by Ruthie Knox
She would survive.
The disappointing thing was that she could see, in the wake of discovering she wasn’t going to get sex, that her interest in Sean wasn’t entirely about sex. She wanted to know what his deal was, what made him tick. Like the whole thing with having a company in California that he planned to go back to. He’d been in Camelot for months already. He worked for Caleb. Did Caleb know? What was the story there?
And the on-again, off-again stutter. She couldn’t figure it out.
Such an old, bad habit of hers, trying to figure everybody out. What made them tick, how she could make them confide in her. What they needed and whether she could give it to them. Useful when she’d been a bartender and when she needed to put Wild Ride clients at ease, but it wouldn’t get her anywhere in her efforts to become her best self.
Whatever. Her best self could have the night off. A woman could handle only so much defeat without taking some time to recuperate. In the meantime, she’d default to the old Katie and indulge her curiosity.
“Hey, Sean?” she asked when the movie went to a commercial break.
“Yeah?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“You already are.”
“You stopped stuttering.”
Silently, he stared at the screen, and she knew she’d put her foot in it. She could never figure out if it was okay to come right out and say something about stuff like this—to be verbally curious about people with scars or wheelchairs or disabilities—or if it was unforgivably rude. Was stuttering even a disability?
If it was bad enough, surely. If people treated you like a pariah because of it. But Sean wasn’t a pariah, he was hot. And she was curious.
“Sean?”
“That wasn’t a question.”
“Fine. Did you stop stuttering because you’re drunk?”
“I’m not drunk.”
When he didn’t say anything else, she tucked her feet under her and twisted back toward the screen. “Forget I said anything.”
Sean sighed. “No. It’s ffine. Ask awuh-way.”
But now she’d made him conscious of it, and he was stuttering again. Which made her even more curious. “Sorry. It’s just … sometimes you do, and sometimes you don’t, and I don’t know. I thought it was me, at first, because you said you only stutter around some people, but it can’t be me all the time. Is it when you’re nervous or something?”
He exhaled, a drawn-out, exhausted sound, and she wished she’d kept her trap shut. “It’s not you.”
“Sorry, really. I’ll shut up. You don’t have to—”
“Actually, it is yuh-you,” he interrupted. “P-partly. But it’s n-not your ffault. I c-can’t say your name, okay? In my head, I hear it, and I know if I try to say it out loud, I’m going to sstutter on the hard k ssound, and it’ll never c-come out. So I don’t even try.”
She hadn’t noticed, but now that she thought about it, he’d only ever called her Clark. Leadfoot. And one time, sweetheart. Never Katie. Though “Clark” and “Katie” started with exactly the same sound.
“You know that p-pretty much everybody stutters sometimes?” he asked. “Especially kids. Kids stutter all the t-time. One-second delays in speech. Half a second. Slight p-pauses. It’s so normal, we don’t even notice it.”
He stared at the screen. His fingers were wrapped around his mug, and he lounged against the couch with one arm tossed casually over the back, but nothing about him looked relaxed. He looked tight. Tense.
“My mom didn’t notice I sstuttered more than n-normal until I was three or four, and then the pediatrician t-told her it would go away when I got older. When I started school, though, the other kids made ffun of me for it, and I c-came home to my m-mom in tears one day. She told me, ‘Sean, there’s nothing wrong with the way you t-t-talk. You’re smarter than those k-k-kids, and you’re going to g-g-grow up to do in-c-credible things, so don’t wuh-worry about it.’ ”
Sean’s mother had been proud of him. Everybody in Camelot knew that. It was actually almost all Katie had known about him. His mom was the new tenth-grade English teacher, they’d moved from Zanesville right before freshman year, they lived over on Wiggin Street, and he was so smart, he was practically Einstein.
“I thought when she said there was nuh-nothing wrong with how I talked, she meant it was okay to ssstutter. It took me a few years to figure out she literally thought there was nothing wrong. Or at least, that’s wuh-what she pretended to think. Like she couldn’t even hear it.”
“That’s wacked.”
“I don’t think she could handle that I wasn’t p-perfect,” Sean said. “It t-took too much away from her. So she ignored it. She d-d-denied it. And by the time I was in m-middle school, I understood that when I sstuttered, it made her muh-mad, and I t-t-tried not to.”
His face in profile was both beautiful and frightening. Rugged and rigid, so mercilessly controlled. She imagined him with a knot inside his chest, at the core of him. His past, his deepest feelings, bound in layer after layer of rope, with guy lines stretching out to the surface of him, stringing him tight.
“That really sucks,” she offered.
