Chapter 3
FOR SIX DAYS, KATY gave 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. Apparently she’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.”
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 said I don’t believe you and walked away without a backward glance, because she had 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 the polite 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 COOLER smelled 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 saying anything else and 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 come out of the bathroom with clear eyes and a calm voice and say I’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 saying that was a mistake and 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 he wasn’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?”
“Not by name. He said ‘the other server.’ But you’re the only other terrace server, so.” Maui shrugged. “You want me to take it?”
“No.” Katy wrapped the sandwich and put the lid on the Tupperware, heard the crack where the plastic had split. “I’ve got it.”
She crossed the terrace. Afternoon sun. The jacaranda throwing its purple shadows across the stone, the light coming through the leaves in gold-warm pieces that fell across Table Nine.
He was sitting with his laptop closed, his water glass empty, his hands flat on the table.
Not typing. Not pretending. Just sitting there with his attention riveted on the spot where the service door opened, and when she came through it, his gaze settled on her and didn’t let go.
She felt it. The pull. The thing that had dragged her back to this club month after month, the thing that had made her apply for a job she didn’t need and serve water to a man who broke her heart. It was still there. Still enormous. Still the most real thing she’d ever felt.
She stopped at his table. “You need a refill?”
“Sit down.”
“I’m working.”
“Katy.” His voice scraped on her name. She clocked the movement of his throat, the hard swallow, and she remembered putting her mouth to that throat in the garden and feeling his pulse slam against her lips.
“I can’t sit with members.”
“Then walk with me.”
She should have said no. She was a person who should have said no, because the last time she’d walked with him they’d ended up against a garden wall and his hands had been under her hair and his mouth had been on her pulse and then he’d ripped himself away and dismissed her like a problem to solve.
She should have said no because she had twenty minutes of break left and a cracked Tupperware container to pack and a shift to finish and a heart that was still stitching itself back together, and saying yes was reckless, headlong, completely Katy.
The sort of decision her mother would have recognized.
“Okay,” she agreed softly.
They walked. Away from the terrace, past the gardens, into the grove where the jacaranda grew thick and the light turned purple-blue and the sounds of the club faded into birdsong and the rustle of things growing.
She kept two feet between them. He kept pace beside her with his hands in his pockets, and she could feel the heat of him even across the distance, the same cellular awareness that had electrified her on her eighteenth birthday, her body tuned to his frequency like a radio stuck on one station.
“You’ve been different,” he said.
“I’ve been professional.”
“That’s what I mean.”