Flirting With Disaster (34 page)

She felt something brush against her bare thighs and looked down in surprise. Sean’s gray T-shirt. Her clothes were folded on a chair in the corner. He’d undressed her and put her to
bed last night.

God
, he was a good guy. The best guy.

“I know it doesn’t make sense,” she told him. “I know it’s not the smart way to handle the case, and I know I shouldn’t be emotionally tied up with what happens to Judah, and I know I shouldn’t care about you, either, as much as I do, okay?” She paused, dismayed by the confession she hadn’t intended to make. But what did it matter? It wasn’t as though it would hurt less to lose him if he didn’t know how she felt.

She exhaled, letting go of some of the tension in her neck and taking it on faith that her glass head wouldn’t fall off her shoulders. “You just have to trust me,” she said. “Judah needs me there. This is something I know how to do.”

“What is? Wuh-what d-do you know how to d-do?”

“Help.”

Sean stared at her for a long moment. “If you g-get hurt because of him, I will ffucking k-kill him.”

She touched his wrist. “You’re cute when you’re possessive.”

“I’m c-coming along.”

“You’re not invited.”

“I’m c-coming. You’ll juh-just have to make room for me at the b-breakfast table. And I’m bringing at least one Palmerston guy with a gun.”

“You’re not even supposed to
know
about this.”

“Tough. Your life’s more important to me than his ssecrets.”

Katie closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “Judah’s going to be so pissed at me.”

“Ssomehow I think you’ll survive.”

She tried to smile at him, but her mouth felt like it was made of ancient rubber bands. “All right.”

He didn’t smile back. “What t-time is breakfast?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Lie down.”

Katie didn’t move. It took a lot of effort just to stand here.

Sean tugged at her wrist. “Lie down. You look like you’re g-going to ffall over.”

Katie dropped her knees to the bed, and he put a hand out to steady her as she lowered to
the mattress and curled into a ball. “I feel awful,” she confessed.

“You don’t ssmell so hot, either.”

“Sorry.”

“I know.”

When he lay down beside her, he was still radiating tension, but she scooted close and put her head on his chest anyway. He gathered her in and held onto her, his arm a band around her shoulders that squeezed a little too tight. When she closed her eyes, the space behind them pulsed purple and red.

She felt sick and tired and scared.

But at least he was here.

Judah kicked a chunk of ice toward the storm sewer and shoved his hands deeper into his pockets.

He’d forgotten how cold Iowa winters were. Probably they weren’t technically colder than winter in the Windy City, but it seemed that way. He felt raw and exposed here no matter how many layers he wore.

The quaint faux-Dutch streets of downtown Pella might have sheltered them from the wind, but Ben lived in a residential area on the fringe of town, and there were plenty of cracks between the houses for the wind to whistle through. Judah and Katie moved in and out of the small circles of illumination cast by each house’s security light.

The sun had just barely poked over the horizon. Still dark and gloomy at eight in the morning—that was Iowa winter for you.

They turned onto Ben’s block.

He’d insisted on walking, irrationally feeling that he needed to approach the house on foot.
It’s only a ten-minute walk
, he’d told Katie, but it had been a while since he could feel his toes. A smart man would have driven.

A smart man wouldn’t have brought along Katie, plus Sean and an entourage of pissed-off security agents driving thirty feet back in an unmarked sedan.

Judah didn’t think he was stupid. Nor was he drunk. He was resigned. Though resigned to what, exactly, he couldn’t say. Fate?

Maybe to the Fates, plural. He’d always liked the idea of those three Greek goddesses spinning out the thread of his life. Measuring and cutting it before he took his first breath. If you believed in the Fates, the ultimate outcome of your actions was beyond your control. You did your stupid, flailing human thing, but in the background the end was already written somewhere.

But the Fates didn’t dabble in the details. They weren’t micro-managers. No higher power had brought him to his hometown or impelled him to call up Ben yesterday and invite himself to breakfast. No mysterious force pointed his feet in the direction of the Abrams house. It was only him.

Him and Katie.

“If I get killed, make sure Paul gets my guitar, okay?”

“Are you an organ donor?” Katie asked. “If you are, I’d like your ego.”

