Flirting With Disaster

by Ruthie Knox

  Describing it all to Cassie, it didn’t sound quite as good as it had felt. It sounded kind of seedy and poorly thought out, actually, and Katie’s stomach started to churn when Cassie began asking pointed questions. Did she know what she was doing? Had they used protection? Why hadn’t he called her? What was he doing in Camelot, and when was he leaving?

  Katie managed to dismiss all the deepest worries that her conversation with Cassie called up, but the price she paid was the loss of her bliss. Part of her started to wonder whether she’d been entirely in her right mind the other night.

  If she could just see Sean, she might have reassured herself, but that wasn’t an option, which made it hard to remain confident. It made it hard not to think of him every moment of the day, and hard not to feel as though she’d made the whole thing up. That he’d never really smiled at her like that, or laughed with her, or given her grief for calling herself stupid. That he hadn’t been as wonderful as she remembered, and he wasn’t thinking about her as much as she was thinking about him.

  On Wednesday morning, she woke up in a foul mood, then made it worse by cutting her thumb while slicing a piece of cheese. It throbbed all day. She spent eight hours in the office furious with herself for reasons she couldn’t quite specify and furious with Sean for reasons that didn’t make any sense. Judah called, surly about something, and Katie refused to rise to the occasion and cheer him up. She wasn’t his performing monkey. He hung up on her after a few minutes, and then she felt even worse.

  With her bandaged thumb resting awkwardly on the keyboard, she typed up her notes from the various interviews she had conducted in Buffalo and tried to turn them into some kind of useful report for Sean and Caleb, but the longer she looked at the screen, the more it all just looked like a bunch of crap. She was a third wheel on this case. Sean was wheels one and two, and he hadn’t even returned her text.

  On Thursday, she loathed everyone. Even people who hadn’t been born yet. She sat at her desk, drinking coffee and looking at old Garfield cartoons on the Internet that someone had re-captioned with profound and depressing statements about the condition of humanity, and she thought, Yes, this is my life.

  Which didn’t even make sense. It was just the kind of morning she was having, and there wasn’t any point in fighting it.

  Caleb came out and looked at her, and the longer he looked, the more she wanted to walk out of the office, go home, get in bed, and refuse to come out until life became easier.

  She lifted her chin in an attempt to disguise the fact that she was the sort of woman who wanted to weep over Garfield.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Katie crossed her arms and remained mute. Caleb might look all stern and scary standing there with his hands on his hips, but in truth, she knew he was deeply uncomfortable. He wanted to talk to her about something personal. He was actually initiating a personal conversation with her, which never happened, ever. Katie was always the one who drew him out. Which meant that all she had to do to avoid having a heart-to-heart with her brother was say as little as possible.

  “What happened in Buffalo?” he asked.

  “I’ve been working on my interview notes, but everything important is in Sean’s report.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “Then I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Caleb sighed and sat on the edge of her desk. Sometimes she forgot how big and experienced and intimidating her brother could be. He’d left home at eighteen, traveled all over the world with the army, and come back again fully an adult.

  Katie felt as if she’d missed a step, somehow. Maybe she was supposed to have built a chrysalis around herself at some crucial moment and emerged out the other side all wise and mature. Maybe if she’d done that, she wouldn’t feel quite so much like she was cluelessly flailing around all the time.

  She leaned down to find her purse on the floor by her feet, then started digging around for her lip gloss. What had happened to her in the past few weeks? Parisian Katie was a distant memory, a phantasm Sean had exorcised in the backseat of his car. While her disappearance had very briefly seemed like a good thing, Katie knew better now. She’d lost her confidence. Misplaced it somewhere by the roadside. All the lip gloss in the world couldn’t save her.

  She located the little pot, unscrewed the lid, and used her pinky finger to slick it on anyway.

  “I’m not giving up the case,” she said. “And I don’t want to keep talking it to death. I’ll do a better job keeping you in the loop, but—”

  He cut her off. “What happened with Sean?”

  “What? Nothing.”

  “Then why are you so moody?”

  “I’m not. I’m great.” Katie pasted on a bright, fake smile.

  Caleb looked out the front window and exhaled a long breath. Several seconds passed in which neither of them spoke. Katie reminded herself that it wasn’t her responsibility to fill every awkward silence.

  “Did he kiss you again?”

  Caleb sounded so uncomfortable, she felt sorry for him, but not sorry enough to answer the question. “That’s none of your business.”

  “You both work for me. It could affect the case.”

  Katie screwed and unscrewed the lid of the lip gloss, wishing she were anywhere else in the world than here in the office with her brother, having this conversation.

  Caleb retaliated by standing up to fiddle with the coffeemaker. She imagined what they’d look like to any agent who came in. A performance of awkwardness.

  He turned back toward her abruptly. “Okay, no. That’s not true. I don’t give a shit about that. I just want to know what’s going on so I know if you’re all right.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “And that’s all you’re going to tell me?”

  Katie felt sudden tears rush up behind her eyes, a fist gripping her throat, and she swallowed hard. She set the lip gloss down on her desktop as if the fate of humanity depended on its precise placement at the corner of a sheet of copier paper.

