Flirting With Disaster (11 page)

“That’s kind of fucked up.”

“Yep.”

“You didn’t ask her?”

Sean didn’t reply.

“Don’t even tell me you still aren’t talking to her.”

“Even if I were, I wouldn’t have asked her. She was pretty pissed at me for k-kissing her. I didn’t exactly get permission.”

He thought of the hot challenge in her eyes when she’d put her foot up on the chair to strap her shoe on. Her naked leg and the flash of pink panties she’d given him.

The back of his skull hit the wall with a dull thud.

“You want my advice?” Mike asked. “Give it up, man. I know it can’t be easy for you, dealing with all your shit back home, but you’re not going to figure it out just by hanging around there. It’s messing with your head. I can come out and pack up your mom’s stuff, or we can hire somebody to do it. You need to get out of there and focus on what’s really important.”

There was no arguing with him. Even this week, when the business needed him, he’d been staying up late every night, trawling cyberspace for data about Judah Pratt. His brain felt sludgy, off-kilter from too much coffee and too much Camelot, Ohio.

“You know what people ssay to me, everywhere I go?” he asked. “They say, ‘Sean! You grew!’ ”

Mike snorted. “No arguing with that.”

“It’s been more than a decade, Mikey. You’d think they’d get over it. But no, every time I leave the house, I have to hear about it. I stop at the post office to mail something, and B-bev behind the counter says, ‘Sean! I can’t get over how tall you are. I thought you’d never hit your growth spurt.’ ”

“People don’t forget anything there.”

Sean nodded his head in agreement.

Rolling the ball back and forth between his knees, Mike said, “You know she’s just a girl, right?” Mike asked.

Sean stiffened. “Drop it.”

“She’s an average small-town girl. Kinda pretty, but nothing special. She’s not worth it.”

Katie wasn’t just a girl. She
was
special. She was kind and open-hearted, and he’d been awful to her.

The next time he saw her, he would talk. If he sounded like shit, it was no worse than he deserved.

“Drop it,” he repeated. He snagged the ball from under Mike’s knee.

“Well, if you’re going to be in love with her, can you do something about it? Can you get her into bed or ask her out, or at least talk to her? Because it’s kind of painful watching you suck at this from the other side of the country.”

“I’m not in love with her, and I
am
doing something,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out Pratt.”

Sean would solve this one last puzzle for Caleb, pack up the house, and sell it. Apologize to Katie and show her he could behave like a normal human being, albeit a stammering one.

Then he would get the hell out of Dodge. Get back where his tongue worked and he knew who he was.

“What about him are you trying to figure out?”

“What he wants from Katie.”

Mike ran his hands over his head again. “I thought you said he wanted to get in her pants.”

“No,” Sean said. “That’s the weird thing. He acted like he d-did, but I’m pretty sure Judah Pratt is gay.”

Katie raised her torso off the floor for another crunch, singing along to “I Will Survive,” which she’d turned all the way up to eleven for therapeutic purposes.

“I hate this song,” her brother complained from his position holding her feet. “More than all the other songs that have ever been recorded put together.”

“You just have a problem—”
Crunch
. “—with female empowerment.”
Crunch
.

Caleb shook his head wearily. His gray T-shirt was dark with sweat. He’d dragged himself out of Ellen’s bed at six a.m. to run on the treadmill in his basement while Katie used the stair-climber, had spotted her while she lifted weights, and here he was counting her crunches—all evidence of the fact that her brother had no issues whatsoever with female empowerment. She knew she shouldn’t give him such a hard time, but she’d woken up feeling sassy, and this song epitomized her mental state.

Her best self was rising from the ashes of the Louisville debacle. Yes, she’d walked out before completing her first assignment as a security guard. Yes, she’d sucked at casual sex. Yes, it was taking her longer than anticipated to flush all stray thoughts of the inscrutable Sean Owens out of her head.

But she wouldn’t give up. Being your best self was an ongoing project. You couldn’t let the little setbacks throw you. You had to drag yourself out of bed and throw yourself at your workout. You had to badger your brother into giving you a new assignment. You had to—

“Time for push-ups,” Caleb said. “With the medicine ball.”

“You’re evil.”