Judah flexed his stiff fingers inside his pockets. If he did get killed, it would suck. He’d made so little of his life. He’d turned over decision-making power on everything important to Paul, because after he’d made the decision to leave Ben, he hadn’t wanted to decide anything ever again.

It had split his life in two, that choice. He didn’t want to live half a life anymore.

He glanced sideways at Katie, huddled in her peacoat. “I apologized to Paul, you know.” Guilt over the way he’d treated Katie drove him to it, but it had turned out pretty well. He and Paul ended up talking through the night, and Judah found a lot more things to apologize for. For taking Paul’s loyalty for granted, taking
him
for granted. For being an asshole.

“Yeah, so you said. Did it help?”

“Yeah.” Paul forgave him. Paul loved him, though Judah could scarcely credit it.

“It’s magic,” she said.

“Cheap magic.”

“All magic is cheap.”

He thought about that. Yesterday, Ginny had followed him to Iowa, and again Judah had heard Katie’s voice in his head, urging him to be a decent person. Telling him to apologize. He’d told Ginny the unvarnished truth, and she’d collapsed in a puddle of tears. But after he rubbed her back and apologized all over again and tried to cheer her up, she came around. And now when he thought of Ginny, that tug in his gut was missing. That heavy guilt. Vanished.

Katie had a point. Cheap or not, there was something magical about it.

He stopped at the base of Ben’s driveway. The siding on the modest ranch home was new since he’d last seen it, the trim a green that matched Ben’s aura.

It was time to make the only apology that counted.

He’d been circling this town, circling this decision since the first message arrived and he began to understand that by speaking of Ben in the interview—by remembering him out loud, acknowledging a sliver of their former happiness—he’d set something profound in motion. The taunts came, each one a spear of anxiety and a provocation to take the matter into his own hands, to act before he was acted upon.

And he had acted, in a cowardly, passive sort of way. He’d planned what Katie called his “nostalgia tour.” He’d put her and Sean to work.

Seeing Ben hadn’t told Judah whether or not Ben wanted him dead, but it told him he still felt something powerful for Ben. Guilt and attraction, affection that hadn’t died in a decade and a half. It had convinced him that he needed this reckoning to come, in whatever form it took. He needed the halves of his life to fuse back together.

The car with Sean and the Palmerston guards pulled into the drive beside them. Sean got out. They’d agreed that only Sean and Katie would go inside with him, and that Sean would carry a weapon. Judah didn’t like the idea, but Katie had told him he needed to compromise, so he accepted it.

“I really don’t think he’s going to try to kill me,” he said. “But I’m a little worried about you guys. I’m not sure how he feels about uninvited guests.”

“Why would he kill
me
?” Katie asked. “I’m nice.”

“You?”

“I’m
so
nice. You think I’d be here with you if I weren’t nice?”

He looked at her sidelong. She was smiling. “No.”

“All right then. Did you change your mind?”

He thought about what it would be like inside the house. Having to say out loud,
This is what I did to you. This is what you meant to me. I’m sorry
.

He could do it, but he’d rather not do it alone.

Soon, he would give her up. Give her back to her life, to Owens and Ohio and whatever the future had in store for her. Soon.

“No, I didn’t change my mind.”

“Then let’s do this.” She hooked her hand through his elbow, grabbed Sean’s hand, and began walking them up the driveway.

Whatever happened next, it would be what was supposed to happen.

Judah rang the bell.

Ben opened the door. He wore a gray sweater over a white dress shirt, jeans, and the crooked smile Judah had seen when he closed his eyes every night for the last fifteen years.

“Ben,” Judah said. He pulled off his gloves and offered one icy hand.

“Judah.” Ben shook it. “You’re cold.”

“We walked.”

“It’s minus fifteen with the wind chill. Too cold to walk.” He looked behind Judah to where Katie and Sean stood a few feet back. “You brought … Kate, is it?”

“Katie. Yes. Nice to see you again,” she said. “And this is Sean, my … This is Sean.”

Turning sideways, Ben held the door open with one straight arm and gestured them inside. “Come on in.”

Judah left his coat and shoes in the front hall and floated into the Abramses’ great room. It was the same house, of course, but better in every way than it had been before. Brighter. Cleaner. More tasteful. It had become an extension of Ben.

