Flirting With Disaster

by Ruthie Knox

  Ginny shot her a look laced with disbelief and arsenic. “What are you doing here?”

  “Wanted to talk to Judah. How about you?”

  “I thought he needed a friend.”

  Judah rubbed Ginny’s shoulder in a brotherly way. “I did, honey, thanks. But do you think I could talk to Katie alone for a while?”

  Ginny looked from Katie to Judah, then back again. “Sure.” She hopped down from her perch and slung her purse over her shoulder. “Listen, are you …” She ducked her head, then raised her eyes and looked at Judah with naked longing. “Is she …”

  “No.” He chucked his fingers under her chin. “It’s like I told you. No girls. Katie and I are just friends.”

  She managed a small smile. “All right. I’ll see you around, I guess.”

  “You will. Thanks for listening.”

  “Any time.”

  Katie waited for Ginny to clear the door before she asked, “What was that all about?”

  “I apologized. You should be proud. I’m getting good at it.”

  “Are you, now?”

  “I am. First I apologized to you at the hotel. That one was a little ugly, but I was still getting warmed up. Then I found Paul and apologized to him for being such a hopeless bastard, and also for what I was about to do.”

  “Which was?”

  “Duck security, sneak back to Iowa, and have a reckoning. Though I didn’t tell Paul that.”

  “And you brought Ginny along for your reckoning?”

  “No, she kind of followed me. But that’s okay, we needed a reckoning, too. I told her I’m gay, she cried a little, and then we moved on to a discussion of my many faults and how she wants a raise. I think it’s going to be fine.”

  Katie tried to absorb that while Judah caught the bartender’s eye and ordered himself another rum and Coke. “What can I get you?” he asked. “I’m buying.”

  “Just water, thanks.”

  “Make it two rum and Cokes,” he told the woman. “And a water.”

  “So I guess Paul and Ginny didn’t confess to sending you threatening messages?”

  “No, I’m thinking Ben,” he said. “You?”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  “I’m having breakfast at his place.”

  “You really think that’s wise?”

  “No. And you’re going to realize just how unwise in about twenty minutes, when I get drunk enough to tell you the whole story.”

  “I’m not getting drunk with you.”

  “Indulge me. I’m doing the Memory Lane thing tonight, and this was my drink of choice when I was too young to know better.”

  “And where did you drink the illicit rum and Cokes of your youth?” she asked. “Not here, surely.”

  “Over at Ben’s. His mom worked swing shift at the window plant, so there was never anybody around to keep Ben and me out of trouble.”

  The bartender set down their drinks, and Judah flashed her a smile straight off a magazine cover. “Thanks, Patty.”

  The woman gave him a kiss-my-grits sort of smirk and said, “Don’t mention it.”

  “Wow,” Katie said after she’d gone. “The charm doesn’t work on Patty.”

  Judah laughed. “The charm doesn’t work in Pella. Pella is unimpressed with Judah Pratt. Always has been.”

  “I want to hear more about your glory days. Who was the instigator in all this trouble you got up to, you or Ben?”

  “Me. Definitely me. Ben was a straight shooter. I told you he was going to go to West Point, right? Had the grades for it, the crew cut and everything. I was wilder. Stupider. I didn’t know anything, but I thought I knew everything.” Judah picked up his drink and knocked down two-thirds of it in several deep swallows.

  “I can picture that.” Ben had that air of discipline, the set expression of a man who liked things to be done a certain way and no other. “You must have tempted him off the path of virtue.”

  “Poor Ben,” Judah said with a sigh. “I was the worst thing that could’ve happened to him. At first, I just liked making him laugh. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but he has such a great laugh. But then we got to be friends, and I wanted more, and I made him want it, too. I talked him into moving to Louisville that summer to live with me. Melissa had a place there, and I’d heard about the High Hat and wanted to play it. I sent them a demo tape, and after they invited me out, I spent two weeks talking Ben into it.”

  “You dragged him along on your adventure.”