He smiled. “If you let me pick out the music, you can do normal ones. Hell, you can do the girl ones with your knees bent if we can listen to Pearl Jam.”

“Not a chance.”

Katie found the medicine ball and began a set of push-ups, rolling the ball from one hand to the other so each dip became an exercise in core stabilization. She hated these, just loathed them. But then Beyoncé came on, demanding that her cheating boyfriend put all his worldly possessions in a box to the left, and that cheered her up.

“I take it back,” Caleb said from the space at the bottom of the stairs, where he was doing one-armed pull-ups from the bar he’d mounted on the ceiling. “I hate this song more.”

Katie smiled and sang louder.

The doorbell rang upstairs. Caleb dropped to the floor. “Expecting anybody?”

“At seven thirty in the morning?”

“I’ll see who it is.”

Katie did another push-up and geared up for the chorus. It was probably just one of the neighbors letting them know the garbage cans had gotten knocked over or something. They had friendly neighbors, and everybody knew Caleb got up early because he was Mr. Army Guy.

Though he’d been out of the army more than a year now.

Since Caleb was no longer around to see her cheat, she skipped the last five push-ups and got on the treadmill, turning off the music in favor of the wall-mounted TV. She liked to watch the celebrity gossip while she cooled down.

After a few minutes, she heard the door at the top of the stairs open, and Caleb said, “Katie, can you come up here?”

“Why, what’s up?”

“Sean’s here. He wants you.”

She misstepped, kicked the plastic guard in front of the treadmill belt, and fell over. Luckily, she’d clipped the emergency shut-off thingy to her shorts, or she would have shot off the end of the treadmill like a cartoon character. Instead, she landed in an inelegant pile of limbs at the end of the belt, one arm still clinging to the safety rail.

Katie Clark: World’s Least Coordinated Woman.

“I’ll be right up,” she said, grateful Sean didn’t have X-ray vision. So far as she knew.

He stood by the couch, leather jacket draped over one arm, and he looked larger in her living room, rougher and ever-so-slightly scarier than she remembered him. She wished fervently she were wearing a shirt over her sweaty red sports bra.

“Have a seat,” Caleb said to Sean.

“Excuse me for a second,” Katie said to both of them.

She nipped into her bedroom and pulled a T-shirt out of the closet. No way was she going to sit down shirtless in front of Sean Owens. She was in good shape, but nobody was in
that
good a shape. Things would fold over other things. Pieces of her would bulge unattractively. But
they would do it underneath a T-shirt, as nature had intended.

When she reemerged, Caleb disappeared into the kitchen, saying, “I’ll make some coffee.”

Left alone with Granite Man. He handed her a stack of papers bound with a black clip.

“What’s this?” she asked, flipping through the pages as she collapsed onto Caleb’s beat-up leather chair opposite Sean, who took a seat on the matching sofa.

“A report,” he said.

Katie’s head snapped up. “Whoa. Did you just talk to me? Voluntarily?”

Sean said, “Yes.”

She had no idea what he was doing here, she didn’t know why he’d started talking to her, and she didn’t know why it made her happy. But it did.

This didn’t bode well for her ability to forget he existed.

“Will wonders never cease?”

“Juh-just read it.”

She did. She stopped wondering soon enough, distracted by the document. “This is all about Judah?”

He didn’t answer.

She read. Caleb brought two cups of coffee and left them alone in the room. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she registered the sound of the shower coming on in the master bath off his bedroom.

“How did you get this stuff?” she asked after a few minutes.

“Hacked it.”

That got her attention. “Hacked it, as in the computer kind of hacking?”

“Is there another k-k-kind?”

“You’re a hacker.” Now she was just repeating herself like a moron, but it wasn’t as if she’d ever met a hacker before. She felt like she’d dropped into a movie.

Of course, she was also being charm-stalked by a celebrity. Her life had taken a turn toward the surreal a few weeks ago. Sean turning out to be the sort of computer genius who could do shady code-slinging things probably shouldn’t surprise her. Wasn’t that what geeks did in college? Flirt with the dark side?

She could see him in her mind’s eye, hunched over a keyboard in the dark. Total
concentration. Ruthless determination.

“I
wuh-was
a hacker,” he clarified.

