Page 10 of Give In to Me
“Not by name. He said ‘the other server.’ But you’re the only other terrace server, so.” Maui shrugged. “You want me to take it?”
“No.” Katy wrapped the sandwich and put the lid on the Tupperware, heard the crack where the plastic had split. “I’ve got it.”
She crossed the terrace. Afternoon sun. The jacaranda throwing its purple shadows across the stone, the light coming through the leaves in gold-warm pieces that fell across Table Nine. He was sitting with his laptop closed, his water glass empty, his hands flat on the table. Not typing. Not pretending. Just sitting there with his attention riveted on the spot where the service door opened, and when she came through it, his gaze settled on her and didn’t let go.
She felt it. The pull. The thing that had dragged her back to this club month after month, the thing that had made her apply for a job she didn’t need and serve water to a man who broke her heart. It was still there. Still enormous. Still the most real thing she’d ever felt.
She stopped at his table. “You need a refill?”
“Sit down.”
“I’m working.”
“Katy.” His voice scraped on her name. She clocked the movement of his throat, the hard swallow, and she remembered putting her mouth to that throat in the garden and feeling his pulse slam against her lips.
“I can’t sit with members.”
“Then walk with me.”
She should have said no. She was a person who should have said no, because the last time she’d walked with him they’d ended up against a garden wall and his hands had been under her hair and his mouth had been on her pulse and then he’d ripped himself away and dismissed her like a problem to solve. She should have said no because she had twenty minutes of break left and a cracked Tupperware container to pack and a shift to finish and a heart that was still stitching itself back together, and saying yes was reckless, headlong, completely Katy. The sort of decision her mother would have recognized.
“Okay,” she agreed softly.
They walked. Away from the terrace, past the gardens, into the grove where the jacaranda grew thick and the light turned purple-blue and the sounds of the club faded into birdsong and the rustle of things growing. She kept two feet between them. He kept pace beside her with his hands in his pockets, and she could feel the heat of him even across the distance, the same cellular awareness that had electrified her on her eighteenth birthday, her body tuned to his frequency like a radio stuck on one station.
“You’ve been different,” he said.
“I’ve been professional.”
“That’s what I mean.”
She studied him. His face was tight. His eyes were on the path ahead, not on her, and the muscle in his cheek was working. He didn’t want to be saying this. He was saying it anyway.
“You told me it was a mistake,” she pointed out. “I’m respecting that.”
“I know.”
“So what do you want?”
He stopped walking. She stopped too, because her body was stupid and loyal and did whatever his did. They stood in the grove with the jacaranda shadows falling between them and the afternoon heat thick in the air, and he turned to her with a rawness on his face that split something open in her chest.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
Three words. Quiet. His voice stripped of the silk, stripped of the boardroom composure, stripped of everything except a nakedness that she recognized because she heard it in her own voice every time she said his name.
“That’s not good enough,” she told him. Not cruel. Honest. “You kissed me like I was air and then told me it meant nothing. You don’t get to sayI don’t know.”
“You’re right.”
“I know I’m right.”
Warmth crossed his face, there and gone before he could catch it. “You’re fearless around me.”
“I’m terrified around you,” she countered. “I just don’t let it stop me.”
His focus sharpened on her then. Full on. His eyes burning in the afternoon light, his pupils expanding, and the hunger was back, the thing he’d been starving behind days of her indifference, and it roared to the surface so fast he didn’t have time to tamp it down.
“That’s the problem,” he said roughly.
