Flirting With Disaster (17 page)

Katie raised her eyes to his. “Holy shit,” she said. “Sean. Oh my gosh, Sean,
look
at you.” She placed one palm flat on his chest, over his heart, and he knocked it away.

“Don’t p-p-play with me,” he warned her. “We’re going to be p-partners. That’s all.”

A perplexed frown knit the space between her eyebrows. “You were hitting on me in the car.”

“I knuh-know.”

“And at my house, right? I didn’t just make that up?”

He shook his head, disgusted with himself. “I wuh-was. Buh-but I
sh-shouldn’t
have.
We’re not g-going to watch m-movies together, and we’re not going to ffflirt, and we’re
not
g-going to sleep together.”

Katie’s gaze slid below his waist and held there for a moment, then meandered its way back up. When she met his eyes, hers held a single question.
Why not?

He looked away from her and counted to twenty. It didn’t help. “I’m luh-leaving t-town.”

“What? When?”

“Ssoon. When we ffinish the c-c-case.”

“Why?”

“I have a juh-job b-back in C-c-california. A c-computer sssecurity c-company I ruh-run. I nuh-need to g-get b-back to it.”

The furrowed forehead again. “I thought you’d moved back to Camelot.”

Sean shook his head. “N-no. I’m juh-just … It’s t-temporary, the juh-job with your brother. I’m
luh-leaving
. So I d-d-don’t wuh-want to …” He raised his arms out to the side, palms flat, a gesture that encompassed his bare-chested self and her compromising outfit. The room. The bed. The entire situation. “I d-don’t
wuh-want
to.”

Katie flinched, but Sean couldn’t think of any way to take it back without actually taking it back.

“You’re being a gentleman.”

“Sssort of.”

“Don’t. The last thing I need—the absolute
last
thing—is for you to be a gentleman. You know, people do have meaningless flings. It’s a thing. I keep hearing about it from, like, every form of popular culture ever.”

“N-no.”

She crossed her arms and took a step back. The confidence had drained out of her, and she looked younger. Smaller. “You’re confusing.”

“I know.” He sighed. “I’m ssorry. It’s c-c-complicated.” He clenched his hands into tight fists. It was even harder to keep from touching her when she looked so bewildered and hurt. Hard not to comfort her, but he knew where that would lead.

“It’s really not.” She fiddled with the ties to her pajama bottoms. “The way I remember it, it’s super simple. Kind of an Insert-Tab-A-into-Slot-B thing. I might be remembering wrong, though. I haven’t had sex in almost two years.”

Two years
. She hadn’t been with anyone since Levi—which meant she probably hadn’t been with anyone
but
Levi—and now she wanted him, and he was turning her down. He was out of his fucking mind.

“Fffind someone else.” Even as he said it, the thought of her having sex with another man made him homicidal.

She lowered her eyes to the carpet. “No,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I think I’m all tapped out.”

Slowly, it sank in.

First Levi, then Judah, now him. The third man in a row to tell Katie she wasn’t good enough. She’d gathered up her courage and come over here, maybe not throwing herself at him but at least open to the possibility. She’d done it because he’d
encouraged
her to, the way he’d talked to her at her house, and in the car. And now he was turning her down.

Not gently, either. Badly. Clumsily.

“I’m ssss—” He couldn’t make the word come out, but he had to. She deserved a decent apology. He tried again. “I ap-p-p—”

She flapped a hand and turned her back on him. “Don’t worry about it. You want a drink?” She popped the cork out of the wine and poured two measures into the mugs. “Hope you don’t mind, I already started the bottle. Liquid courage and all that.” Turning toward him, she lifted one mug in invitation.

“I n-n-need a sh-shower.”

“Yeah, I noticed. Well, it’ll be here.” She put one mug down on the table and settled onto the couch with her own drink. The remote was on the coffee table, and she lifted it, turned on the TV, and began flicking through channels.

“Go shower, Sean,” she said after a moment.

He didn’t move. He couldn’t figure out why she was still in the room, much less talking to him.

Katie raised the mug to her lips and drank down the contents in four long gulps. She wiped the back of her hand over her mouth and sighed.

