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evenings—”
    “You call and you come,” Kat’s mother snapped in her inimitable style.
    “Yes, I sure will,” he assured her. “When things slow down, I’ll call.”
    But he wouldn’t call. He absolutely would not call. Kat watched him pocket the card, watched the entire interaction with an ambivalent look on her face. Oh, her glorious curls and those lovely pouting lips he wanted to kiss.
    Run, you idiot. Run.
    Forget it. It’s too late.

Chapter Three
     
    It took over a week for Kat to get back on her feet. Then she started work from home, which was impossible with all the noise, so she returned to working at the office probably sooner than she should have. Her stitches itched and her bruises were tender. She went straight to bed after work, no nightclubs. Her beloved club shoes were tainted by misfortune and went out with the trash.
    She still thought about him, though, in no small part because her mother muttered often about the fact that he didn’t call. Kat tried not to care, but each time she stood at the top of a flight of stairs, she felt the loss of him. She waited for it to happen again, some random accident in the random world that flummoxed her. Wouldn’t he be sorry when her next stair debacle turned fatal because he wasn’t there? Escalators with their sharp, scary teeth were impossible for her to cope with. She took elevators whenever she could and convinced herself he was just an asshole. Just one more of those club guys, not worth obsessing over. She forced herself to stop thinking about him and actually tried to convince herself she hated him. She threw away his silly paper animals so she didn’t have to look at them, then fished them out of the trash and stowed them in a shoebox under the bed because she couldn’t bear to lose them.
    On difficult days, when the textbook translation was boring and her family was annoying her to tears, she’d pull out the box and pore over the origami figures he’d made. The folds and corners were so delicate and precise. Little flaps and notches, each perfectly symmetrical and balanced, like him. She would trace the folds as if to trace the fingers that had run over them. Some of the newspaper ink blurred along the edges. Had his fingers done that? Or hers, tracing again and again? She imbued the paper figurines with an emotional gravity she was sure they didn’t have.
    She just needed to go back out to the clubs. She needed the eardrum-bursting music, the hot press of party people. But to return to that place where she’d surely see him, where she’d have to navigate those stairs—it seemed the most self-destructive of choices.
    But then, she was a self-destructive person. It took less than three weeks for her to break down and return to Masquerade because she simply couldn’t stay away. She refused to admit to herself that he was the reason, that she really wanted to see him again. She convinced herself it was only the atmosphere she missed, and the promise of more empty but comforting sex.
    When she got there it felt strangely different. She felt like an outsider for the first time in a long time. She wandered around for a while, then retreated to her place at the top of the stairs, navigating the concrete steps gingerly. The blood was long gone, of course, and now the stairs had some kind of nonslip rubber material on them. Some other girls were standing in her spot. Damn it. She leaned on the railing farther down and her gaze swept the dance floor. Lots of new faces but a few familiar ones too.
    But not him. Relax , she told herself. You didn’t come here to see him. She could have asked one of the bouncers where Ryan was but she was way too embarrassed to do that. Even now, she thought they were looking at her funny. Why is she back here? I hope she doesn’t fall down the stairs again. She needed to get out of there before she went crazy, but she needed to find a man first.
    She made her way down to the dance floor and found a hot prospect