  Katie’s fingers found her thumb as she thought of Levi. How his hand gestures used to get big and expansive whenever he spoke of Alaska. The way he’d spun out his dreams and made them hers. It hadn’t even taken much convincing. She’d wanted to go with him, because she’d been so infatuated with his confidence. She’d wanted to be married to him, too, even though she’d always known she took the whole thing more seriously than he did. She’d bought the silver wedding bands at the mall and worn hers on her thumb, as if three fingers’ distance could turn it into an ironic gesture.

  “He loved you, I bet,” she said. Judah would have been easy to love once.

  He wiped his hand over his mouth and looked pointedly at her glass. “Drink up.”

  She took a sip and made a face. “Rum, ugh. I’ve had some memorable nights with rum.”

  A faint smile. “You know, I had good intentions taking Ben to Louisville,” he said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was mostly about me, but he missed his sister. She’d just gone to Louisville a year earlier, and they were close. We were all close, that summer.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, flipping it open and handing it to her so she could see the photograph where his license ought to have been.

  Three teenagers clumped together, all of them young and beautiful. Judah in the middle, his smile as large as ever in a face she remembered from the checkout-aisle magazines of her early adolescence. His arms around Ben and Melissa Abrams, one on each side. Ben looking at the camera with that crooked half-smile. Melissa looking at Judah and putting devil horns behind his head.

  He kept talking as she studied the evidence of his lost happiness.

  “I’d had this idea for the tour, that we’d buy a van and go play all these places, and we’d go through Iowa City. His dad lived there. He and Ben were practically strangers. I’d met him once, after graduation. He was this very straitlaced military guy, and the way I understood it, Ben wanted his approval more than anything, and that was why he was dead set on West Point. So I thought if we went to Iowa City, I could bring them together. Mend all their broken fences and whatnot.

  “Everything was going really well. We were out of Pella, which was a huge step, and even though Ben didn’t want us to be out out, we were together twenty-four/seven. I’d lined up some shows, and Paul had been to see me play and suggested I come out to L.A. with him. Ben thought I should do it, but we decided to go through with our tour first. Neither of us were in a hurry for the summer to end. We didn’t want to think about what happened next, with him going to New York to learn how to be an officer and me heading all the way to the other end of the country.”

  He polished off the drink and stared at his hand on the glass. The ice made a faint settling sound. His hand was shaking. “I’m not an alcoholic,” he said pensively. “I don’t think. There are a lot of days I don’t drink. In the past few years, though, I don’t know … Sometimes I can’t think of anything but every wrong thing I’ve ever done. Every woman I slept with when I shouldn’t have, and every person I lied to, and … and Ben. I think about Ben all the time.”

  Katie took several large swallows of the cold, sweet drink, fortifying herself for the bitterness on its way.

  “I mentioned him in an interview,” Judah said. “The woman who interviewed me reminded me a little bit of Mel, and I found myself telling this story of something funny Ben had said once. Reminiscing. I’d never let myself do that before, and it was a bad idea, because any time I say something friendly about
a guy, the gay rumor mill starts up again, and Paul gets pissed off at me.”

  “Why don’t you just, you know, get it over with?”

  “Come out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m going to,” he said. “Soon. I talked to Paul about it. I can’t help feeling it’s his decision, too. After all these years of putting up with my shit. I want him to come around, to be ready for it.”

  He rattled the ice cubes in his glass, deliberately this time.

  “That makes sense,” she said.

  “Does it?” The smile he offered said he wasn’t too sure. “Anyway, once I started thinking about Ben, it was like this tap I couldn’t turn off, and I drank so much I ended up in rehab. That got me to ease up on the drinking, but it made the thinking worse.

  “He was the biggest supporter I ever had. Ben and Mel. They came to every show, and afterward we’d go back to Mel’s, and Ben and I would wait for her to go to bed. Give her some time to fall asleep in the other room. And then, in the dark, in this complete quiet, it was …”

  He sighed and folded his arms on the bar, laying his cheek against his forearm. “You don’t want to hear about that.”