“You don’t want me,” she said without turning around. “It’s not a crime. I know I’m not, like, centerfold material. It’s fine. We’ll watch kung fu movies and work our way through this bottle of wine. You’ll stay on your side of the couch, I’ll stay on mine, and by the time I go to
bed after three or four hours of Jackie Chan, we’ll be friends, and I’ll be able to sleep.”

He stared blankly at the back of her head.

Balls. Katie had
balls
.

She went through life with her heart on her sleeve, saying what she meant, telling people how she felt, what she wanted, what she needed, and she got slapped for it. But she didn’t let it set her back.

He couldn’t remember ever having been like that. Not one day in his life had he been that unguarded.

She found the right channel, and the screen filled up with a young Jackie Chan wearing a tank top, high-waisted jeans, and what looked like a woman’s belt while he beat the crap out of three bad guys.

“Take a shower,” she said flatly. “I don’t want to sit by myself in my room feeling like a complete waste of space, okay?”

He didn’t know what to say, so he grabbed some clothes from his bag and headed for the bathroom, leaving her alone, bathed in the flickering light of the television.

“Pass me the bottle,” Sean said.

Katie leaned forward and hooked the wine bottle off the coffee table with two fingers. She handed it over, careful not to touch him, and smiled at the image of Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan, drunk as skunks in two Old West bathtubs.

“This scene is totally homoerotic,” she said.

Sean poured himself a few inches of wine. “Nothing homoerotic about it. The side-by-side bathtub scene is a c-classic.”

“Right. Two guys naked in tubs, a few feet apart, and you’re telling me they’re not thinking about doing each other?”

“It’s just efficient. There was only so much hot water, and somebody had to fetch it and c-carry it. They might as well both bathe at once. And anyway, they’re going to do the prostitutes after they get c-cleaned up.”

“Maybe, but they’ll still be thinking about doing each other. Like in
Brokeback Mountain
. All those lonely hours on the range …”

She glanced at him. He was grinning, his teeth half hidden behind the cup he’d raised to his lips. “You’re the expert,” he said.

“On what?”

“Gay subtext.”

She threw a pillow at his head and succeeded in knocking it against his cup, causing wine to slosh on his hand. He slurped it off, laughing.

“Give it back,” she said, holding out her hand.

He obligingly leaned over to retrieve the pillow and handed it back to her. Katie shoved it into the crack between the back of the couch and the arm and settled her head against it, relaxing.

This was better. She’d created a disaster, but now she’d fixed it with the wine and a bunch of smart-ass jokes while they watched the movies.

Sean had come out of the shower, all wet hair and lean muscle packed into track pants and a clean T-shirt, and she’d stayed on her side of the couch as promised. He smelled
unbelievably good, and he looked even better, but whatever. She’d shamed herself enough for one decade. She would make the first move again when hell froze over—and even then, she’d pick Beelzebub over Sean. The devil probably wasn’t too choosy about his sex partners.

It had taken more than an hour for the sick rush of shame in her veins to subside, the knot in her stomach to loosen and relax in a wash of wine. But now, sitting beside Sean in the darkened room, she felt okay again.
Almost
okay. Kind of wrung out, her eyes squinty and aching as if she’d been crying, but fine.

She would survive.

The disappointing thing was that she could see, in the wake of discovering she wasn’t going to get sex, that her interest in Sean wasn’t entirely
about
sex. She wanted to know what his deal was, what made him tick. Like the whole thing with having a company in California that he planned to go back to. He’d been in Camelot for months already. He worked for Caleb. Did Caleb know? What was the story there?

And the on-again, off-again stutter. She couldn’t figure it out.

Such an old, bad habit of hers, trying to figure everybody out. What made them tick, how she could make them confide in her. What they needed and whether she could give it to them. Useful when she’d been a bartender and when she needed to put Wild Ride clients at ease, but it wouldn’t get her anywhere in her efforts to become her best self.

Whatever
. Her best self could have the night off. A woman could handle only so much defeat without taking some time to recuperate. In the meantime, she’d default to the old Katie and indulge her curiosity.

“Hey, Sean?” she asked when the movie went to a commercial break.

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You already are.”

“You stopped stuttering.”

Silently, he stared at the screen, and she knew she’d put her foot in it. She could never figure out if it was okay to come right out and say something about stuff like this—to be verbally curious about people with scars or wheelchairs or disabilities—or if it was unforgivably rude. Was stuttering even a disability?

