Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
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, 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.