Flirting With Disaster (37 page)

It should be possible, but it didn’t
feel
possible, any more than it had been possible for him to keep his hands off her.

Don’t grab her. Don’t kiss her. Don’t touch her
. He’d been telling himself that for days, and here he was, still semi-hard and buried to the hilt inside her body.

God
, he was weak. Weak and stupid.

And he needed a new plan, because he couldn’t give her up.

He was supposed to be good at solving problems. This was a simple problem. It had a simple solution.

He couldn’t stay here, so she had to come with him.

“Come to California with me.”

Katie’s hands flew up and flattened against his pecs. “What?”

“Come to C-california with m-me.”

He loved her. He thought she felt the same, or that she might eventually. They hadn’t been together all that long, but they
had
something.

“When? Why?”

“T-tomorrow would be n-nice.”

She blinked, momentarily dazed, and then she pushed him away, her palms exerting a surprising amount of pressure. As soon as he rolled off her, she stood and began pulling up her jeans, her movements jerky and uncoordinated. The set of her lips told him what she wasn’t
saying. He’d taken a serious wrong turn.

Regret soured his mouth. He’d picked the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong tone for this discussion. But the weight on his shoulders never lifted anymore. The claws had sunk down to bone, where they scraped at him so he was always shrinking away from pain, bleeding every time he opened his mouth. The board of directors would meet the day after tomorrow and he needed to be there, really
be
there, and be done with this place.

He and Katie had cleared out nearly everything. He would leave the rest of it for someone else to throw away. He would walk away from the black insufficiency he’d been wallowing in for months, and if she would have him, he would take the best part of Camelot with him.

The only possible solution.

Except she hated it.

“What about the wedding?” she asked.

“I have a board m-meeting in Sssan Jose I c-c-can’t m-miss. I’m guh-going to try to sell the board on a p-program ssssimilar to what I did for Juh-judah. Internet sssurveillance for highprofile p-people and c-c-c-corporations, that sort of thing.”

She didn’t respond. She just stood there, turned slightly away from him, crumpling her hands into fists.

“Say something.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I wuh-want you to say yes, but I’ll sssettle for a c-c-conversation. Juh-just t-t-
talk
to me.”

“Somehow I doubt you want to hear what I have to say to you right now.”

“Sssay it anyway.”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“I’m n-not a child. Stop fucking sheltering me and
talk
.”

“Fine. Why don’t you tell me what you really want? If I come to California with you tomorrow, how big a bag do I pack? You want to be my long-distance boyfriend? You want to swap visits, San Jose to Camelot and back? Because it’s thousands of miles between California and Ohio, and this is the first time you’ve said anything about this. It’s not a good sign, Sean. It’s the kind of sign that makes me skeptical about our chances. Actually, it makes me a lot more than skeptical. It makes me whatever’s on the other side of skeptical. Somewhere in the kingdom
of not-fucking-likely.”

He’d really pissed her off.

How could he make her understand this was harder than it should be, because the pressure on his shoulders, the pressure in his chest and in his head had become a relentless, pounding demand that stole his breath and exhausted him? He was so fucking tired of fighting it all the time. So beat up by not being able to speak a single clean sentence, by his failure to infuse his voice with any of the strength he’d depended on for so many years.

He hated this place. Hated what it did to him, what it made him feel, how it made him sound. Weak. Worthless. Perpetually coming up short, no matter what he did.

She forgave everyone else their weaknesses, but damn it, he wasn’t one of her charity cases. He didn’t want Katie’s mercy. He wanted her.

“I’m n-not guh-going to c-c-c-come back. After I leave, that’s it. I wuh-want you to leave with m-me. To live with me.”

She twisted around to see him better, her expression so hurt, it was as if every word he’d said was a rock he’d flung at her. “In
California
?”

“Yes.”

“Sean, I can’t move to California. I live in Ohio. My family’s here. Caleb and Ellen and Henry … and I’ve got my parents to look after, all my friends … I live in Camelot. It’s where I’m supposed to be. I don’t even know who I’d be in California. I don’t know what I’d
do
.”

