Page 13 of Give In to Me
He caught it twice. Once when she was clearing a nearby table and her gaze drifted sideways to his face and lingered for three seconds before she corrected herself, and in those three seconds her face was unguarded and yearning and so full of wanting that his hand clenched under the table hard enough to ache. Once more when she was walking past his table to the bar and he said “Thank you” for the water. She flinched. A micro-movement, her shoulders tightening at the sound of his voice, and then she said “You’re welcome” without turning around, her voice perfectly professional, but her fingers on the tray had gone white.
She still wanted him. She was just trying very hard to survive it.
He knew the feeling.
PROM WAS IN THREE WEEKS.
Katy hadn’t thought about it. She’d been too busy not thinking about Julian, which was a full-time job that paid worse than Haven and offered no benefits except the grim satisfaction of her own composure. She went to school. She went to work. She went home and ate dinner with Amy and sat through TV and went to bed and didn’t lie awake thinking about his hand on her bare skin or the sound he’d made against her shoulder or the rigid tension in his body when he’d pulled himself away from her, and if she was lying about that last part, at least she was lying well.
But prom was in three weeks, and Luke Dryer High School treated senior prom like other schools treated homecoming: committee meetings, decoration votes, theme announcements, the grinding buildup of an event that assumed everyone had someone to go with. Katy didn’t have someone to go with. Katy had been to one school dance in her life and had stood against the wall for two hours without speaking to anyone because the music was loud and no one had asked her.
She didn’t care about prom. She told herself this firmly, repeatedly, with the conviction of a person who cared about prom very much.
Because prom was a night. A single night where you wore a dress and someone noticed you and you danced and for a few hours the world arranged itself into something that felt like a story, and Katy Gates, who had spent her entire life being the person nobody noticed, wanted to be seen. Not by a boy at school. Not by a stranger. By the man who sat at Table Nine every afternoon and pretended his laptop was more interesting than she was and gripped his water glass and pretended she didn’t set him on fire.
The idea arrived fully formed. She was going to ask Julian to prom.
The rational part of her brain, the part that paid bills and forged signatures and had kept Amy alive through the rehab year, screamed at her. Screamed that he’d rejected her twice. That he’d called her a mistake. That he’d put his hands under her shirt and then walked away without turning back. That asking a twenty-nine-year-old billionaire to a high school prom was the most ridiculous, humiliating, doomed-from-the-start idea she’d ever had, and she’d once entered a pie-eating contest without knowing she was allergic to blueberries.
The other part of her brain, the part that made her sayI pay attention to youandI don’t believe youandis this okay, the part that only existed around him, that part said:You felt his heart under your palm. He’s in there, behind the wall, and he’s drowning, and you are the only person in his life brave enough to reach in.
She practiced in her bedroom mirror. “Would you like to go to prom with me?” Too formal. “Want to come to my prom?” Too casual. “I know this is crazy, but.” She covered her face with both hands. Every version sounded absurd. She was asking a man who owned a gaming empire and a penthouse forty-three floors above Wilshire to spend an evening in a high school gymnasium decorated with streamers and rented disco balls.
But she remembered that flash across his face, that fraction of a second of unguarded warmth when he’d appeared young and startled by his own amusement, and she wanted to give him a whole night of that. A night where the gap between them didn’t matter and the walls came down and he let her in without the armor.
She was going to ask him. He was going to say no, and she was going to survive it like she’d survived everything else. Or he was going to say yes, and her life was going to change.
Either way, she was done being small.
SHE ASKED HIM ON AThursday.
Three fifteen. His water. Two cubes. She set it on the table and didn’t walk away.
His attention lifted. She registered the moment his eyes processed that she was still standing there, that she hadn’t retreated, and his face went very still. Not the composure, not the hunger, but a suspended kind of stillness, like a man who’d just heard a sound he wasn’t sure he’d imagined.
“Senior prom is on the twenty-third,” she said. Her voice shook. She let it. “It’s at Luke Dryer. My school. It’ll be streamers and bad DJ music and a chocolate fountain that someone will definitely fall into. It’s nothing like anywhere you’d normally spend your evening.”
His eyes were on her. He didn’t blink.
“I want you to come with me.”
The words hung between them. Somewhere on the terrace, a glass clinked against a table and someone laughed, and the world went on being a world where people did normal things. Katy stood at Table Nine with her tray against her chest like a shield and her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her fingertips.
“Katy.” His tone was stiff.
“You don’t have to answer now. I know it’s ridiculous. I know you’re going to say no. But I had to ask because I am physically incapable of not being honest with you, and honestly, I want to dance with you.” Her eyes stung. She blinked it back. “Just once. I want to have one night where you’re not running away from me.”
His expression broke open. She’d never witnessed anything like it on his face. Unfinished, unguarded, like a man with his hand on a locked door, hearing a knock from the other side, wanting to open it and not trusting himself to.
He opened his mouth.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
Not no. Not yes. Something in between that kept the door cracked, and the light behind it was blinding.
“Okay,” she managed. “That’s...okay.”
She picked up his empty glass, turned, and walked three steps.
