Except she couldn’t stop thinking about him.
Not just his face, but how he’dtaken her in.
The drop of his gaze to her mouth.
His pupils blowing wide before he’d shut it down.
She was eighteen and she’d never been kissed and she didn’t fully understand what she’d read on his face, but her body understood. Her body had cataloged every microsecond of thatattention and was replaying it on a loop behind her eyelids every time she closed her eyes, and the replay came with heat, a low warm pulse in her belly that she didn’t have a word for because nothing in her experience had prepared her for a man studying her throat and making her feel it hours later in her own bedroom in the dark.
His name sat in her mouth for days.
Julian Ventura.
She said it once, alone in her bedroom, just to feel how it sounded, and then buried her face in her pillow because she was eighteen and ridiculous and this was exactly the sort of thing her mother had done and look how that turned out.
Amy had fallen for Harrison Gates the same way. Fast, total, with a certainty that rational people called reckless and Amy called love. Harrison had already divorced Phyllis by then, but that hadn’t stopped him from treating Amy like a convenience and Katy like a footnote. The smallest possible alimony. No birthday calls. No holidays. Amy’s heart had broken so completely that she’d spent years trying to numb it with things that came in bottles and plastic bags, and Katy had learned to cook dinner at nine and forge her mother’s signature on school forms at twelve and never, ever count on a man who made your pulse race.
She Googled him anyway.
Julian Ventura. Twenty-eight. Founder and CEO of Gubat, a gaming company that had made him a billionaire before most people his age had finished paying off student loans. An MMORPG empire that spawned book franchises and movie deals. The articles called him “reclusive” and “notoriouslyprivate.” One gossip piece called him “the most eligible ghost in Los Angeles.” There were almost no photographs. A conference panel where his face was half-turned. A charity gala shot where he was leaving the frame, seized mid-stride, his profile sharp against the flashbulbs. She’d studied that profile for so long her phone screen went dark and she’d had to tap it back to life with a finger that wasn’t quite still.
THE MONTHS PASSED.
The crush didn’t.
Katy went back to Haven every month for Dionne’s lunches and scanned the terrace every time. She wore the green dress that made her eyes something worth noticing and told herself she was just hungry for the cobb salad, which was a lie so transparent she almost laughed.
He wasn’t there in July. He wasn’t there in August. In September, she thought she recognized his profile near the valet stand, and her entire body lit up and then the man turned and it was no one, a stranger with the wrong face, and the crash that followed left her hollow for a week.
She went back to school that fall. Junior year, a year late, because she’d taken the previous year off to care for Amy during the worst of the rehab. The pills and then the withdrawal and then the long, ugly crawl back to something resembling a person. Katy had cooked and cleaned and driven her mother to meetings and held Amy’s hair back on the bad nights and lied to the school about a family emergency, which wasn’t entirely a lie. She’d lost a year. She didn’t regret it. Amy was clean now, one year and counting, a paralegal by day and a student by night, and Katywas proud of her mother in the fierce, private way of a girl who’d learned to parent her own parent.
But school felt different now. The other juniors were seventeen, and Katy was eighteen, and the gap felt wider than a single year. She sat in the back of her classes and did her homework and ate lunch alone with a book and saidsorrywhen someone bumped into her and thought about Julian Ventura approximately four hundred times a day.
October. Dionne’s lunch. He wasn’t there.
November. He wasn’t there either.
December. He wasn’t there still.
Katy ate her salad in the thin winter light and surveyed the empty terrace and finally asked the waiter, casually, while Dionne was in the restroom: “Is Mr. Ventura a regular here?”
Her own voice startled her. She never asked strangers questions. She once let a barista give her the wrong order rather than say something.
The waiter gave her the polite blankness of a man trained not to answer questions about members. “I’m not able to discuss our members, miss.”
“Of course. Sorry. I’m sorry.” Too many sorrys. She flushed and considered her plate.
She left it. She didn’t leave it. She sat in her car after lunch and pulled up the club’s website on her phone and found the employment page and saw the listing for a terrace server, part-time, and her heart rate did something medically concerning.
Amy didn’t need Katy hovering anymore. Katy was nineteen now, finishing junior year, and her school schedule left afternoons free. She had the time. She had the availability. She had a reason that she wrapped in a practical excuse and presented to herself like a gift: good tips, flexible hours, a foot in the door at a nice establishment.
She applied the next morning. They called her within a week.
THE FIRST TIME SHEsaw Julian Ventura at Haven as a staff member and not a guest, she was carrying a tray of Veuve Clicquot across the terrace and he was sitting at Table Nine.
Corner of the terrace. The spot where the jacaranda threw its afternoon shade and the light came through in purple-gold pieces. Laptop open, iced water untouched, his attention on a screen. He sat alone. He always did.
She didn’t drop the tray. She wanted credit for that.