  As a bartender, she’d learned that there are people who need to talk and people who need to be left alone. There was nothing she could do for the latter, but when it came to the people who needed to talk, all you had to do was bring their drinks and give them some time and an opening.

  Caleb had her pegged. She needed to talk. She didn’t want to, but it hardly mattered.

  “We got … involved,” she said quietly.

  “Which means?”

  “I slept with him.” She didn’t look up to see his reaction.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And is that bad or good?” Caleb raked his hand through his hair. “Jesus, Katie, just tell me what happened. I mean, I don’t want to know all the … Tell me why you’ve been so quiet. I hate seeing you this way. It makes me want to punch something.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “I don’t know if it’s good or bad. I don’t know if it was smart or stupid. I haven’t seen him or talked to him all week, and I don’t know. It’s making me crazy.”

  “Did you call him?”

  “He’s working on some technical stuff. He said he’ll call me when he’s done.”

  “So you’re just waiting.”

  “I’m just waiting.”

  “Waiting sucks.”

  “I know.”

  Caleb abruptly ducked into his office and came out with his jacket and his keys. “Come on. We’re taking an early lunch.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “We’ll go to the Cove.”

  “I don’t want to eat pizza, and I don’t want to talk.”

  “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. Put on your coat, and we’ll go play Ms. Pac-Man, and I’ll beat your ass. You’ll feel better.”

  “Yeah?”

  He threw her
half a smile. “Get your coat.”

  So she got it, and she followed her brother out the door of the office. He turned around and reached past her to flip off the light, leaning over her shoulder to do it. As he straightened up again, he dropped an unexpected kiss on the top of her head. “You’re going to be fine.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “You don’t have to be sure. I’m sure.”

  “What if I’m not fine?”

  Caleb pulled the door shut behind her back and grinned. “That’s easy. If he breaks your heart, I’ll break his arms.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “Ha. That’s right, you cagey little bitch. How do you like me now?”

  Sean pulled his headphones off as he rose, tossing them on the table by the keyboard. Done.

  The rush lasted a full five seconds before he regained enough self-awareness to remember he was alone in his mother’s house, talking shit to computer code.

  Old habits died pathetic.

  He grabbed his phone off the table and tapped out a quick message to Katie. It’s done. Come over?

  Stretching out his shoulders in the door frame, he lifted his feet off the floor and hung for a few seconds to straighten his spine. When had he last stood up? He tried to remember, but the whole period since he’d arrived in Camelot on Sunday morning was kind of a blur.

  No surprise there. It was always like this. At least this time, Katie had sent him a few texts reminding him to eat. There were three empty delivery boxes sitting on the dining-room table, a testament to his willingness to follow orders.

  He’d thought about her, which both surprised him and didn’t. When he was coding, he didn’t normally think of anyone or anything but the screen in front of him, but for Katie he seemed to have a separate set of rules.

  Every time the servers were engaged in processing something for more than a couple of seconds, his brain had skipped to Katie and that night in the back of the SUV, and he’d looked at his phone and wanted to call her. But he’d known that if he called her, he’d ask her over, and if she came over, he’d do his level best to take her to bed, and if he took her to bed he wouldn’t finish the work.

  He didn’t like Judah Pratt all that much, but he didn’t want it on his conscience if the guy somehow managed to get killed because Sean hadn’t been able to keep his dick in his pants.

  His phone vibrated. Katie. I’ll be 30 min.

  It was four thirty. He managed to shower, shave, brush his teeth, throw some laundry in the washer, and clean up the worst of the mess around the computer before the doorbell rang.

  Sean had learned a long time ago that women didn’t appreciate being neglected for days on end by men too absorbed in their hacker crap to remember to call, and he’d formulated a reentry routine that featured the careful avoidance of expectations. As he reached for the doorknob, he reminded himself that Katie might be happy to see him or she might be furious. She could be irritable or conflicted, distant or horny.

  Horny would be nice, but the trick was to be ready for anything.

  When the door swung all the way open, he realized he’d failed. He hadn’t been ready for her to not be there.

  A sniffle drew his eyes downward to where Katie was sitting in the icy slush on his front step, inspecting her ankle.

  “I fell,” she explained. “It’s really freaking slippery out here.”

  “Jesus, I’m ssorry. I haven’t so much as looked out the window in … Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” He offered her his hand, and she took it and stood. With a frown, she put weight on her ankle, and after a moment her expression cleared. “It’s fine. I thought I might’ve twisted it—I do that sometimes hiking, always the same ankle—but it feels okay.”

  “Good. C-come on in.”

  She brushed past him and stood on the throw rug, toeing off her shoes and looking around. The curtains were closed, and he hadn’t turned on the light, so the room was too dark. CPUs and monitors covered his mother’s Amish oak table, awash in a tangle of keyboards and cables. His headphones were still blasting Thom Yorke from the tabletop, the sound rendered tinny by distance.

  “This is quite the nerd cave you have going here,” she said.

  He flipped the light switch on. “I think this would’ve k-killed my muh-mother.” He wrinkled his nose. “If she wuh-weren’t already dead, I mean. T-tactless. Sorry.”

