by Ruthie Knox
As he spoke on autopilot, he picked up his pen off the table and began flipping it. The board was used to that, too. One of his tics, a trick he’d developed to keep his head in the right groove.
He dropped the pen.
“Excuse me,” he said, and ducked down to pick it up.
Two dozen shoes under there. Black and brown loafers, red and navy heels. They gave him a strange feeling, a prickling unfamiliarity that he had to shake off.
It wasn’t the first time he’d felt this way. Since he got back, he kept having these moments. His bed was too big and too empty, and all those months in Ohio had turned California into a foreign land. The brightness of the manicured lawns seemed wrong for the desert. His sprinklers had come on in the middle of the night and woken him from a fitful sleep. The news on the drive to work warned of coyotes eating house cats.
He stood up and clicked quickly to the next slide.
“Okay. So. Where does that leave us? That’s the big question. How is Anderson Owens supposed to respond to these changes in the marketplace?”
He tugged at his tie, uncomfortably aware of the snugness of the knot. The shirt was too tight. Maybe his collar size had changed, but it felt more like his skin was wrong. Arid and strained, stretched too tight over his bones.
He flipped the pen again and dropped it a second time.
As he bent down to get it, the thought came unbidden, unexpected.
You hate this.
Katie’s voice. Katie’s honesty, and a hint of the compassion she couldn’t hide even at her angriest.
“Jesus,” he whispered, staring at the pen. “I do.”
He’d bought the suit he was wearing, hand-picked every one of the board members, and framed the view out the conference room window for the architect with the square edges created by his thumbs and index fingers. In a very real sense, Sean had made this building, made these people assemble here—his willpower the force that had turned a teenage prank into a successful enterprise.
He hated it.
He’d woken up this morning in a sterile house and drunk a cup of coffee alone in the kitchen. He’d thrown out the filter, rinsed the pot, put his mug in the dishwasher, and felt as much at home as he would have in a hotel room.
Except the last several hotel rooms he’d stayed in, he’d had Katie, and with Katie he always felt at home.
I don’t like my own house. The words leapt to his tongue, and he had to bite the inside of his bottom lip to hold them in.
This wasn’t his life.
He stood up and laid the pen down on top of his legal pad on the table.
His mother had given him the pen for his sixteenth birthday. Not a fountain pen, because he had terrible handwriting and would only have crushed the nib, but a weighty pen that required pricey cartridges his PA had to buy online. A heavy silver bullet that could strike terror into the hearts of his employees.
It was the sort of pen an important man would have. That was why she’d bought it for him. He’d been dutifully using it for years as he became an important man. He had other pens, better and more expensive pens, but he always used this one, because he’d loved his mother with the desperate, furious love of an only son for his sole parent, and he had wanted to please her.
“I don’t even like this p-pen.”
Ray Richardson fidgeted, and Carol Piaskowski frowned. Yet they all waited patiently for Sean to get his shit together.
He wondered how much crazy they would endure. How far they’d follow him toward the cliff edge before they put on the brakes.
“I’ve always been m-more of a p-pencil guy.”
Mike was starting to look irritated. “Sean, let’s take five,” he said.
Sean didn’t need five minutes. He needed Katie.
“Okay,” he agreed. “Ssorry, ffolks. We’ll b-be right b-back.”
Mike took his elbow and pulled him into the hallway, and with every step he took out of the conference room, Sean made a little more sense to himself.
“I don’t belong here,” he said wonderingly as the door closed behind him. “This is all—it’s all just a p-performance. The whole thing. This whole company. Juh-just to p-prove a p-point to my muh-mother.”
She’d wanted him to matter, but everything she gave him with one hand, she had taken away with the other: love with conditions, joyless opportunities, praise with asterisks. Her brand of adoration had worn him down, making him smaller and quieter, less individual, less whole, until he couldn’t separate himself from the disfluency anymore, the anxiety and loneliness and fear of mockery that dogged him every time he opened his mouth and every time he didn’t.
