Page 18 of Give In to Me
He wore the suit like armor. Charcoal, fitted, tailoring that whispered money so softly you had to lean in to hear it. His dark hair was pushed back. His eyes caught the disco ball light and fractured it into cold sparks. He stood in the doorway with her sister beside him, and Dionne’s hand was curled around his forearm, proprietary, and her dark hair was perfect and her black dress was perfect and she was everything Katy was not: poised, expensive, belonging.
Katy’s green thrift-store dress. Katy’s red hair, loose and unpinned, the one thing she’d changed. Katy’s plastic cup of melted-crayon punch and her twelve-dollar cotton skirt and her heart, which she’d walked in here with in pieces and which was now dust.
He brought her sister to her prom.
The man who’d kissed her in a garden and put his hands on her skin and saidI don’t knowlike it was a confession, the man who’d faced her across a white tablecloth four days ago and called her love a fixation and told her she was nothing. That man had put on a suit and walked into her high school gymnasium with her own sister on his arm. And Dionne was smiling. Not the warm, sisterly smile she’d worn at Haven. A different smile. A smile that saidI won.
“Katy.” Reid’s voice was low, close to her ear. “Do you need to leave?”
She couldn’t speak. Her throat had closed. She stood on the basketball court in the scattered light and the tears that had been locked behind her ribs for four days began, finally, to rise.
“Katy. Right here.”
Reid’s brown eyes were serious when she met them, his hand still on her elbow, and she could tell he understood. Not the details. Not the history. But the shape of it. The girl in the cheap dress. The man in the expensive suit. The sister who’d brought him here like a trophy.
“I need air,” she managed.
“I’ll take you.”
JULIAN SPOTTED HERthe moment he walked in.
Green dress. Red hair, loose, falling past her shoulders. He’d never seen it down. At Haven it was always pinned, the copper catching the three-fifteen light, and seeing it loose was encountering a different girl, one who existed outside the terrace and the polyester uniform and the three-week window of his life when he’d been stupid enough to let her close.
She was dancing with someone. A man. Tall, brown-haired, standing close to her with the easy confidence of someone who’d never had to earn a room’s attention. The man’s hand was on her waist, respectful, and Katy was tilted up toward him with an expression Julian couldn’t identify from across the room, but his body identified it, because his hands clenched at his sides and a surge of heat went through him that had nothing to do with the gymnasium’s broken ventilation.
Katy was supposed to be alone. She was supposed to be miserable. She was supposed to be the girl he’d left behind, the fixation he’d corrected, and instead she was standing on a basketball court in a green dress with her hair down and anotherman’s hand on her waist and she waslaughing, and the sound of that laugh, even from forty feet away, even over the bass and the fog and the noise, struck him like a fist to the chest.
“Julian?” Dionne’s hand tightened on his arm. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” he bit out.
“Oh.” Dionne had found her, too. “I didn’t know Katy would be here.”
This was her prom. Of course she’d be here. He turned to Dionne, and for the first time in their friendship, her face struck him as wrong. The concern too calibrated. The surprise too smooth.
He moved through the gymnasium with Dionne beside him, nodding at the school board rep who’d arranged the chaperone invitations, shaking a vice principal’s hand, doing the mechanical things a person does in a social setting while the person inside him stood at the edge of a cliff and felt the ground give way.
She’d seen him. He knew because she’d turned, and her face had opened. For one unguarded second, before she’d had time to rebuild her composure, her face had cracked open like a door flung wide, and everything she’d been holding back for four days had been right there on the surface. The hurt. The disbelief. The betrayal so total it didn’t resemble anger. It resembled grief.
Then Reid’s hand had closed around her elbow, and she’d turned away.
Reid. Julian knew the name because the man had introduced himself to the school board rep. Reid Jamieson. SenatorJamieson’s grandson. Twenty-one years old with a handshake that said old money and a face that said good breeding, and he was standing next to Katy at the punch table now, talking to her in a low voice, and his hand was still on her elbow.
Julian observed them from across the room and felt acid spread through his chest.
“I’m going to get some water.” He pulled his arm free of Dionne’s grip and crossed the gymnasium floor and walked past the DJ booth and the photo backdrop and the chocolate fountain and stopped at the punch table, where Reid Jamieson was standing with Katy Gates, who regarded Julian with an expression so blank it made the nothing he’d worn at Table Three seem amateur.
She turned and walked away without a word. Into the crowd. Gone.
Reid followed her exit, then turned to Julian with the assessing calm of a man who’d been raised in politics and knew how to read a room.
“Julian Ventura,” Reid said pleasantly. “I recognize you from Haven.”
“Reid Jamieson.” He didn’t know what he was doing here. He didn’t know why his feet had carried him across the room to a man he’d never met who’d been touching Katy’s elbow. “Chaperoning?”
“My grandfather’s idea. He thinks community involvement builds character.” Reid picked up a cup of punch, examined it, set it back down. “How do you know Katy?”
“Through her sister.”
