Page 12 of Give In to Me
She was nineteen. She was a virgin. He knew this with the same certainty that he knew the color of her hair and the scar at her eyebrow and how she tucked her hair behind her left ear whenshe was nervous, never the right. He knew because her first kiss had been in the garden, and he’d felt her inexperience in the clumsy warmth of her mouth and the searching, uncertain placement of her hands, and the knowledge that he was the first person to touch her like this, to put his mouth on her throat and his hands on her skin, filled him with something so tangled he couldn’t separate the tenderness from the hunger from the self-loathing.
His phone buzzed. Dionne.
He let it ring. It went to voicemail. It buzzed again.
He picked up.
“Where were you today? I came by for lunch and you weren’t at your usual table.”
“I left early.”
“Everything okay?” A pause. “Is it the Katy thing?”
He said nothing. The Pacific was doing what the Pacific did, enormous and indifferent, and a pelican folded itself into a dive and vanished under the surface.
“Julian, I talked to her. Gently. I told her that she needed to be careful about how she talked about you at the club, that people were noticing, and she got defensive. Really defensive.” Dionne’s voice was reluctant. “She said you’d been meeting her privately. That you kissed her.”
His hand clenched on the phone.
“I told her that even if something happened, it was a one-time lapse and she shouldn’t read into it. She got upset. Said I was jealous.” Another pause. Perfectly calibrated. “Julian, Iknow she’s my sister. I love her. But she is building something dangerous, and I need you to hear me when I say that her mother did the same thing to our father. Amy saw an opportunity and she took it, and it cost everyone.”
Her mother did the same thing.
He thought about the grove.I’ve tried for a year now. I’ve tried really hard, and I can’t.The break in her voice. The crimson flush. Her fingers on his jaw, light and uncertain, so that he’d felt the flutter of her courage against his skin.
That was not a performance. He knew what performances resembled. He’d grown up inhabiting one. The careful choreography of a boy pretending he didn’t know his brother existed, pretending he didn’t read every article about Luciano Salvatore, pretending the name on his birth certificate was the one he’d been born with.
But Dionne was her sister. Dionne knew her better than he did. Dionne had been the one constant in Katy’s fractured family, monthly lunches and birthday texts and bags of hand-me-down clothes. Why would Dionne lie?
Why would anyone lie about someone they loved?
The answer came from a place so deep it didn’t have a name:Because love makes you desperate. Because wanting someone who doesn’t want you back turns you into something you wouldn’t recognize. Because Dionne has been attending to the way you react around Katy, and this is what it costs.
The thought surfaced and he drowned it immediately. Pushed it under. Let the easier narrative close over it, the one whereKaty was her mother’s daughter and wanting was dangerous and walls were the only architecture that held.
“I hear you,” he said.
“I’m trying to protect you.”
“I know.”
He hung up and sat in the car. The Pacific went on being the Pacific. The pelican resurfaced with something silver in its beak.
His phone sat on the passenger seat. He could call Katy. He had her number from the staff directory he’d accessed through the club’s system, an invasion of privacy he’d committed the first week she started and never used. He could call her and ask:Is any of this true? Are you telling people about us?He could walk into Haven tomorrow and talk to Maui, to Speedy, to whoever else worked the terrace, and ask them directly.
He didn’t.
He drove home. Stood at the bathroom mirror. Confronted his mother’s blue eyes in his own face and told himself this was protection. This was survival. This was the smart thing.
His reflection didn’t blink. Didn’t argue. Just offered back the soft eyes of a woman who’d died before she could teach her son that love wasn’t supposed to feel like a trap.
TWO WEEKS PASSED. KATYserved his water and kept her eyes elsewhere, and he didn’t ask her to walk, and the jacaranda kept dropping its purple blossoms on the terrace like confetti at a funeral nobody had planned.
She was good at this, the invisibility. He’d observed her doing it with everyone else since the day she started. The quiet voice. The downcast eyes. The body that folded into itself, taking up the minimum possible space, apologizing for existing. She’d been doing it her whole life, he realized. Surviving by being small. The only person she’d ever been big around was him, and he’d punished her for it, and now she was small again, and the loss of her boldness felt like someone blowing out a candle and not understanding until the room went dark how much light it had been throwing.
But she hadn’t quit. She came to work every shift. She served his table at three fifteen. She saidanything elseand he saidnoand she walked away. She didn’t cry. She didn’t sulk. She offered him nothing. No accusation, no hurt, no anger. Which was worse than all of those things combined.
And sometimes, when she thought he wasn’t paying attention, she offered him everything.
