Chapter 3 #3
Why would anyone lie about someone they loved?
The answer came from a place so deep it didn’t have a name: Because love makes you desperate. Because wanting someone who doesn’t want you back turns you into something you wouldn’t recognize. Because Dionne has been attending to the way you react around Katy, and this is what it costs.
The thought surfaced and he drowned it immediately. Pushed it under. Let the easier narrative close over it, the one where Katy was her mother’s daughter and wanting was dangerous and walls were the only architecture that held.
“I hear you,” he said.
“I’m trying to protect you.”
“I know.”
He hung up and sat in the car. The Pacific went on being the Pacific. The pelican resurfaced with something silver in its beak.
His phone sat on the passenger seat. He could call Katy.
He had her number from the staff directory he’d accessed through the club’s system, an invasion of privacy he’d committed the first week she started and never used.
He could call her and ask: Is any of this true?
Are you telling people about us? He could walk into Haven tomorrow and talk to Maui, to Speedy, to whoever else worked the terrace, and ask them directly.
He didn’t.
He drove home. Stood at the bathroom mirror. Confronted his mother’s blue eyes in his own face and told himself this was protection. This was survival. This was the smart thing.
His reflection didn’t blink. Didn’t argue. Just offered back the soft eyes of a woman who’d died before she could teach her son that love wasn’t supposed to feel like a trap.
TWO WEEKS PASSED. KATY served his water and kept her eyes elsewhere, and he didn’t ask her to walk, and the jacaranda kept dropping its purple blossoms on the terrace like confetti at a funeral nobody had planned.
She was good at this, the invisibility. He’d observed her doing it with everyone else since the day she started.
The quiet voice. The downcast eyes. The body that folded into itself, taking up the minimum possible space, apologizing for existing.
She’d been doing it her whole life, he realized.
Surviving by being small. The only person she’d ever been big around was him, and he’d punished her for it, and now she was small again, and the loss of her boldness felt like someone blowing out a candle and not understanding until the room went dark how much light it had been throwing.
But she hadn’t quit. She came to work every shift. She served his table at three fifteen. She said anything else and he said no and she walked away. She didn’t cry. She didn’t sulk. She offered him nothing. No accusation, no hurt, no anger. Which was worse than all of those things combined.
And sometimes, when she thought he wasn’t paying attention, she offered him everything.
He caught it twice. Once when she was clearing a nearby table and her gaze drifted sideways to his face and lingered for three seconds before she corrected herself, and in those three seconds her face was unguarded and yearning and so full of wanting that his hand clenched under the table hard enough to ache.
Once more when she was walking past his table to the bar and he said “Thank you” for the water.
She flinched. A micro-movement, her shoulders tightening at the sound of his voice, and then she said “You’re welcome” without turning around, her voice perfectly professional, but her fingers on the tray had gone white.
She still wanted him. She was just trying very hard to survive it.
He knew the feeling.
PROM WAS IN THREE WEEKS.
Katy hadn’t thought about it. She’d been too busy not thinking about Julian, which was a full-time job that paid worse than Haven and offered no benefits except the grim satisfaction of her own composure.
She went to school. She went to work. She went home and ate dinner with Amy and sat through TV and went to bed and didn’t lie awake thinking about his hand on her bare skin or the sound he’d made against her shoulder or the rigid tension in his body when he’d pulled himself away from her, and if she was lying about that last part, at least she was lying well.
But prom was in three weeks, and Luke Dryer High School treated senior prom like other schools treated homecoming: committee meetings, decoration votes, theme announcements, the grinding buildup of an event that assumed everyone had someone to go with.
Katy didn’t have someone to go with. Katy had been to one school dance in her life and had stood against the wall for two hours without speaking to anyone because the music was loud and no one had asked her.
She didn’t care about prom. She told herself this firmly, repeatedly, with the conviction of a person who cared about prom very much.
Because prom was a night. A single night where you wore a dress and someone noticed you and you danced and for a few hours the world arranged itself into something that felt like a story, and Katy Gates, who had spent her entire life being the person nobody noticed, wanted to be seen.
Not by a boy at school. Not by a stranger.