  “It’s okay.” She’d become transparent, listening to him. A glassine envelope, she received what he told her and held it. Whatever good she might do him, she knew she had to hear him first. He had to get this out.

  “It was the only time in my life it’s been like that. With Ben. I guess I thought there would be others, sooner or later, but there was only ever him. Do you know what that’s like, Katie?”

  She wanted to say no, that she’d never found it.

  She hadn’t. It had found her.

  He fixed her with his dark eyes, pupils huge in the dim bar but focused. He wasn’t as drunk as she’d thought. He knew what he was saying, and he saw her clearly enough.

  “You have the brightest, cleanest aura of anyone I’ve ever met,” he said. “Like a new leaf, just unfurling. It’s really something to see.”

  “Sorry, did you just tell me you see my … aura?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know that’s completely nuts, right?”

  “I know. Ben’s is green, too. A deeper green. Very peaceful. Healing. I bet he’s a great nurse.”

  “What color’s yours?”

  “Dunno. Can’t see my own. It’s only some people. Yours has changed since you got together with Sean. It’s bigger and, I don’t know, happier. Like looking at pure joy.”

  Katie finished her drink in one huge gulp. “You’re getting kind of pushy with the crystal ball crap.”

  Judah chuckled. “I can’t see the future, Katie. If I could, I never would’ve taken Ben to his father’s house for dinner.”

  He raised two fingers, signaling to Patty for another round. She mixed the drinks, then cleared out, obviously smart enough to recognize that they wanted to be alone.

  Katie waited at the center of the story for Judah to find her. She’d done this before—done it for her mother, done it for Levi, done it as a barista and a bartender and occasionally as a river guide. People needed someone to listen, and she was good at it.

  She was good at it.

  The recognition tumbled into place with a click. How many times had she promised herself she wouldn’t listen anymore? She wouldn’t receive other people’s problems and make them her own, wouldn’t be the one who heard the story instead of the one who wrote it. Katie the sidekick. Katie the wingman.

  All her life, she’d been a pushover. Tough on the outside because she cared too much, but inside she was soft and malleable, too easily swayed by another point of view, too unsure of what she wanted for herself.

  But here in the bar with Judah, it seemed obvious. This wasn’t an insignificant role. The listener mattered a great deal to the person who needed to be heard.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said.

  Judah swirled his ice, staring into his glass as if the story were in there. “His father figured us out. We were sitting at the dinner table, talking. It was going fine. Not fantastic, but it was something. The old man seemed to be making an effort. But then Ben said something—I don’t even remember what, something political, I think—and his dad lit into him.

  “I was so proud of Ben. Every thought he had, I agreed with. So I came to his defense, and his dad got this considering look. He sat back in his chair, looking from me to Ben and back again. And he said, ‘Son of a bitch. You little faggot.’ ”

  Judah and Katie both took a drink then, synchronized.

  “All hell broke loose. Melissa jumped in to deny it, I started shouting, their dad turned red and got going, spit flying as he gave this drill-sergeant-type lecture about honor and disgrace and butt-fucking punks and who the hell knows what. And Ben just sat there and took it. It didn’t even diminish him. It was like he became untouchable, and I absorbed all of it. The injustice and the anger and the … the hate.”

  Katie waited for Judah’s eyes to meet hers. When they did, they were wet and anguished. “I flew to pieces,” he said. “I can’t even describe it.”

  She reached out and found his knee, needing a fixed point.

  “Eventually, they got me out of there. Mel did, I guess. Their father might have killed me if they hadn’t. We were right in each other’s faces, shouting. They got me out, took me back to the hotel, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I lay awake, and at four in the morning I went to a convenience store and bought some lighter fluid, a couple bottles of vodka, a cheap T-shirt, and matches. I made Molotov cocktails on the lawn—a guy at church camp had told me how to make them once, if you can believe that—and I threw them through the window and set Ben’s dad’s house on fire.”

  “Holy cow!” Katie said, breathless. “Did you kill him?”

