Page 17 of Give In to Me
She sipped the punch. It was too sweet, the red kind that stained your teeth, and she held it against her chest like a prop because having something in her hands meant she didn’t have to figure out what to do with them.
“You look like you’re having a terrible time.”
The voice came from her left. She turned.
He was tall. Not Julian tall, not that specific height that had become her body’s calibration for every other man who walkedinto a room, but tall enough. Brown hair, brown eyes, a face that was handsome in the easy, uncomplicated way of someone who’d grown up knowing he was handsome and hadn’t let it ruin him. He wore a dark suit that fit too well for a high school prom, and he was gripping his own cup of red punch with the same careful, prop-like hold she was using.
“That obvious?” she asked.
“You’re standing at the punch table alone in a dress that’s too pretty for this gymnasium, and you haven’t moved in six minutes.” He smiled. It was a good smile, warm and unbothered, and it didn’t do a single thing to her nervous system. “I’m Reid.”
“Katy.”
“I know. You’re Dionne’s sister, right? I’ve seen you at Haven.”
She stiffened. Haven. The name struck her like a hand on a bruise, and she must have shown it, because his smile gentled.
“Sorry. Wrong topic?”
“It’s fine.” It wasn’t fine. Nothing with the word Haven in it was fine. “I don’t work there anymore.”
“Got it. New topic.” He took a sip of his punch and made a face. “This tastes like melted crayons.”
“It really does.”
“Who authorized this?”
“The prom committee. They also authorized the fog machine, which I think is just a humidifier with ideas.”
His laugh was genuine, surprised, and she felt a loosening in her chest. Not warmth. Not attraction. Just the unclenching that happened when someone treated you like a person instead of a problem.
“Reid Jamieson,” he offered, extending his hand. “Senator Jamieson’s grandson, if that matters to anyone here, which it shouldn’t but probably does. I’m chaperoning. My grandfather’s on the school board and he volunteered me.” He surveyed the dance floor with the amiable resignation of a man who’d been volunteered for things his entire life. “I was promised there’d be a chocolate fountain.”
“There is,” Katy said, and pointed to the far corner where the fountain was indeed gurgling, surrounded by a ring of strawberries and pretzels and one sophomore who was dangerously close to dipping his entire forearm. “Its structural integrity is questionable.”
“Everything about this event’s structural integrity is questionable.” He was taking her in with a kindness she hadn’t expected, his brown eyes reading her face with an attentiveness that wasn’t hunger or heat but gentler. Recognition, maybe. The expression of a person who’d learned to spot sadness in other people because he’d carried his own. “Do you want to dance?”
“I don’t really—”
“Just as friends. I promise. I have zero moves and a strong fear of disco balls.”
She almost laughed. It caught in her throat and came out softer, a half-sound that surprised her, because she hadn’t made a sound that wasn’tfineorokayorI’m going to bedin four days.
“Okay,” she agreed. “Just as friends.”
They danced. Or rather, they stood on the basketball court and swayed in the approximate rhythm of the music while Reid talked about California, which he’d just moved to, and his grandfather, who was a force of nature, and the chocolate fountain, which he was genuinely concerned about. He was easy to be around. He asked questions without pressing. He made her laugh twice, real laughs that felt foreign in her mouth, and he kept a respectful distance that told her he’d clocked the sadness and had decided to stand next to it without trying to fix it.
Midway through the second song, the gymnasium doors opened.
Katy didn’t register them at first. She was facing Reid, her back to the entrance, and the music was loud and the fog machine was working and the disco balls were throwing their scattered light across everything. She didn’t see the doors open, or the woman who walked through them in a black dress that cost more than every prom dress in the room combined, or the man beside her in a charcoal suit with his hand on the small of her back.
Reid did.
His focus went over Katy’s shoulder to the entrance, and his eyebrows rose. “Huh. Didn’t know we had more chaperones.”
She turned around.
The room lurched. The actual, physical room, the gymnasium floor with its painted lines and its scattered light, lurched under her feet, and she felt Reid’s hand close around her elbow, keeping her upright, and she heard him say her name maybe, but the sound was distant, underwater, because Julian Venturawas standing in the doorway of her high school prom with Dionne Gates on his arm.