By the man who sat at Table Nine every afternoon and pretended his laptop was more interesting than she was and gripped his water glass and pretended she didn’t set him on fire.
The idea arrived fully formed. She was going to ask Julian to prom.
The rational part of her brain, the part that paid bills and forged signatures and had kept Amy alive through the rehab year, screamed at her.
Screamed that he’d rejected her twice. That he’d called her a mistake.
That he’d put his hands under her shirt and then walked away without turning back.
That asking a twenty-nine-year-old billionaire to a high school prom was the most ridiculous, humiliating, doomed-from-the-start idea she’d ever had, and she’d once entered a pie-eating contest without knowing she was allergic to blueberries.
The other part of her brain, the part that made her say I pay attention to you and I don’t believe you and is this okay, the part that only existed around him, that part said: You felt his heart under your palm.
He’s in there, behind the wall, and he’s drowning, and you are the only person in his life brave enough to reach in.
She practiced in her bedroom mirror. “Would you like to go to prom with me?” Too formal.
“Want to come to my prom?” Too casual. “I know this is crazy, but.” She covered her face with both hands.
Every version sounded absurd. She was asking a man who owned a gaming empire and a penthouse forty-three floors above Wilshire to spend an evening in a high school gymnasium decorated with streamers and rented disco balls.
But she remembered that flash across his face, that fraction of a second of unguarded warmth when he’d appeared young and startled by his own amusement, and she wanted to give him a whole night of that.
A night where the gap between them didn’t matter and the walls came down and he let her in without the armor.
She was going to ask him. He was going to say no, and she was going to survive it like she’d survived everything else. Or he was going to say yes, and her life was going to change.
Either way, she was done being small.
SHE ASKED HIM ON A Thursday.
Three fifteen. His water. Two cubes. She set it on the table and didn’t walk away.
His attention lifted. She registered the moment his eyes processed that she was still standing there, that she hadn’t retreated, and his face went very still. Not the composure, not the hunger, but a suspended kind of stillness, like a man who’d just heard a sound he wasn’t sure he’d imagined.
“Senior prom is on the twenty-third,” she said. Her voice shook. She let it. “It’s at Luke Dryer. My school. It’ll be streamers and bad DJ music and a chocolate fountain that someone will definitely fall into. It’s nothing like anywhere you’d normally spend your evening.”
His eyes were on her. He didn’t blink.
“I want you to come with me.”
The words hung between them. Somewhere on the terrace, a glass clinked against a table and someone laughed, and the world went on being a world where people did normal things.
Katy stood at Table Nine with her tray against her chest like a shield and her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her fingertips.
“Katy.” His tone was stiff.
“You don’t have to answer now. I know it’s ridiculous.
I know you’re going to say no. But I had to ask because I am physically incapable of not being honest with you, and honestly, I want to dance with you.
” Her eyes stung. She blinked it back. “Just once. I want to have one night where you’re not running away from me. ”
His expression broke open. She’d never witnessed anything like it on his face. Unfinished, unguarded, like a man with his hand on a locked door, hearing a knock from the other side, wanting to open it and not trusting himself to.
He opened his mouth.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
Not no. Not yes. Something in between that kept the door cracked, and the light behind it was blinding.
“Okay,” she managed. “That’s...okay.”
She picked up his empty glass, turned, and walked three steps.
“Katy.”
She glanced over her shoulder.
He was absorbing her. His eyes in the jacaranda shade.
His hands flat on the table, very still, and on his face was an expression she couldn’t name.
Neither wall nor hunger but something between them, something that resembled a man standing at the edge of everything he feared while the girl he wanted walked away and he couldn’t decide if letting her go was protection or the worst mistake of his life.
“The chocolate fountain,” he said. “Which idiot is going to fall into it?”
Her heart slammed. “Probably me.”
His mouth tugged up. Just barely, just for a heartbeat, a warmth so brief and so real that it rearranged his entire face, made him seem young and startled and human, and she caught it, every microsecond of it, and it hit her so hard her knees went soft.
She walked back to the bar with her pulse in her throat and a wild, reckless, probably doomed hope blooming in her chest. He hadn’t said no. He’d asked about the chocolate fountain. He’d smiled at her, even if he hadn’t meant to.
She was in so much trouble.