  “No, but I tried to. Ben found me before the police did. He took the heat.”

  “What do you mean, he took the heat?”

  “I mean he told them he’d done it. He confessed. They took him away in the car with the lights flashing, just like on TV. And I was just sitting there on the curb in Iowa City, watching the sun come up and realizing I’d just ruined his whole life.”

  “He went to prison?”

  “No, he ended up taking a plea bargain and doing some community service in exchange for the charges being dropped. But it didn’t matter. West Point wouldn’t take him with an arrest record.”

  “He doesn’t have an arrest record.” She’d run a background check on Ben, and he’d come up clean.

  “Huh. He certainly got arrested. Charged, booked, the whole shebang.”

  “Maybe he had it expunged.”

  A hollow laugh from Judah. “I imagine that’s the sort of thing Paul would have a hand in. Make it disappear. Poof.” He waggled his fingers. “Never happened. One of Paul’s many talents. I wrecked Ben’s future, and Paul erased it.”

  “Why do you say you wrecked his future? He seems to have coped okay without you.”

  “West Point was his Los Angeles. It was his life’s goal, and he gave it up for me.”

  “Maybe he wanted to.”

  Judah picked an ice cube out of his glass.

  She put her hand on his arm. “Maybe he thought you were worth it.”

  He sneered. “I went to visit him in jail, and I told him I loved him, which I’d never done before. And then I got on a bus with Paul, moved to L.A., went straight, and never called him again.”

  Katie went to lean back, remembered too late she was on a stool, and fell on her ass.

  Judah offered her his hand, hauling her to her feet.

  “Elegant,” he said.

  “Bite me.”

  She took her seat again and found her drink. Finished it off and ordered two more.

  As shocked as she was at Judah’s attempt to kill Ben’s father, Katie knew that it was his betrayal of Ben that he felt guilty about. And she knew only too well how it felt to be betrayed.

  Did Levi feel this guilty for what he’d d
one to her? Would he ever? Those months she’d spent closing down Wild Ride, when she’d hardly been able to walk without kicking the rubble of their life together away from her feet, she’d hoped he did. She’d wanted guilt to be a curse that ate him alive for the rest of his life. But instead, she’d just been eating herself up, just as Judah wallowed in his own regrets instead of doing something about them.

  It wasn’t right. She’d given Levi her future freely. He’d asked her to come with him, to share his dream, and she’d packed her bags and climbed into his truck and never once looked back on the road to Anchorage. Sure, the dream had gone sour. He’d disappointed her. But that was life, wasn’t it? You made mistakes. You did the best you could. And then, if you could manage it, you moved on.

  But none of them had moved on—not her, not Judah, not Sean.

  Patty delivered the new round and made herself scarce.

  “You need to be forgiven,” Katie said.

  “No shit.”

  “To be forgiven, you have to say you’re sorry.”

  “I knew you were going to say that.”

  “It’ll be easy,” she said, reaching out to rest her hand on Judah’s shoulder. “You’re getting good at it.”

  Judah raised his drink. “Cheers.”

  Their glasses collided with a melodious clink, and she drank to the past. To the person she used to be, and whoever it was she and these men she loved might become if they gave themselves half a chance.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Katie woke up to Madonna screaming at her head. Someone was shoving an object right in her face.

  “Turn it off,” Sean said, his voice sleep-muffled and grouchy.

  Her phone. Her alarm. She pushed his hand away and rolled over, but her stomach was on a five-second delay, and her brain felt like someone had been after it with a meat tenderizer. The inside of her mouth tasted like Coke syrup and regret.

  “Fuck,” she said, partly because she felt so utterly horrible and partly as an experiment, to see if her mouth still worked.

  It did, but her voice came out hoarse, as if she’d been crying a lot. Or, worse, singing.

  Sean must have figured out how to turn off the music himself, because it stopped, and then something clattered against the nightstand, and one of the bedside lights came on and drove a railroad spike into her hippocampus. Katie covered her eyes with her hand and assumed the fetal position.