too fast, petals everywhere, no way to close it back up.
He nodded at Dionne and moved on. His shoulders cut a straight line through the terrace crowd, and Katy followed his path until he disappeared, then sat down and picked up her fork and put it down again because her hand wouldn’t hold still.
It wasn’t just her hand. It was also the heat. It was sitting in a wrought-iron chair on a terrace in Los Angeles on the day she turned eighteen, absorbing the absence where a man had just been standing, and feeling warmth spread across her skin, a phantom trace left by his attention. She touched her throat where his eyes had lingered. The skin there felt the same as always. It didn’t feel the same at all.
Dionne was talking about a case at work. Something about a deposition. Katy saidmmhmmandwowandthat’s insaneat what she hoped were the right intervals and tasted nothing of the birthday lunch her sister had paid for and couldn’t stopstudying the spot on the terrace where he’d been standing and thought, with the calm, clear certainty of a girl who had never been calm or clear about anything:I’ve found him.
Her heart felt like it was about to burst with the news.
But she ended up saying not a word about it.
Not to Dionne, not to anyone because honestly...
What was there to tell?
She’d met her sister’s friend for ten seconds at a country club she couldn’t afford to eat at, and she’d felt a thing, and the thing was too large and too sudden and too stupid to say out loud.
Katy Gates didn’t tell people things. She was the quiet one. The girl who sat in the back of the classroom and handed in her homework on time and ate lunch alone with a book because making friends required a kind of social bravery she’d never figured out. She got herself to school. She packed her own lunches. She’d been managing her mother’s bills since she was fifteen and Amy’s hands were too unreliable to hold a pen, and she was good at being invisible, and she didn’t fall apart over a man’s eyes and a two-word introduction.
