Her feet kept moving because her body was smarter than her brain, and her brain had gone white and blank and useless. A year of imagining this moment and she had pictured herself composed, casual, a girl who happened to work at the same club where a man she’d met once also happened to spend his afternoons. She hadn’t pictured the tray rattling because her hands were full of electricity, or her pulse climbing so high she could hear it in her ears like a second heartbeat.
She served Tables Three through Seven. She smiled at Mrs. Callahan. She refilled Mr. Drummond’s sparkling water. She did her job, and she did it well, and she didn’t glance at Table Nine for eleven minutes.
On the twelfth minute, she glanced.
He was already focused on her.
Not his laptop.
Not his phone.
But on her.
Katy.
His gaze tracked her path across the terrace with an intensity that made the hair on her arms stand up. And when her eyes collided with his, he didn’t flinch. He didn’t break away. He kept her there, pinned, across thirty feet of jacaranda shade, and the heat on his face was the same heat from her eighteenth birthday. The same dark expansion of his pupils. Only this time he wasn’t shutting it down. This time he was justdrinking her in, openly, like he’d been doing it for a while and had stopped pretending he wasn’t.
Three seconds. Four. Five.
Then his mouth flattened. He dropped his gaze back to the laptop screen, and his hand went to his water glass and gripped it until the tendons stood out along his wrist.
Her lungs forgot how to work. Her skin felt tight and hot, and there was that warmth again, the low pulse in her belly that she’d first felt in her bedroom a year ago replaying his attention, ten times stronger now because he was thirty feet away and he’d just taken her in likethat, in broad daylight, and she didn’t know what to do with the information except hold it against her chest and try not to come apart.
She served him for the first time that afternoon. Walked to his table with fresh water, two cubes of ice because she’d noticed him accept exactly two from the server on Tuesday and filed the information in a part of her brain she refused to examine.
“Can I get you anything else?”
“No.”
One word.
But his voice was different than it had been on her birthday. Lower. Rougher at the edges, like he’d scraped it against something on the way out. And he wasn’t attending to his laptop. He was taking in her hands on the tray, then her wrists, then the strip of skin above her collar where her pulse was hammering so hard she was certain he could see it. His gaze stayed there. On her throat. On the place where her blood was beating visibly under her skin. And his eyes went dark again, that blown-pupil heat, and she felt it land on her neck like a warm hand, and her knees almost buckled.
She should have walked away. She was a person who walked away. She was a person who saidthank youandhave a nice dayand didn’t make eye contact with strangers on the bus.
“You haven’t eaten today.”
The words came out of her mouth without permission. She heard herself say them and wanted to dissolve into the terrace stone.
His gaze traveled up. All the way up, from her throat to her face, and the journey across those few inches of skin left a trail of heat so acute she felt her flush climb in its wake, pink blooming from her collarbone to her ears. His eyes registered her. Nother uniform. Not her tray.Her.The red hair she’d pinned back. The freckles across her nose that no amount of concealer could conquer. Her face, which she knew wasn’t a face that belonged at Haven Country Club, because the women here had cheekbones that could cut paper and skin that cost more monthly than Katy’s rent.
“I’m not hungry,” he said, his voice pitched so low she almost didn’t catch it. He seemed to hear the drop himself, because his nostrils flared and he turned away, annoyed at his own body for betraying him.
“The kitchen does a really good club sandwich. Turkey, avocado, no mayo unless you ask. I probably shouldn’t be recommending things, it’s my first week, I don’t actually know if it’s good. I haven’t tried it. Staff eats in the back.”
She knew she was rambling, but somehow...she just couldn’t stop.
“But it looks good? When it goes past me on the tray?”
His mouth moved. Not a smile, but close, his lips tugging up for a fraction of a second before he killed it. That half-second of warmth made him appear younger, less guarded, and the beauty of it hit her so hard she lost the rest of her sentence.
“You memorize the menu, too?” Low. Almost amused. The roughness was still there, underneath.
“They make us. First week thing.” She was a girl who barely spoke in class, who let group partners present without her, who once whispered her own coffee order so softly the barista asked her to repeat it three times.
And yet here she was, chattering at Julian Ventura about club sandwiches while he contemplated her with those gas-flame eyes and his voice did things to her nervous system that should require a medical disclaimer.
“Sorry. You said you’re not hungry. I’ll stop.”
