Page 24 of Give In to Me
“I went to that gym alone, Julian. I drove myself there and parked between a minivan and a pickup truck and sat in my car for four minutes trying to convince myself I could walk in without you. And I did it. I walked in. I put my shoulders back and I held my chin up and I survived, and then you opened the door and you brought my sister and you took the one thing I had left.”
“I know.”
She assessed him. His hands. The sharp face. The eyes that were bright and wet in a way she’d never witnessed, and the tears in them were not falling, not yet, but they were there, held by whatever remained of his composure.
“And I still love you.” Her voice broke on the wordlove, and she let it. Let it crack open in the sweet pea row in the golden afternoon, because she was done with composure and done with walls and done with pretending that loving him was something she could survive without admitting. “I still love you, and I hate it, and I can’t stop, and I’ve tried, and I’m standing in a flower farm in Rhode Island six months after you ruined my life and you’re here and my stupid heart is doing the same thing it’s been doing since I was eighteen years old, and I don’t know what that makes me. Brave or stupid or broken or all three.”
“Brave,” he said instantly. No hesitation. The word came out of him like it had been waiting, pressurized, behind everything else he’d said. “That’s how brave you are.”
The tears she’d been holding for four days at Haven and two weeks at the flower farm and every moment in between rose and broke the surface, and she covered her face with her hands and stood in the sweet pea row and cried. Not the shower floor, not the gardening gloves, not the private, contained grief she’d been rationing. She cried all at once, and the sound was ugly and honest and human.
He closed the distance in two steps. His arms came around her and she let him, and she hit his chest with her fist, once, hard, and then her fingers closed on his shirt and pulled him closer, and he held her. His arms tight around her shoulders, his face in her hair, and she could feel him shaking against her, his whole body rigid with the effort of holding himself together, and his mouth was at her temple and he was saying her name, over and over,Katy, Katy, Katy, and it sounded nothing like the terrace, nothing like the destruction, nothing like any version of her name she’d ever heard from him. He said it like a man who’d been holding his breath for a month and had just broken the surface and her name was the first air he’d tasted.
When she pulled back and tipped her face up, his face was wet. The tears had fallen, and he hadn’t wiped them, and he was taking her in with an expression so open, so unprotected, so completely without armor that she understood with a clarity that went through her like light: this was the man behind the wall. This was who he’d been hiding. This.
“If you ever do this to me again,” she told him, her voice thick and ruined and sure at the center, “I will not come back. Notbecause I don’t love you. Because I love myself too, and I learned that here, in this dirt, with these flowers, and I will not let you take it from me again.”
“I know,” he said. “I won’t.”
“You won’t.” Not a question.
“I won’t.” Not a promise. A vow. Stated with the same certainty his brother had used on the phone when he’d saidI’ll find her, the certainty of a Salvatore who had decided, and the decision was final, and the world would rearrange itself accordingly.
Her hand reached up and touched his face. Fingers on his cheekbone, tracing the line of tears, and he turned into her touch, his eyes closing, his face pressing into her palm. She felt the wetness against her skin and the heat of him and the tremor that ran through his body at the contact.
“I love you,” he said against her palm. “I have loved you since your birthday. I have loved you since the terrace and the garden and the grove and every second since, and I couldn’t say it because saying it made it real and real things can be taken away, and I am so sorry, Katy. I am so sorry for all of it.”
She kissed him.
Not the desperate collision from the garden wall. Not the soft certainty from the jacaranda grove. This was new. It tasted like salt and afternoon light and the particular sweetness of a thing that had been broken and put back together by hand. Her mouth on his, soft and sure, and his hands came up and cradled her face, his thumbs on her cheekbones, and the gentleness of his grip after everything he’d done, the tenderness of those unsteady hands, undid her more completely than any kiss they’d shared.
He kissed her back, learning her all over again, as if the month apart had erased his memory of her mouth and he was rebuilding it from the ground up. His lips moved over hers, and his thumbs traced lines on her cheekbones, and when he pulled back it was only far enough to press his forehead to hers.
They stood like that. Forehead to forehead in the sweet pea row. His hands on her face. Her fingers on his wrist, feeling his pulse, fast and strong and alive.
“Come back to me,” he said. Low. Against her mouth. “Come back.”
Her eyes closed. His pulse under her fingertips. The warm Rhode Island afternoon wrapping around them both.
“I’m here,” she whispered. “I’m here.”
Epilogue
THE PENTHOUSE WAS NOTHINGlike the one in Los Angeles.
Julian’s LA apartment was forty-three floors of glass and concrete and silence, a monument to a man who’d built an empire on top of a wound. Luciano’s penthouse was on the Upper West Side, twelve floors up, and it smelled like coffee and fresh bread and the particular warmth of a home where someone had been cooking all morning and had left the windows cracked to let in the September air.
Katy stood in the doorway and tried not to grip Julian’s hand hard enough to break his fingers.
“Hi.” Elsa appeared from the kitchen, and the first thing Katy noticed was that her hands were dusted with flour and she was wiping them on the front of a cotton dress that already had a sauce stain on the hem. No shoes. Brown hair pulled back with a clip that was losing its hold. She was small, younger than Katy had expected, and she was smiling, but her other hand was at her side, her index finger tracing a small circle against her thigh, and Katy recognized the gesture because she had her own version of it. The hair tuck, the downward glance, the body doing something small and repetitive because the brain was running too fast. “Come in. I made — there’s a lot of food. I might have overdone it.”
She had overdone it. The dining table was set for four with mismatched plates and cloth napkins that didn’t match either, and there were three different serving dishes on the counter and a pot still simmering on the stove and a vase of sunflowers in thecenter of the table that had been arranged with more love than skill, the stems uneven, one head drooping slightly left.
At Haven, Katy had served hundreds of meals to couples who spent more on a single bottle of wine than Amy made in a week. She knew what wealth performed like. She knew the particular attention to surface. The right watch, the right water, the right amount of boredom to signal that none of it impressed you because you’d always had it. Everything curated. Everything conscious.
This apartment had none of that. The bookshelves were overstuffed and disorganized. A pair of men’s shoes sat by the door, not hidden in a closet. The kitchen counter had a flour handprint on it. It was the home of two people who were living in it, not presenting it, and something in Katy’s chest unclenched.
“Elsa grew those,” Julian said behind her, nodding at the sunflowers. “She ships them from Nebraska.”
