Page 23 of Give In to Me
“Katy.”
His voice.
Her eyes closed. Her hands stopped. The sweet pea tendril she’d been tying curled around her finger, delicate and green, and she held onto it like it was the only thing keeping her tethered to the ground.
“Katy. Please.”
When she opened her eyes, Julian Ventura was standing at the end of the sweet pea row in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled and dirt on his shoes that hadn’t been there when he’d gotten out of the car. His eyes were bloodshot. His face was thinner than she remembered, the bones sharper, and he carried himself like a man who hadn’t slept or eaten properly in a month. His hands were at his sides, and they were shaking.
Not the rigid, white-knuckled grip she’d come to associate with him fighting himself. Shaking. Open. Visible.
She stood up, brushed the dirt off her knees, and pulled her gardening gloves off one finger at a time and set them on the trellis wire. She did these things with care, because the alternative was running to him or running from him and she was not going to do either.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“My brother.”
A brother. There were so many things she didn’t know about him, so many rooms in the fortress he’d never let her enter, and here he was standing in her sweet pea row with his sharp face, and the wordbrotherhit her with the weight of everything he’d never told her.
“Why are you here?”
“Because Dionne lied.” His voice was raw. “Everything she told me about you was a lie. You never bragged to the staff. You never told anyone I was wrapped around your finger. You ate lunch alone every day and you couldn’t even order your own coffee and she knew that, she knew exactly who you were, and she fed me aversion of you that I could walk away from because the real you was too terrifying to let close.”
Katy stood in the sweet pea row with the afternoon light on her face and the smell of sugar in the air and studied the man she loved and felt nothing settle. No relief. No vindication. Just a bone-deep weariness and the question she’d been carrying for twenty-six days.
“You believed her.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t ask me. You didn’t ask the staff. You didn’t do a single thing to verify what she told you. You just believed her, and then you stood in front of me and called me a fixation and told me I was nothing.”
“Yes.” He didn’t flinch. Didn’t defend. Stood there and took it, every word, with his hands at his sides and his bloodshot eyes on her face. “I believed her because believing her was easier than trusting you.”
“Why?”
The question was quiet. Not an accusation. A genuine question, from a girl who’d given him everything she had and gotten a destruction speech in return, and who still, after all of it, wanted to understand.
He was quiet for a long time. The sweet peas rustled. A bee worked the row behind her, heavy and purposeful. When he spoke, his voice was stripped to the studs, nothing left but the frame of the thing he’d been building walls around since he was thirteen years old.
“My father was a man named Salvatore. El Diablo. He had the resources to find anyone on earth. My brother stole me from him when I was a baby, gave me to a woman who raised me under a different name, and my father never came for me. Never hired anyone. Never placed a call.” His hands opened and closed at his sides. “I was eleven months old, and I wasn’t worth finding.”
The sweet pea tendril she’d been tying swayed on the wire.
“I built everything I have on top of that wound. Gubat. The money. The penthouse. All of it, proof that I couldn’t be overlooked. That no one could throw me away.” His eyes were on her, and behind them was every locked door she’d ever tried to open. “And then you showed up. You, with your two ice cubes and your club sandwich ramble and your complete inability to hide what you felt, and you terrified me. Because you saw me. You saw past everything I’d built, and being seen meant being known, and being known meant you could decide I wasn’t worth keeping. So when Dionne gave me an excuse to push you away first, I took it.”
He stopped. Swallowed. His throat moved, the hard, visible swallow she’d cataloged a hundred times from behind a serving tray.
“I made myself into him.” His voice cracked on the last word. “The one thing I swore I’d never be. A man who throws away the person who loves him because keeping her requires more courage than he has.”
Silence. The bees. The sweet peas. The Rhode Island afternoon, warm and golden and indifferent to the two people standing in it with a month of damage between them.
“You walked into my prom with my sister.”
“I know.”
“You walked into the one night that was supposed to be mine, the one place where I was allowed to be a normal girl in a dress, and you brought Dionne, and she held your arm and smiled, and I was standing in a twelve-dollar dress from a thrift store and you destroyed me. In front of everyone. At my own prom.”
“I know.” His voice was barely audible.