He’d left because he had to leave, but he’d left for her, too. She never would have been satisfied with the reality of him. He’d had to get away in order to fight his own battles and to define what success meant in his own terms.
But he’d gotten the terms wrong.
Sean didn’t want to be important. He liked screwing around on the computer and solving puzzles for Caleb and playing basketball with Mike. He liked reading science fiction and running and swimming. He liked every single thing about Katie.
He didn’t like this job, hadn’t missed it, and didn’t want it back.
As much as it unsettled him to accept it, his life was waiting for him in Camelot, Ohio. Claws and all.
“Ffucking hell,” he said, and he looked at Mike, dazed by the force of his own revelation.
“I hate golf.”
“I know that.”
“I also hate b-board meetings.”
“Everybody hates board meetings,” Mike said.
“I hate those long, expensive dinners we have to g-go to at all the tech c-conferences,” he confided. “And m-memos about marketing.”
“Sean? What the fuck is going on?”
He looked down at his fist, still clutching the pen. “I have to—the thing is, I have to resign. Effective immediately. I’ll—I think I have to do it in writing, don’t I? So I’ll do that, and that’ll be it. You guh-guys can sort out what I’m supposed to do with my shares in the c-company. Whatever’s best for Anderson Owens. You can buy me out, or you can sell them to the Syntek people or whatever makes the m-most sense. I just …”
Mike’s expression stopped him. Not because he looked shocked, but because he didn’t. A drooping acceptance settled in at the edges of his mouth and in his shoulders.
Guilt stabbed at Sean. He owed Mike an apology. He owed him a thousand apologies.
“I’m sorry, Mikey,” he said more quietly. “I let you down. And this—” He gestured behind him at the door to the boardroom. “This was n-not the way to do this. Until I got up there, I d-didn’t know I was going to … well, I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?”
Sean looked at Mike, surprised to notice how deeply the concern was etched in his face. He’d been close to Mike longer than anybody in his life—had lived with him or seen him practically every day since he started high school. Almost as long as he’d lived with his mother.
Mike had borne witness to his transformation from a stuttering outcast to a hacker to a successful businessman. He was the only person in Sean’s life other than Katie who had some idea what he was going through.
But Sean had left Mike out of this last transformation. Left him in the dark.
Those brackets on either side of Mike’s mouth, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes—Sean hated to think he’d been responsible for drawing them deeper. He hated to think he’d added to the burden on Mike’s shoulders, but there was really no denying it. He’d put his oldest friend in a bad position and left him there.
“I—I guess I ffigured some stuff out, finally. About my m-mom, and what I’m supposed to be d-doing with my life.”
“And what is that, exactly?”
Sean started to shrug, to say I don’t know, when he realized that he did know. “I’m ssupposed to be with Katie. I love her. And … and I’m not ssupposed to be doing this.” He w
aved his hand at the hallway, the suit he was wearing. “I don’t like being this b-big corporate guy. I like solving p-problems and fucking around on the c-computer. I think I’m going to ask Katie’s brother if I can buy into his ssecurity business. Be his tech support, and maybe help him with the celebrity security stuff we’ve been talking about, if you don’t sssue me for developing the idea for Anderson Owens and then trying to use it out there in C-camelot.”
“I wouldn’t do that to you,” Mike said.
“You probably should. I’ve been a dick.”
Mike nodded his acknowledgment and acceptance of this fact, as if it were no big deal. “So you’re going back to Camelot.”
“Ssorry,” Sean said again. “I’ll ffigure out how to make it up to yuh-you. I’ll g-give you my sh-shares. Most of them, anyway, or whatever I can do to m-make this easier.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I do, I think, because—”
“Shut up for a second, huh?”
Sean closed his mouth. Mike clapped him on the shoulder. “I can’t say I’m not disappointed, but dude, I saw this coming a long way off. Months ago. Your timing sucks, but I’ll deal with it.”
“Really?”
