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)
Her mother did the same thing.
He thought about the grove. I’ve tried for a year now. I’ve tried really hard, and I can’t. The break in her voice. The crimson flush. Her fingers on his jaw, light and uncertain, so that he’d felt the flutter of her courage against his skin.
That was not a performance. He knew what performances resembled. He’d grown up inhabiting one. The careful choreography of a boy pretending he didn’t know his brother existed, pretending he didn’t read every article about Luciano Salvatore, pretending the name on his birth certificate was the one he’d been born with.
But Dionne was her sister. Dionne knew her better than he did. Dionne had been the one constant in Katy’s fractured family, monthly lunches and birthday texts and bags of hand-me-down clothes. Why would Dionne lie?
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.