Page 15 of Give In to Me
“A fixation,” she repeated flatly.
“You tracked my schedule. You memorized my drink order. You engineered a job at my club specifically to be near me.” He recited the facts without inflection, each one landing with the accuracy of a lawyer’s closing argument, and she heard Dionne in every syllable. The cadence. The framing. Innocent things rearranged into something that sounded pathological. “You told your coworkers I was wrapped around your finger. You bragged about a relationship that doesn’t exist.”
“I never said any of that.”
“Your sister—”
“My sister is lying.”
The words came out of her hard and certain, and she felt them connect, felt the faintest crack in the nothing, and then it sealed over and he kept going, as though she hadn’t spoken.
“I should have drawn a clearer line from the beginning. I didn’t, and that’s my fault. But the line is here now.” His gaze met hers across the white tablecloth, across the distance he was building between them word by word, and his voice was even, toneless, a man signing a contract he’d already decided on. “You’re a server. I’m a member. That’s all this has ever been, and it’s all it’s ever going to be.”
“And the garden?” She hadn’t meant to say it. But the words were out, and she didn’t take them back. “And the grove? Your mouth on my skin and your hands on my body and how you went rigid when you pulled away, like it was costing you everything you had. Was that a member-server interaction?”
“It was a mistake I’ve already acknowledged.”
“You didn’t just acknowledge it. Youlivedit. You lived it twice. You asked me to walk with you. You held me against a tree and put your hand under my shirt and I felt your heart beating so fast I thought you were going to collapse, and you’re standing here telling me that wasnegligence?”
“Katy—”
“Don’t.” Her voice cracked. She heard it crack and she hated it, hated that he’d found the frequency that made her composure shatter, because she’d been so careful, and all it took was her own name in his mouth to split her open. She set her jaw. Held. Let the crack seal. “Don’t say my name like you know me and then tell me I’m nobody.”
He said nothing. The silence was a wall of its own, and he stood behind it with his flat eyes and his rehearsed speech and his still, still hands.
“I’m going to ask you something,” she said. Her voice was level again. Barely. “And I need you to answer honestly. Not the script. Not whatever Dionne fed you. Honestly.”
He stood there. Waiting.
“Do you feel nothing?” Green to blue, unflinching. “When you look at me right now, in this moment, do you feel nothing?”
Three seconds of silence. The jacaranda blossoms drifting. The clink of a fork on a plate somewhere behind her. His eyes on her face, and behind the nothing, behind the flat, rehearsed composure, a caged hunger straining against the bars he’d built around it, and she sensed it. She knew it was there because her body was a tuning fork calibrated to his frequency and no amount of composure on his part could stop the vibration from reaching her.
“No,” he answered. “I don’t.”
The lie was so total, so complete, so perfectly delivered that for one terrible second she believed him. Not because it was convincing. Because she was tired. Because believing him was easier than fighting him, and fighting him was the only thing she’d been doing for weeks, and she was nineteen years old and she’d been carrying things since she was nine. Amy’s pills and the rent checks and the school forms and the weight of a family that never wanted her. She was so, so tired of holding things that didn’t want to be held.
The second passed. She didn’t believe him.
But she was done trying to make him believe himself.
“Okay,” she said. Soft. Final. Not an agreement. A release. “Okay, Julian.”
One last time. She let herself take in the eyes that had settled on her face fourteen months ago and rearranged her entire understanding of what it felt like to be seen. The mouth that had kissed her against a wall and under a tree and tasted like iced coffee and wanting. The hands that had found her waist and her ribs and stayed there, and were now so perfectly motionless at his sides that the effort of it must have been unspeakable.
“You’re wrong about me,” she told him. Not angry. Not pleading. Just the truth, delivered with the same flatness he’d used on her, because if he could wield composure like a weapon then she could too. “Everything Dionne told you is a lie. And somewhere inside that fortress you’ve built, you know it. But you’d rather believe her than trust me, because trusting me means letting me in, and letting me in means I could hurt you, and you’ve decided that being alone is safer than being loved by someone who sees you.”
His expression didn’t waver. His hands stayed at his sides.
“I see you, Julian.” Without flinching. “I’ve seen you from the first second. And I know you see me too. I know it because your voice breaks when you say my name and you learned the crack in my Tupperware lid before I ever told you a single thing about myself. But you’ve made your choice. So I’ll make mine.”
She put down the cloth. Straightened her polo. Smoothed one hand over her hair, the red hair that had been catching the three-fifteen light for him a hundred times, and she turned and she walked.
Across the terrace. Past Table Five. Past Table Twelve. Past the bar where Maui stood frozen with wide eyes and a dropped fork still on the ground. Through the service door, into the back hallway where the fluorescent buzzed overhead and the walls were beige and the air smelled like kitchen grease and the world was ugly and small and not the jacaranda-shadowed paradise she’d been living in for the past month.
The locker room was empty. She sat down on the bench where the staff kept their bags and put her hands in her lap and studied them.
Both of them were trembling. A fine, violent tremor that she observed with the detached fascination of a girl who’d spent her whole life keeping herself together and had just discovered the exact weight it took to pull her apart.