“Yuh-you c-could do wuh-whatever yuh-you wanted.” He moved closer and grabbed her upper arms. “Or n-n-nothing at all. I have muh-money, sssso it d-d-doesn’t really m-matter—”

“It
does
matter. We’re talking about my
life
.”

“What d-d-do yuh-you wuh-want to d-do?”

“I don’t know. But I know you haven’t given it a second’s thought. You expect me to follow you to California, but you forgot all about my job, my friends, my—”

She kept talking, but he couldn’t hear her over the rising panic. It wasn’t working. There had to be something else, some way to make her see—

When he opened his mouth, the words tumbled out.

“We could get married.”

It was the wrong thing. He knew it even before she took a step back. Another one, and she slipped out of his grip. With the third step, she ran the back of her head into a beam, and she
raised her arms to grip it in both hands, the first joint of every digit going white with the effort. She closed her eyes. “Please tell me you did not just propose to me.”

The boards creaked as Sean moved toward her. “I d-did. And I m-m-muh-meant it.”

Amazing
. He did.

Katie scanned the floor until her eyes found the shoe box he’d been sorting through earlier. She picked it up and dumped it on the floor and kicked the papers all over the place. She found the story he’d been looking at and flung it at his chest.

She started to cry.

“Sweetheart—”

She toppled over the box full of framed memorabilia that had been the shrine, put one boot on top of the pile, and weighted it. Sean winced at the sound of splintering glass and cracking wood.

“Stop that,” he said, and she jumped on the pile, slipped, and nearly fell, but she was crazed now, and she wasn’t listening. She was just pounding at the frames with her boot as if his past were made of snakes, and she wanted them dead.

“Jesus, honey, stop!” He reached out for her, but she evaded his grasp and moved behind him, around him, circling warily as her eyes darted back and forth from his face to the other boxes, measuring the distance and calculating whether she could get to them before him. She must have decided she couldn’t, because she turned the offensive on him.

“Do you know how many times in her life a girl needs to receive a half-assed, why-don’t-we-just-go-ahead-and-get-married proposal?”

There was no good way to answer that question.

“None,” she said. “None is the correct number of times. And now I’ve had two.”

“I’m n-n-not Levi Rider.”

“Aren’t you?” she asked. “Aren’t you, Sean? Because it seems like you just asked me to marry you without saying a single word about love. It seems like you want to drag me off to the other side of the country to be your accessory, just like he did. You
seem
to not give a rat’s ass what I need, what I want, what I plan to do with my life. Even just now, I was trying to tell you some of my reservations about this ingenious plan of yours, and you weren’t listening. You were thinking about what you could say to make me do what you wanted. ‘Marry me, Katie.’ What kind of solution is that?”

Sean opened his mouth, but she wasn’t done.

“You know what the difference is between you and Levi? At least Levi had some nobility. At least he was chasing a dream. He had a grand plan, and I wanted to get in on it. You—you’re just running. You’re too freaked out by the way you feel about Camelot, and your mom, and everything bad that ever happened to you to even consider figuring out how to make peace with the place.”

“I’m n-n-not ruh-ruh-running—”

“Yes, you are.”

“D-d-d
-don’t
inter-ruh-rupt m-m-me when I’m trying t-t-to t-t-t-talk.”

“Don’t propose to me just because you don’t want to have to deal with all this shit!” she cried, flinging her arms wide.

“That’s n-n-not wuh-what this is.”

“Yes, Sean, it
is
. I know it’s not the done thing to freak out when the man you love asks you to marry him, but damn it, what am I supposed to do with you? You need therapy, not a wife. You think you want to marry me, but you won’t even say my name.”

“I
c-c-c-can’t
sssay yuh-your n-name.”

“Yes, you can. You don’t
want
to. You don’t like the way it would sound. It wouldn’t match up to your precious ideal, so you refuse to try. Camelot makes you feel things you don’t want to feel, and you think if you leave it will get better. You’re going to take the solution you came up with in Ohio and present it to your board in California as the shiny way forward.”

“It’s n-n-not like that.”

