Page 25 of Give In to Me
“He flies them,” Elsa corrected, and the circle on her thigh stopped. “He has a cargo company do it. He thinks I don’t know.”
“She found out in the first week,” said a voice from the hallway.
Luciano Salvatore came through the kitchen doorway carrying a bread basket, and Katy’s lungs forgot how to work.
He was taller than Julian. Not by much, an inch, maybe two, but his bearing made the difference feel larger. Dark hair. Dark suit. Dark eyes, not Julian’s blue, but the same depth behind them, the same gravity, as if both brothers had been forged in the same fire and the heat had left the same mark regardless of the color it burned. The resemblance was not in the features. It was inthe men themselves: the carriage, the jawline, the way they both held stillness like a weapon and tenderness like a secret.
She was standing in a room with two men who had been born into darkness and had clawed their way out separately, and the women who loved them had found them on the other side.
“Katy.” He said her name simply, without ornament, as though the name itself was enough. He set down the bread basket and extended his hand. “It’s good to meet you.”
His handshake was firm and brief and nothing like Julian’s touch, which was all heat and current and barely-contained want. Luciano’s handshake was a door being opened. Welcome. Enter. You’re safe here.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it for more than the handshake, and he knew, because his eyes moved to Julian and something passed between the brothers, not a glance, not a nod, just a current, and Katy understood that the full weight of what Luciano had done, the phone call and the search and the address in Rhode Island, was present in the room and would never be spoken of in front of her, because the Salvatore brothers conducted their love in silence and always had.
Lunch was pasta. Elsa had made enough for eight, and apologized for this, and then apologized for the bread, which she said was overbaked, which it wasn’t. She served with the earnest, slightly flustered energy of a woman who wanted desperately for this to go well and was managing her nerves by keeping her hands busy. Katy recognized that too. She’d spent a year managing her own nerves behind a serving tray.
Halfway through the meal, Elsa asked about the flower farm, and Katy told her about the dahlias, how they grew fromtubers that resembled dead things, and Elsa leaned forward with her elbows on the table and her chin in her flour-dusted hand, and her eyes lit with the specific recognition of a woman who’d grown things from nothing and understood the metaphor without needing it explained.
“I killed three rosebushes the first year,” Elsa admitted. “Luciano replaced them without telling me. I think he thought I wouldn’t notice.”
“You cried,” Luciano said.
“I did not cry.”
“You cried into your coffee.”
The look Elsa gave him was equal parts exasperation and adoration, and Katy caught the corner of Luciano’s mouth move, not a smile, not quite, but a shift in the granite that suggested the man underneath it was capable of warmth that would embarrass him if anyone pointed it out.
Julian was different here. Katy observed it from across the table: his shoulders had dropped two inches since they’d walked in, his voice lost its edge when he spoke to Luciano, and he ate Elsa’s pasta with the unselfconscious focus of a man who’d been hungry for a long time and had just remembered that food could taste like being cared for.
At Haven, Katy had served men who ate without tasting. Men who ordered the prix fixe because it was the most expensive option and left half of it on the plate because finishing was gauche. Julian cleared his plate. Luciano cleared his plate. Elsa beamed and gave them both seconds without asking, the same instinct Katy’s mother had, because in certain kitchens the foodwas the love and the love was the point and the plates were just how it traveled.
After lunch, Julian drove her to Marydale.
THE CAMPUS WAS OLDstone and green lawns and pathways lined with oak trees whose leaves were just beginning to turn. September. The air smelled like cut grass and the faint mineral tang of old buildings and the possibility of becoming someone new, and Katy stood on the main quad with her hands in her jacket pockets and her chin tipped up and her heart so full she was afraid to breathe in case something spilled.
The admissions rep was waiting at the main building. A young woman in a blazer who was visibly nervous and kept addressing Julian as Mr. Ventura and offering him water and pamphlets he didn’t take. Julian ignored her with the distracted patience of a man who’d been treated this way his entire adult life and had stopped noticing.
“This is Katy’s visit,” he told the rep. “She’s the one you should be impressing.”
The tour took forty minutes. Lecture halls and libraries and the student center with its coffee shop and its notice board covered in flyers for clubs Katy would never have the courage to join and might join anyway, because she’d learned in a flower farm that courage wasn’t the absence of fear but the willingness to show up alone and put your shoulders back and survive. The rep pointed out the botany program. Katy’s fingers tightened in her pockets.
They crossed the north end of campus, past the sports facilities and a row of Victorian houses that had been converted intodepartment offices, and turned onto a street that was quieter. Residential. Trees. A wrought-iron gate standing open, and behind it, a stone house.
Not large. Not a mansion. A former fraternity house, the rep explained, recently renovated by a private donor. Two stories. Blue shutters. A porch with a swing, and a garden, small, neglected, promising, that wrapped around the side and caught the afternoon light.
Katy stopped walking.
“This is the private residence option for affiliated students,” the rep said, consulting her clipboard. “Fully furnished. Kitchen, two bedrooms, private entrance. The donor requested that it be offered to—”
“Thank you,” Julian said. “We’ll take it from here.”
The rep left. Katy stood on the brick pathway and took in the house with the blue shutters and the porch swing and the garden that was going to grow zinnias and sweet peas and dahlias next spring, she could already see it, could already feel the dirt under her fingernails and the morning light on her face, and her eyes were burning.
“This is too much,” she said.
“Not at all.” Julian was behind her, his voice silk and warmth and the particular tone he used when he was about to be ruinous and knew it. “I need a place to stay when I visit you.”