“Until when, a few hours ago?”

Sean shrugged. One corner of his mouth curved up into the closest thing to a pleasant expression she’d ever seen on his face. He looked almost human.

She turned her eyes to the papers he’d brought again, but her concentration wasn’t all it should be. His voice was wrong. He sounded nervous, but he didn’t look nervous. He looked … well, she wasn’t going to think about how he looked. Not nervous, anyway.

“Why do you sound so worried when you’re not?”

The line between Sean’s eyebrows deepened into a crevasse. “I sss—” He stopped, closed his eyes, and sighed. “I have p-p-problems t-talking.”

“No, you don’t,” she said automatically.

Sean didn’t open his eyes. “I have problems t-talking to ssssome p-p-people,” he clarified.

He stuttered. That was what he’d tried to say.

Sean stuttered, but only in front of some people. “Including me?” she asked, knowing even as she said it this was a worthless question, a filler while her brain took a few more precious seconds to decide what to think about what he’d just told her.

Because she’d heard him talk to quite a few people. A dozen or more. And she’d never heard him stutter before.

When he nodded, the furrow between his eyebrows was so deep it looked painful.

“I’m sssorry,” he said. “I sh-should have t-told you.”

She wanted to ask him why.
Why didn’t you? Why do I make you stutter?
Or
Why didn’t you just say so to begin with and save me all the wondering?
It wasn’t as if she would have cared.

Stutter away!
she might have said.
Just fucking
talk
to me
.

But then he opened his eyes, and everything about him was wary, his shoulders tense and his jaw tight and storms flashing in his blue irises.

He didn’t like this. He didn’t like being here, he didn’t like talking to her, and he especially didn’t like talking to her about having trouble talking to her.

“It’s okay.” She wasn’t sure what else to say. She looked down at her lap, wanting to
offer him something, some acknowledgment of how flattered she was to finally hear his voice directed at her. “Thanks for doing it now,” she said. “It’s, uh. It’s nice. Talking to you, I mean.”

Sean’s face went blank, and he looked out the window. Apparently, he didn’t return the sentiment.

She went back to reading the report, sipping her coffee and wondering what kind of dork thanked somebody for talking to her.

He’d gathered a lot of information in a few days. A rundown of all the rumors about Judah, how long they’d been around, what the sources were. A list of people who seemed to hate him, and some speculation as to why.

Turning the page to a new section, she sucked in a quick breath. “Hoo! How many laws did you break to get your hands on this stuff?”

“Some t-terms of use. G-guidelines. No laws.”

“You’re not counting the Ten Commandments?”

Sean made a derisive noise. “No.”

“Don’t even try to tell me this is a moral gray area,” she said, delighted. Some of what he’d given her to read was public information, but a lot of it must have come from closed archives and personal accounts. Personal accounts he’d
hacked
.

“Charcoal, maybe,” Sean replied, and he sounded so different, she glanced away from the report. What she saw shocked the hell out of her.

He was smiling. Sitting on her couch, looking relaxed and mighty fine in an unbuttoned blue oxford shirt worn loose over a gray T-shirt and jeans, Sean Owens was smiling at her, and he stole her reason for a remarkably large handful of seconds.

When he smiled, laugh lines crinkled up that she hadn’t even noticed were there. His cheeks creased. His teeth gleamed, white and even. He had a dimple on one side, and kind eyes, and a beautiful, beautiful mouth.

He wasn’t a rock at all. He was a man.

A very hot man.

She’d known that already, but she kept forgetting, and he kept bludgeoning her over the head with it when she least expected.

Flustered, Katie returned to her reading. It took her a while to find the groove again, but the last section was riveting.

The last page was astonishing.

“Let me make sure I have this right,” she said finally, setting the report aside and meeting Sean’s steady gaze. “What you came here to tell me is, basically, two things: (a) Judah Pratt is gay, and (b) someone is kind of sort of threatening to kill him.”

He nodded.

She smiled.

“You’re going to think I’m a terrible person for saying this,” she told him. “But that is
such
a relief.”

Sean raised his coffee cup to his lips, which made it difficult for Katie to decide if it was her imagination or if he was indeed struggling not to smile again.