  Katie did her usual, wonderful appearing-not-to-notice-or-care-about-the-stutter thing, which helped. He’d have to tell her sometime how much it helped. Preferably after he figured out how to quit fucking stuttering around her.

  “I think you’re allowed to make tactless comments about your own dead mother,” she said. “It’s just other people who aren’t supposed to.”

  “That’s a c-comfort.”

  She wore a navy wool peacoat and a white knit cap. One whole side of her jeans was soaking wet from butt to knee. She was a breath of fresh air and perfect in his mother’s dark, stagnant house.

  He, by contrast, was off his game. Nobody had visited him here since he’d come back, and he hadn’t stopped to consider the logistics. He had no food, nothing to offer her to drink, and apparently no social skills whatsoever.

  And now that Katie was looking at his mother’s house, he was looking at it, too, which was something he no longer did. He’d been living here, but not really looking. Not since the first few days, when he’d pushed open the front door into this museum of his childhood and reeled at the strength of the sense memories the house evoked.

  The smell of old books and Pine-Sol and the air freshener she plugged into the bathroom outlet. The way the winter light filtered weakly through the kitchen curtains. His fleeting certainty that his mother would descend the stairs any moment, and he wouldn’t be able to talk. He would gag on all the things he’d never managed to say to her.

  He shook off the memory. “Ssssorry about the w-walk. I sh-should have sh-shoveled it. I wuh-wasn’t thinking, and I didn’t n-notice all the ssnow, b-but—”

  “It’s no problem. I’m fine.”

  Sean took a break from the disappointment of listening to himself try to speak and closed his eyes. Inhaled. Exhaled. Opened them. “Let me take your c-coat, huh?”

  “Sure.”

  He took her coat, but then he didn’t know where to put it. The closet overflowed with his mom’s things. He ended up hanging it over a chair.

  “Wuh-want m-me to t-take yuh-your juh-jeans? I c-can throw them in the d-dryer.”

  Katie smiled shyly. “I think we’d better wait to get my pants off until a little later.”

  “I d-d-didn’t m-mean—” He raked his hand through his hair, which he had at least combed. “I’m n-not used to c-company, and—”

  She reached out and stroked his forearm, a quick, light touch. “Relax. I’m not company. Not really.”

  He wrapped his fingers around hers, grateful for the excuse to touch her.

  “So you finished the program-thing?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Ssorry it t-took me so long.”

  “Did you sleep at all? You look tired.”

  “Some.” He’d grabbed a couple of hours here and there. “What about you, d-did C-caleb give you a hard t-time?”

  “He was pissed, but I talked him out of pulling both of us off the job. It helped that Judah insisted he’d only work with us.”

  “Me t-too, huh?”

  She grinned. “I told him to say that. We worked it all out before I talked to Caleb.”

  “Has Judah gotten any more m-messages?”

  “Not that he’s telling me about.”

  “Are we on the road tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. We’re meeting with Judah at the hotel before his show. It’s a nine- or ten-hour drive to Iowa City, so I booked us a flight. Is that okay?”

  “Sure. Out of C-columbus?”

  “Columbus to Des Moines, and then we’ll still have to drive.” She smiled and caught his eye. “I rented something b
ig in case we needed room to spread out.”

  Heat flashed between them, and he squeezed her hand. Despite his abysmal failure to approximate normal human behavior, she didn’t seem unhappy with him. Far from it.

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Sean stepped closer and put his hands at her waist. “C-can I k-k-kiss you hello?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He lowered his head to kiss the corner of her mouth that had begun smiling. Then he kissed the other corner, and she put her arms around his neck. He ran his hands down her back, over the curve of her ass, and his fingertips registered a familiar ring shape through the cold, damp denim of her jeans.

  “You brought c-condoms?”

  “Oh! Yeah, I guess I did. Ellen’s idea of a joke. She shoved them in my pocket when she stopped by the office.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Ellen knows we, uh …”

  “So it would seem. I told Caleb.” She paused, then confessed, “And Cassie, too. So I guess probably half of Camelot knows by now. I hope that’s not a problem. It was sort of an accident. If you can count Cassie as an accident. Which I do.”

  “Did your b-brother fflip out?”

  “No. Why would he flip out?”

  “Because he’s your b-brother.”

  “He likes you.”

  “He did like m-me. I’d expect him to change his m-mind once he ffound out what I d-did to you in the c-car.”

  Katie made a disgusted face. “I wouldn’t tell him that. He threatened bodily harm if you hurt my feelings, but I think he’s on your side.”

  “I’ll just have to avoid hurting your ffeelings.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” She rose on tiptoe and kissed him, the fingers of her condom-free hand threading through his damp hair. When her lips parted, he pulled her closer with one arm around her back and deepened the kiss, trying not to wonder if there was any chance he could get through the case and out of this thing he’d started without hurting her.

  Maybe, if they could keep their emotions out of it. But he was starting to worry he’d been kidding himself about that. He’d done casual before, and it didn’t feel like this. Which made kissing her a truly awful idea.