Page 9 of Give In to Me
He thought about Katy at Table Three, pouring sparkling water for a member with a calm hand and a half-smile and absolutely no indication that a man existed at Table Nine. He thought about the concealer on her neck, the pink shadow of his mouth that she’d tried to erase and couldn’t quite.
“I’ll handle it,” he ground out.
“You’re a good man.” Warm. Sisterly. “She’s young. She doesn’t understand how these things work.”
He hung up. Stood at the bathroom counter with both hands on the marble and his mother’s blue eyes reflected back at him. He hated those eyes. They were too soft for his face, too much like something that had been loved instead of built, and every time he confronted them he thought about the woman who’d given them to him and the father who hadn’t cared enough to keep either of them.
She’s building a narrative.
The girl who once let a barista give her the wrong order rather than speak up. The girl who ate lunch alone. The girl who’d stood in the garden with petals in her hair and saidI don’t believe youand walked away without a backward glance, because shehad more dignity at nineteen than most people accumulated in a lifetime.
That girl was bragging about him to coworkers.
He turned on the faucet and ran cold water over his wrists. It didn’t help.
The problem was that it could be true. People surprised you. People wore faces that didn’t match what was underneath. His father had been charming, a man rooms rearranged themselves around. And El Diablo had stolen a woman’s baby and then never once searched for the child, because wanting was a temporary inconvenience for men like that, and people were things you used until they bored you.
What if she’s the same? What if this is what it feels like right before someone hands you back?
He considered his reflection. His mother’s eyes. His father’s bones.
He went to bed. He didn’t sleep.
The next afternoon, she brought his water. Two cubes. Her hand was calm, her face was blank, and the concealer mark was gone. Skin healed. His mouth had been on that exact spot and there was no trace of it left, and the irrational fury that surged through him at the absence was so disproportionate he almost stood up.
She turned to go.
“How are you?” The words left him before he could stop them.
She stopped and faced him. Not with the blazing openness from before, not with the heart-on-her-face transparency that had been destroying him for weeks. She faced him with thepolite blankness of a stranger who’d been asked for directions. Guarded. Waiting.
“Fine, thank you. Can I get you anything?”
“No.”
She nodded and walked away. He noted the red hair she’d pinned back catching the three-fifteen light, copper through gold, and he thought:Good. This is what you wanted. This is safer.
His features settled into the mask. Smooth. Composed. The face that boardrooms trusted and rivals couldn’t read. Underneath it, something was clawing to get out.
The following day, she called in sick. The other server, a girl with dark hair and a name tag that read MAUI, covered her section. Maui was efficient, cheerful, and didn’t make the air feel different when she walked past his table.
He left at two forty-five. Sat in his car in the parking lot for eleven minutes and didn’t start the engine.
THE WALK-IN COOLERsmelled like lemons and industrial cleaner, and Katy leaned her back against the steel shelf and let the cold seep through her polo and tried to feel nothing.
She was getting better at it. Almost a week of serving him water and sayinganything elseand walking away without turning back, and the performance was nearly second nature now. Smile for the members. Eyes down at Table Nine. Voice flat, hands calm, face blank. She’d learned the trick from Amy, actually, from the worst of the rehab year, when her mother would comeout of the bathroom with clear eyes and a calm voice and sayI’m fine, baby, I promise, and Katy had known it was a lie but admired the craftsmanship.
She wasn’t fine. She was so far from fine that she’d called in sick yesterday because her body had simply refused to get out of bed, and she’d lain there studying the ceiling and replaying his mouth on her throat and his voice sayingthat was a mistakeand the expression on his face when he’d said it, the flat, dead composure that she hadn’t believed for one second because she’d felt him gripping her hard enough to bruise, felt his teeth on her neck and the sound he’d made, low and ruined, and a man didn’t make that sound by accident. A man didn’t kiss like that because hewasn’t paying attention.
But not believing him and not being hurt by him were different things. And it hurt. It hurt in a way she didn’t have language for, because she’d never let anyone close enough to wound her like this. Amy had taught her that, too, without meaning to: wanting people who didn’t want you back was a form of slow drowning, and the smart thing was to swim.
Katy wasn’t swimming. Katy was sitting in a walk-in cooler on her break with a peanut butter sandwich and a cracked Tupperware lid and the stubborn, possibly stupid conviction that Julian Ventura was lying to himself worse than he was lying to her.
The cooler door opened, and Maui stuck her head in.
“Table Nine is asking for you.”
Katy’s sandwich went still halfway to her mouth. “He asked for me?”
