Page 8 of Give In to Me
He hung up. Set the phone on the counter. Surveyed the city through the glass, all that glitter and distance.
Wrapped around her finger.
The worst part was that it was true. He was. He’d kissed a nineteen-year-old girl in a garden and lost himself so completely that an hour later his composure still hadn’t rebuilt, and she’d stood there after he’d gutted her and saidI don’t believe you,and she was right, and the fact that she’d seen through him, that his cruelty hadn’t worked, that she knew him better after three weeks than people who’d known him for years. That terrified him more than anything his father’s ghost had ever done.
He drank the whiskey. Poured another. Drank that too.
It didn’t help.
THE NEXT DAY HE WENTto Haven at his usual time and sat at Table Nine and opened his laptop and kept his eyes on the screen.
She brought his water at three fifteen. Two cubes. Set it on the table without a word. Or a blush. She didn’t turn those green eyes on him with her heart in them.
She was doing the thing she did with everyone else. The quiet, invisible, eyes-down thing. The thing she had never once done with him, until now.
“Anything else?” she asked. Polite. Professional. A voice for strangers.
He should have felt relief. This was what he wanted. The wall back up. The girl retreating to a safe distance where she couldn’t reach the parts of him he’d spent his life protecting.
“No,” he said.
She nodded and turned.
“Katy.”
She stopped. Didn’t turn around.
He opened his mouth. He was going to say something. He didn’t know what. Her name had come out of him involuntarily, a reflex, his body reaching for her before his brain could intervene, and now she was standing three feet away with her back to him and her shoulders perfectly straight, and he could see the faint mark on her neck where his mouth had been, a small pink shadow at the edge of her collar that she’d tried to cover with concealer and hadn’t quite managed. The sight of it sent a jolt through him so violent his hand knocked the water glass and it rattled against the table.
She heard it. Her shoulders tightened. But she didn’t turn.
“Never mind,” he managed.
She walked away.
He sat at Table Nine with his laptop open and his water untouched and the pink ghost of his own mouth on her neck seared into his vision, and he thought:This is control. This is safety. This is right.
He didn’t believe himself either.
Chapter 3
FOR SIX DAYS, KATYgave him nothing.
She brought his water at three fifteen. Two cubes. Set it down, picked up the empty, moved on. She didn’t ramble. She didn’t blush. She didn’t turn those green eyes on him with her whole heart arranged on her face like an offering he hadn’t earned, and he should have been grateful, because this was what he’d asked for when he’d torn his mouth off her skin and called it a mistake.
He wasn’t grateful. He was losing his mind.
Julian sat at Table Nine with his laptop open and observed her serving the terrace with her eyes down and her voice soft and her body taking up no more space than it had to, and he cataloged every absence. The rambling: gone. The flush that started at her collarbone and climbed to her ears: gone. The sound of his name in her mouth, reverent and reckless: gone. She gave him the same polite nothing she gave every other member, and the loss of the difference was a violence he hadn’t prepared for.
The first few days blurred together. She refilled his water without meeting his eyes. She said “Anything else?” and he said “No” and she walked away and his hand gripped the edge of the table until the tendons stood out.
Then Dionne called.
“I hate to bring this up again.” The reluctance in her voice sounded genuine, almost pained. “But one of the junior members asked me if you and Katy are together. Apparentlyshe’s been telling the other servers that you’ve been coming to the club specifically for her.”
His grip on the phone tightened.
“I asked around, gently. The girl at the front desk said Katy’s been asking questions about your schedule. When you come in, how long you stay. She’s building a whole narrative, Julian, and I’m worried it’s going to become a problem for you.”
