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)
“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.