“I like what you’ve done with the place.”

“Thanks. Grab a seat,” Ben ordered. “You three need coffee. Hey, Mel?” He called toward the kitchen. “Can you bring four cups of coffee? We have more visitors than we planned for.”

She popped her head out, and her eyes widened when she saw the three of them lined up on the couch. “Sure. Give me a sec.”

Judah sat on the couch and listened to the pleasant domestic sounds of Melissa in the kitchen. A refrigerator door opening and closing. A spoon in a ceramic mug.

He listened, suspended in this calm place where he’d arrived, and he stared unabashedly at Ben.

In his whole life, no one had ever looked better.

It was awkward. So awkward.

Melissa came out with the first two cups of coffee, Judah stared at Ben, Ben cleared his throat, Sean turned to stone, and Katie looked around at the prints on the walls and the piano in the corner and wondered if it would be rude to put on her sunglasses.

The sun, absent just minutes ago, had found its way from wherever it had been hiding, and now it was assaulting her through the windows behind Ben’s head. Whose house was this bright in the winter?

Nobody said anything, and Katie had no way of knowing why. Maybe Melissa had a gun in her sock. Maybe Ben was pissed off that she and Sean were here. Maybe no one knew where to begin.

When Melissa handed her a mug and sat down in a wingback chair beside the TV, completing the circle of people staring at other people and wondering what to say, Katie broke the silence. “I’m not his girlfriend.”

“You’re not?” Melissa asked.

She shook her head. “He’s queer as a three-dollar bill.”

Oh, God
. What had possessed her to say that? Now Ben would think she was a homophobe. “No offense,” she told him.

Judah blanched.

Shit
. That was worse. It was entirely possible that she wasn’t supposed to know Ben was gay. She would definitely shut up now.

Ben frowned, and she endured several more seconds of excruciating silence before he said, “None taken.” He crossed one ankle over his knee, preternaturally calm. “So what do you do, Katie?”

“I’m an office manager for my brother’s security company. I thought I was on my way to becoming a security agent, but now I’m thinking probably not. I’m not really the Bond Girl type, it turns out.”

Ben nodded, as if this were a normal sort of thing to say. “And how did you and Judah
meet?”

“I work for him. Sean and I have been trying to figure out who’s sending him threatening messages.” She paused, considering whether this was the best approach to nabbing a bad guy. Sean shot her an exasperated look.

Definitely not.

But she’d more or less given up on subtlety. She was never going to be slick or disciplined or sophisticated. It wasn’t her. She was messy and mouthy, a bit aimless and disorganized. But loyal, too. Kind. Capable of love, with a tendency toward self-sacrifice that was possibly not altogether healthy.

She was fine. Except for the hangover.

“Any chance it was you?” she asked Ben.

He sipped his coffee, the corners of his mouth turned down. “Is this an interrogation?”

“This is breakfast,” Katie said. “Or it will be, I assume. I’m hoping you’ll feed us some of the bacon I’m smelling, because I have to tell you, Judah got me wasted on rum and Coke last night and told me the whole story of what happened with you guys, and then I woke up hungover and he made me walk over here in the minus-twenty-degree cold. I think bacon might be the only thing that can save me.”

Ben looked at Judah. “You told her?”

With his face naked of all the habitual confidence and egotism, Judah hardly looked like a celebrity at all. “I—I did. Yeah. She’s my … friend.”

Ben took another sip of his coffee, his face a wasteland where expressions went to die. Katie would have been willing to swear there was nobody alive who could conceal his thoughts better than Sean, but this guy made Sean look like an amateur.

Then, when he finally spoke, all he said was, “Good coffee, Mel.”

“Thanks.” Melissa was not as good at the emotional burial thing. She appeared to have been smacked in the forehead with a shovelful of surprises.

“To answer your question,” Ben said, “No, it wasn’t me. I haven’t had any contact with Judah in years.”

“Oh. Okay.” Katie tried to think what she was supposed to say next, but her brain was operating at half-impulse, and she really just wanted to tip over sideways and take a nap on Sean’s lap. Not that Sean seemed to be inviting such a thing. He was doing his best impression of
igneous rock.