Mike squeezed his shoulder. “You always were kind of a moron when it came to Katie Clark.”
“Yeah, I know. But she’s guh-good for me.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. She m-makes me stutter.”
“All right, then. Go un-fuck whatever it is you fucked up with her. You have my blessing.”
“Thanks, man.”
They embraced, stiff-armed and awkward, and it occurred to Sean that he’d said Katie’s name out loud a minute ago. Flawlessly.
He said it again. “K-katie. Katie. Not so hard, asshole,” he muttered. “It’s only a name.”
But it was more than that. It was everything.
When they walked back into the boardroom, everyone was staring, but no one spoke up. Not for one endless heartbeat after another.
They were quiet, waiting, and Sean let them wait.
I’m not going to tell you what to do anymore, he thought. Figure it out for yourselves.
Finally, Carol Piaskowski said, “Are you all right, Sean? You don’t seem altogether yourself this morning.”
“I’m guh-good, actually,” he told her. “I’m the m-most m-myself I’ve b-been in a long t-time.”
Chapter Forty-four
He crashed the wedding.
It wasn’t as dramatic as it sounded. By the time the company plane landed in Jamaica and a cab dropped him off at the resort, he had thirty minutes left before the ceremony was supposed to start. It only took him five to walk to the beach and another ten to get the resort security guard in charge of keeping photographers away to check his clipboard and determine that Sean’s name was still on it.
“You were supposed to be here an hour ago,” he chided, and Sean shrugged.
“I g-got held up.”
The guard instructed him to slip through the open-sided reception tent and out to the beach on the other side, where he’d find the Camelot employees arrayed around the perimeter.
It was easy. He nodded a greeting to Eric and Bryce, slipped into a spot at the edge of the assembly, and watched the crowd assemble before his eyes.
Not that it was much of a crowd. Maybe fifty people, many of them with Katie and Caleb’s dark skin and dark hair. Family from Michigan, he guessed. Caleb stood up front beside Jamie Callahan, along with another man who had to be the officiant.
Hidden speakers began playing the wedding march, and the crowd rustled and shifted around in their seats, craning for a better view.
Then Katie walked barefoot along the aisle of sand, her arm through the elbow of a man Sean couldn’t see, because he couldn’t see anything but her.
She wore a tight black dress that left her shoulders bare and puffed out at the knees. Her hair was up in some kind of complicated knot, but a few pieces had already slipped out to lie heavily on her neck. She held a bouquet of tropical flowers, and she smiled all the way down the aisle, looking beautiful and vital and perfect.
The rest of the bridesmaids must have followed her, then Henry as ring-bearer, Ellen the bride, but Sean didn’t notice. He watched Katie’s face, stared at her body, breathed the same air she was breathing, and hoped.
The ceremony was simple. Caleb and Ellen, holding hands before the crowd of well-wishers, surrounded by family and close friends. Plain vows. Caleb’s serious expression the correct counterpoint to Ellen’s open, awestruck face. The exchange of rings, and a kiss that started out hesitant, reverent as a sacrament, but went on and deepened until it became a declaration.
Sean’s focus remained on Katie as she smiled and clutched her clasped hands tight. As she listened, and the smile faded. Her eyes widened and grew glossy, and when she wiped away a tear, her hand trembled.
He’d never seen her so publicly defenseless before, or so beautiful. She wanted this. She wanted the wedding. In a million years, she’d never admit it, but she believed in happily-ever-after, despite everything she’d been through the first time.
He just had to get her to believe in him.
She was looking away from him when she proceeded back down the aisle, laughing at something the groomsman beside her said, and then she was off in the surf, barefoot, her dress clutched in her fists, posing for candid shots with Ellen and Caleb and the rest of the bridal party as the sun sank toward the ocean.
Sean stood at the corner of the tent and waited, filtering out the noises of the wedding guests behind him, the reggae music and the whooping and laughter. He was captured in a vision of Katie backlit by the sun, smiling. She kept throwing her arms around unfamiliar shoulders, laughing with strangers, bumping hips and brushing cheeks with women and men he’d never seen before. Her family. Her friends.
