Page 6 of Give In to Me
But you could want a girl with red hair and green eyes who carried a tray across a terrace, and wanting was the thing that made you disposable, because wanting gave someone the power to hand you back.
She was walking toward him.
Three fifteen. His water. She carried it across the terrace with her eyes down and her shoulders pulled in and her whole body doing the invisible thing, and then she reached his table and set down the glass, two cubes, and glanced up, and her eyes collided with his, and there it was. The collision. The shy girl gone. In her place, a girl whose green eyes locked onto his face with a directness that went through him like voltage.
“You’re here early today,” she said softly.
“I had a meeting cancel.”
“You’ve been here every day this week.” She bit her lip. He followed the teeth sinking into the lower lip, pink going white, and his hand tightened on the table edge. “That’s not a question. That’s a statement. I’m stating a fact. About your schedule. Which I apparently track now. I’m going to stop talking.”
“Don’t.”
The word came out before he could catch it, low and rough, and her eyes widened. He should not have said that. He should not have said anything that sounded like an invitation, because invitations were doors, and doors opened both ways, and this girl walked through every door he left even a crack ajar.
“Walk with me,” he said.
She blinked. “I’m on shift.”
“Your break started two minutes ago.”
Her lips parted. “How do you know my break schedule?”
He didn’t answer. He stood, and she fell into step beside him, because that was who she was around him. The girl who said yes when she should have said no, the girl who ran toward things instead of away from them, and they walked off the terrace and into the garden path where the jacaranda grew thick and the light went purple and the sounds of the club faded to nothing.
She was quiet for eleven steps. He counted. Then—
“Can I tell you something?”
He should have said no. Every rational impulse he possessed was telling him to say no, to turn back, to close his laptop and leave and not return until she’d moved on to a different job or a different obsession that didn’t involve walking too close to him under a jacaranda tree with her face tilted up and her heart visible in her eyes.
“Tell me,” he said, his voice dropping lower than he’d intended.
“I think about you all the time.” Her voice was barely holding together at the edges. Her face was crimson, and her hands were clasped in front of her like she was trying to physically hold herself together. “I know that’s crazy. I know you’re...you, and I’m...me, and I know there’s no version of this that makes sense. But I can’t stop. I’ve tried for a year now. I’ve tried really hard, and I can’t, and I thought you should know because I’m a terrible liar and it was going to come out eventually anyway, so.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “Please say something so I know you haven’t left.”
“I haven’t left.”
She opened her eyes. He was closer than he’d been a moment ago. He couldn’t remember deciding to move.
“You should stop,” he rasped. “Whatever this is. You should stop.”
“I know.” She didn’t move. “I can’t.”
“Katy.”
“I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say I’m nineteen and you’re twenty-nine and I work for you and this is inappropriate, and you’re right about all of it.” Her chin lifted,and her eyes were bright and terrified and utterly unguarded. “I don’t care.”
She reached up and touched his face.
Her fingers grazed his jaw. Light. Trembling. The softest pressure he’d ever felt, and it went through him like a detonation. Her thumb grazed the edge of his mouth, and the expression she wore was half courage and half terror, and she whispered, “Is this okay?”
He didn’t think.
His hands were on her before the wordnocould form in his mouth. One hand at her waist, the other at the back of her neck, and he pulled her into him and kissed her. Not gently. He kissed her with the force of a year of telling himselfnoand three weeks of cataloging her every movement across his terrace and twenty-nine years of locked doors blowing open at once, and her mouth was warm and she tasted like the lemonade the club served at the bar, and she made a sound against his lips, a small startled gasp, and then she was kissing him back. Clumsy. Unpracticed. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, and they ended up on his chest and then his shoulders and then the back of his neck, searching, learning, pulling him closer with an urgency that was so honest it gutted him.
He backed her into the garden wall. Stone and shade and the jacaranda blossoms falling around them in purple drifts. Her spine met the wall and she gasped again, and his mouth left hers and discovered her throat. He kissed the pulse point. The skin was hot under his lips and her blood was hammering against his mouth, fast, alive, and the taste of her skin was warm and faintly salt and he wanted to stay there forever, his mouth on her pulse, feeling her heartbeat against his lips like proof that she was real.