“It is. It’s worse than that. You’re going to steal a piece of Camelot and use it to fix your company. And hey, if you can steal one, why not steal two? Take Katie along for the ride. You think you’ll be able to say my name there, Sean? You think I’ll be your dream girl, and everything will come up roses?”

“D-damn it, I’ll give you anything you wuh-want.”

“Stay.”

“Anything b-but that.”

She shook her head. “I can’t even—you won’t consider it, Sean. You can’t see what you need, and you never thought about what I want.”

“Wuh-wuh-wuh-what d-do yuh-you wuh-wuh—”

“I don’t know!” she shouted.

The attic fell quiet. Katie stopped moving. In a low, ragged voice he’d never heard her use before, she told him, “I don’t know. I thought I did, before we went to Kentucky, but I was wrong. I thought I was doing better, since I met you, but obviously not, or I wouldn’t have just flipped out when you proposed. That’s not normal. I get that. And I’m flattered, sort of, that you care enough to ask. But … it’s not good enough. I’m trying to figure myself out. I’d like to be with somebody who cared enough to stick around and help me.”

“I c-c-care.”

She put her hands on her hips and stared, breathing hard. Her eyes were glistening, her throat all red and her skin blotchy, and she looked down that royal nose at him and said, “Not enough.”

She spoke gently, but the words hit him hard.

He’d been selfish with her from the beginning. Refusing to say her name because he didn’t want to hurt his pride. Kissing her for the first time in front of a stranger he wanted to best, with no regard for her feelings. Fucking her in the backseat of his truck because he wanted her, and telling himself it was okay because she wanted him, too.

And now this. This grasping invitation.

“I’m not your dream girl, Sean,” she said. “I’m not anybody’s dream girl. And I guess I’m not all that tough, and we both know I’m not as smart as you. But even so, I deserve better than what you’re offering me.”

The words took on weight inside him and became a force that pushed closed the door on his hope and left him in a familiar place. A cold, dark place that felt like home.

She was right. He didn’t deserve her. He had never done one thing to deserve her. He wanted her, but if life had taught him anything, it was that want was irrelevant. You played the cards you were dealt, used the talents you had to get ahead, and ignored what you wanted.

Sean stood still and said nothing as what he wanted walked out on him.

“It can’t be over.”

Katie leaned forward in her office chair and punched the speaker button on her phone. She dropped the receiver on her desk and tipped back her office chair so she could contemplate the ceiling.

“Katie, it can’t be over,” Judah repeated, and this time his voice came from farther away, which seemed fitting, since she couldn’t really absorb this conversation. A translucent emotional dam held the whole world at a distance.

One of the speckled white panels on the office ceiling had swollen in the heavy rain overnight, and this morning she’d found it dripping, the carpet a sodden mess. She’d put a popcorn bowl under it.

No doubt if Caleb were here, he would fix it, but he was already in Jamaica getting ready for the wedding, blissfully unaware of what had happened to her, and Katie couldn’t help but feel as though the sopping disaster in the corner of the room matched the pain-flooded landscape of her body.

“It can, actually,” she said.

Judah made a dismissive noise, a sound that traveled through space and into her ears and put a picture in her head of his nose wrinkled and his eyes sly and mischievous. A happier Judah than she’d ever seen. “What did he do?”

“He asked me to marry him.”

She would have preferred it if he’d shot her. It would have hurt so much less than getting proposed to. Any other leave-taking she might have handled with more grace, but he’d pushed the biggest button she had, poked the worst wound she’d ever inflicted on herself, and surely he should have
known
.

He hadn’t even said that he loved her.

“That bastard,” Judah said, and she managed a bitter laugh.

“You had to be there.”

The worst part was, she knew exactly what he’d been trying to do. She understood too
well his need to escape, his desire to take her with him. A big part of her had thrilled to the whole idea—had packed its bags and skipped across the tarmac to fling herself onto his jet to San Jose and marriage and endless, loving bliss.

That part of her was a hopeless idiot.

She’d sacrificed her own dreams for Levi’s, and now Sean wanted her to sacrifice her present so he could escape his past. She couldn’t be happy with him that way.