Page 14 of Give In to Me
“Katy.”
She glanced over her shoulder.
He was absorbing her. His eyes in the jacaranda shade. His hands flat on the table, very still, and on his face was an expression she couldn’t name. Neither wall nor hunger but something between them, something that resembled a man standing at the edge of everything he feared while the girl he wanted walked away and he couldn’t decide if letting her go was protection or the worst mistake of his life.
“The chocolate fountain,” he said. “Which idiot is going to fall into it?”
Her heart slammed. “Probably me.”
His mouth tugged up. Just barely, just for a heartbeat, a warmth so brief and so real that it rearranged his entire face, made him seem young and startled and human, and she caught it, every microsecond of it, and it hit her so hard her knees went soft.
She walked back to the bar with her pulse in her throat and a wild, reckless, probably doomed hope blooming in her chest. He hadn’t said no. He’d asked about the chocolate fountain. He’d smiled at her, even if he hadn’t meant to.
She was in so much trouble.
Chapter 4
HE CAME TO HER.
He came to her. She didn’t go to him. She was wiping down Table Three at four o’clock on a Tuesday when his shadow fell across the stone, and there he was. Standing in the golden afternoon light with his hands at his sides and his face arranged into something she’d never seen him wear: nothing. Not the hunger. Not the fractures she’d learned to read through his composure. Nothing at all, as if someone had taken an eraser to every human thing about him and left only bone.
“Can we talk?” he asked.
Her heart did what it always did around him: accelerated, expanded, made itself stupid and available. Three days since the prom invitation. Three days of replayingI’ll think about itand the chocolate fountain and the warmth at his mouth, three days of a hope so bright it hurt to look at directly, and here he was, standing in front of her with his hands at his sides, and she thought:He’s going to say yes.
She set down the cloth. “Your table or the garden?”
“Here is fine.”
Here. The open terrace. Members at Tables Two, Five, and Twelve. Maui restocking glasses at the bar. The jacaranda overhead, throwing its purple shadows across everything, indifferent and beautiful.
He didn’t sit. She didn’t either. They stood on opposite sides of Table Three with a white tablecloth between them.
“I can’t take you to prom,” he told her.
She absorbed the words. She’d prepared for this, had spent three days building a version of herself that could hear the wordnofrom Julian Ventura and remain upright, just in case, because hope and preparation were not the same thing and Katy Gates had been preparing for the worst since she was nine years old and Amy started disappearing into bottles.
“Okay,” she said. Her voice didn’t break. She was proud of that. “I understand.”
“I don’t think you do.”
Something in his tone made her go still. Not the roughness she’d come to recognize when he fought himself. Not the scraped honesty she’d heard in the grove. This was smooth. Polished. The voice of a man who had rehearsed.
“Katy, what’s been happening between us needs to stop. All of it. The conversations. The walks. The...” He paused, and the pause was surgical, designed to make her fill it with every memory of his mouth on her throat and his hands under her shirt and his body rigid against hers. “Whatever you think this is, it isn’t.”
The terrace went on around them. A glass clinked. A member laughed. Maui dropped a fork behind the bar and swore under her breath. The world was a world, and Katy was standing in it with a damp cloth in her hand, and the man she loved had nothing in his eyes.
“What are you doing?” she asked softly.
“I’m being honest with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
His face tightened. The last time, she thought with a strange, cold clarity. The last time she’d see that particular fracture before he locked it away too.
“You’re a nineteen-year-old girl who works at my club,” he went on, and his voice didn’t waver, didn’t scrape, didn’t betray a single thing. “You developed a fixation, and I was negligent enough to indulge it. That’s the whole story.”
Fixation.The word went through her like a blade, not because it was true but because of how carefully he’d chosen it. Notcrush. Notfeelings.Fixation. A clinical word. A word that made her sound unwell.