What had made Sean think he could take her away from these people? She had connections he’d never forged. Deeper roots, more extensive networks.
Some people were made to go through life pulling other people into their circles of light. Born with her energy, her outward focus, her inner beauty. Living loud and bold, stumbling sometimes but getting up again with a self-deprecating laugh.
Sean wasn’t one of them. But damn it, he wanted her anyway. Whatever good he was to her—his mind, his body, his appreciation—she could have it. He’d do whatever it took to deserve her.
When she returned to the tent with Carly, she held her dress above her calves and carried a pair of sandals in one hand. Her black dress clung tight, outlining the shape of her breasts, her small waist and narrow hips.
She must have seen him. There was no way for her not to have seen him. But she walked past him into the tent as if she hadn’t.
Chapter Forty-five
Rum. Food. Speeches. Katie worried the whole time she held the microphone that Sean would do something, make some grand gesture in the middle of her toast that would embarrass her. Or destroy her.
He didn’t, and her heart ached, and she understood that it was stupid enough to have wanted him to.
Go away, she thought.
While another voice inside her begged, Do something.
When she’d seen him standing along the edge of the seating area during the ceremony, she’d thought he was here for her. That he’d flown thousands of miles for her, desperate to fix what they’d broken.
She’d watched her brother marry the woman he loved, and the whole time, she’d been able to see Sean in her peripheral vision. The man she loved. The man she hadn’t been able to put away or forget about, despite her resolution in the office. Her chest hurt at the sight of him. Her knees hurt. Everything hurt and yearned and ached.
But he hadn’t approached her, hadn’t said a word. He was hanging around the fringes of the crowd.
He was working.
He’d come for the wedding. For her brother. To fulfill his promise to help out with the security, support Caleb on
this important day.
He hadn’t come for her.
The sun set, and the harsh planes of his face grew shadowed and mysterious in the rushlights that illuminated the reception tent. The guests drank to Caleb and Ellen’s happiness. Henry ate too many pastille candies off the tables and ran in frantic loops around the empty dance floor until he fell and hit his head and began to cry, and Ellen had to scoop him up to comfort him. Jamie leaned in toward Carly, whispering something in her ear that put a secretive smile on her lips.
Ellen and Caleb had their first dance, and then the bridal party joined them. Katie swayed back and forth on the small patch of floor the resort had plunked atop the sand with Caleb’s groomsman, an army friend named Rusty.
Rusty was flirting with her. He had an easy smile, but it seemed she’d lost her taste for easy men. It was almost a relief when Sean cut in long before it was polite and said, “Dance with m-me.”
His stony face. That forbidding mouth. He stood an inch or two taller than Rusty, but he had an intensity that made him seem much larger.
He’s not a safe harbor, she told her body. He’s the cliff face you crashed into.
But her body didn’t listen. There was nothing about Sean’s appearance that her body found frightening. Only the threat he posed to her scabby, traumatized heart.
“Do you want to?” Rusty asked.
“It’s fine. Thanks for the dance.”
In Sean’s arms, nothing felt familiar or safe. She was a mouse clutched in the hawk’s talons and lifted to a dizzying height. Any moment, he would drop her. Or eat her.
The song changed to an upbeat number, but Sean held her stiffly, guiding her in a shuffling circle to a rhythm that bore no relationship to the music or the mood of everyone around them. The soft fabric of her dress caught on his fingers and clung to his damp palms. He’d taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves. Heat radiated off him.
She tried not to soak it in. Tried not to admire the way he looked in suit pants and a cotton shirt, to admit she’d been sneaking glances at the trim shape of his hips and the breadth of his shoulders since she walked away from him, but it was as if his heat were melting her, incinerating her resolve and leaving only her body, which never had been able to resist him. When his lower hand shifted to splay across her lower back, there didn’t seem to be any room for pretense between them anymore.