If it was bad enough, surely. If people treated you like a pariah because of it. But Sean
wasn’t a pariah, he was
hot
. And she was curious.

“Sean?”

“That wasn’t a question.”

“Fine. Did you stop stuttering because you’re drunk?”

“I’m not drunk.”

When he didn’t say anything else, she tucked her feet under her and twisted back toward the screen. “Forget I said anything.”

Sean sighed. “No. It’s ffine. Ask awuh-way.”

But now she’d made him conscious of it, and he was stuttering again. Which made her even more curious. “Sorry. It’s just … sometimes you do, and sometimes you don’t, and I don’t know. I thought it was me, at first, because you said you only stutter around some people, but it can’t be me all the time. Is it when you’re nervous or something?”

He exhaled, a drawn-out, exhausted sound, and she wished she’d kept her trap shut. “It’s not you.”

“Sorry, really. I’ll shut up. You don’t have to—”

“Actually, it
is
yuh-you,” he interrupted. “P-partly. But it’s n-not your ffault. I c-can’t say your name, okay? In my head, I hear it, and I know if I try to say it out loud, I’m going to sstutter on the hard
k
ssound, and it’ll never c-come out. So I don’t even try.”

She hadn’t noticed, but now that she thought about it, he’d only ever called her Clark. Leadfoot. And one time, sweetheart. Never Katie. Though “Clark” and “Katie” started with exactly the same sound.

“You know that p-pretty much everybody stutters sometimes?” he asked. “Especially kids. Kids stutter all the t-time. One-second delays in speech. Half a second. Slight p-pauses. It’s so normal, we don’t even notice it.”

He stared at the screen. His fingers were wrapped around his mug, and he lounged against the couch with one arm tossed casually over the back, but nothing about him looked relaxed. He looked tight. Tense.

“My mom didn’t notice I sstuttered more than n-normal until I was three or four, and then the pediatrician t-told her it would go away when I got older. When I started school, though, the other kids made ffun of me for it, and I c-came home to my m-mom in tears one day. She told me, ‘Sean, there’s nothing wrong with the way you t-t-talk. You’re smarter than those k-k-kids,
and you’re going to g-g-grow up to do in-c-credible things, so don’t wuh-worry about it.’ ”

Sean’s mother had been proud of him. Everybody in Camelot knew that. It was actually almost all Katie had known about him. His mom was the new tenth-grade English teacher, they’d moved from Zanesville right before freshman year, they lived over on Wiggin Street, and he was so smart, he was practically Einstein.

“I thought when she said there was nuh-nothing wrong with how I talked, she meant it was okay to ssstutter. It took me a few years to figure out she
literally
thought there was nothing wrong. Or at least, that’s wuh-what she pretended to think. Like she couldn’t even
hear
it.”

“That’s wacked.”

“I don’t think she could handle that I wasn’t p-perfect,” Sean said. “It t-took too much away from her. So she ignored it. She
d-d-denied
it. And by the time I was in m-middle school, I understood that when I sstuttered, it made her muh-mad, and I t-t-tried not to.”

His face in profile was both beautiful and frightening. Rugged and rigid, so mercilessly controlled. She imagined him with a knot inside his chest, at the core of him. His past, his deepest feelings, bound in layer after layer of rope, with guy lines stretching out to the surface of him, stringing him tight.

“That really sucks,” she offered.

“The thing is …” He paused. “The thing is, sstuttering is t-t-tricky. If you stutter on one sound, you can say a d-different word. If you have a hard t-time with the first word in every sentence, you can try ssslow starts, like, ‘Aaaaand here’s Sean,’ or you can add a ssound, like, ‘Ah, where’s the bathroom?’ But the stutter will c-catch up with you. You’ll start blocking on the new word, and your t-tricks will quit working. As a k-k-kid, I ran through all the tricks I could think up, and by the time I sstarted high school I’d turned a mild stutter into a c-c-catastrophe. So you know what my mother d-did when we moved to C-camelot?”

She’d made it worse, somehow.
God
, she must have made it worse, because Katie could hear it in Sean’s voice. Something awful, some painful thing that had created the tightness in him. Something that had made him afraid and ashamed, so he’d reacted by balling it up and hiding it away, out of reach.