“The thing is …” He paused. “The thing is, sstuttering is t-t-tricky. If you stutter on one sound, you can say a d-different word. If you have a hard t-time with the first word in every sentence, you can try ssslow starts, like, ‘Aaaaand here’s Sean,’ or you can add a ssound, like, ‘Ah, where’s the bathroom?’ But the stutter will c-catch up with you. You’ll start blocking on the new word, and your t-tricks will quit working. As a k-k-kid, I ran through all the tricks I could think up, and by the time I sstarted high school I’d turned a mild stutter into a c-c-catastrophe. So you know what my mother d-did when we moved to C-camelot?”
She’d made it worse, somehow. God, she must have made it worse, because Katie could hear it in Sean’s voice. Something awful, some painful thing that had created the tightness in him. Something that had made him afraid and ashamed, so he’d reacted by balling it up and hiding it away, out of reach.
“Before my freshman year in high ssschool, she t-told all my teachers I was sh-shy and convinced them not to call on me in c-class. Ssaid it was a ssocial anxiety d-disorder, and she could get them a d-doctor’s excuse if they needed to see it, though that was bullshit. She was their new c-colleague, so they went along. And I sat through two years at Mount Pleasant High c-c-completely fucking m-m-m-mute.”
She saw him on the bus. Sean Owens, alone in his seat, reading his book, shutting out everyone else. Silent.
She’d thought he was shy, but he’d been miserably alone.
“She gagged you.”
“She d-didn’t m-mean to.”
Katie leaned across the couch to place a hand on his forearm. “Sean, she gagged you.”
She’d expected to see anger in his eyes, or maybe nothing, if that tight control had its way. What she found was something else. Something like loathing.
“She wanted me to b-be p-p-perfect, and wuh-when I wuh-wasn’t, she t-t-took it as an attack on her. I t-t-told her I wanted to g-go to ssspeech therapy. She sssaid no. Ssomeone would find out I was in therapy, sh-she said. They’d think less of m-me, but of c-c-course she meant they’d think less of her. Then I ffigured, maybe if I juh-just g-got away from her, I c-could get ssome help, so I applied for a scholarship to the academy in C-columbus. I thought if I b-boarded there, I’d have to t-t-talk, right? And somebody wuh-would hear me and help me. I got a ffull scholarship. Room and b-board and tuition.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Sh-she wouldn’t let me take it.”
“Why not?”
“She was sso pissed that I’d applied behind her back. I d-don’t think I’d ever seen her that angry, and she got angry a lot. She said when I guh-got my ‘social anxiety’ under c-c-control, she’d c-consider it, but until then, it wuh-wouldn’t be ‘appropriate’ ffor me t-to go.”
“So what did you do?”
“
My b-buddy Mike Anderson, you remember him?”
She shook her head, though she thought maybe she did. She could picture a guy Sean had hung around with, dark-haired, really into computer games and laser tag and that kind of stuff. More outgoing than Sean.
“Yeah, well, he was my b-best friend. A c-couple years ahead of us in sschool. When he went to c-college, I went with him. M-mom told p-people I’d transferred to the academy, but I actually dropped out. Moved to C-california with Mikey and sstarted working whatever juh-jobs I c-could get to support myself. I got a juh-judge to legally emancipate me. The ultimate ‘ffuck you’ to my mother.”
The wind picked up outside, sending a fusillade of icy snow tapping against the windows. Katie’s thoughts whirled around with it, patternless.
She’d heard that he transferred to the academy. She’d thought she knew his story, but she hadn’t known anything about Sean. Not one thing.
What must it have been like, at sixteen or seventeen years old, to be thrust into adulthood on the other side of the country?
No wonder he was so hard. He must have needed all that stony self-control just to function. A teenager, alone and broke, and every word that came out of his mouth chaos.
“You did all right in California, though?”
“I never came home.”
“When you say ‘never,’ you mean …”
“Never. Not once. Not ever again. Maybe I sh-should’ve tried to ssee her, but when I c-called, sh-she wuh-wouldn’t speak to me. I only knew she told p-people I went to the academy because Mikey heard that from his mom. I didn’t sssee the house again until she d-died.”
His eyes had shuttered, his expression set. Granite Man.
“And your mom?”
“I never saw her again, either.”
Katie turned her cheek into the cushion and let herself feel it. The bleak recrimination in his voice. The loneliness and craving and guilt. He’d come home to bury his mother, but clearly, she wasn’t buried yet.
“Mikey and I guh-got into hacking,” Sean continued. “Juh-just for kicks in c-college, but it turned out to b-be useful. We sstarted this security c-company, Anderson Owens, and it took off. I got therapy for the sstutter and thought I’d managed to shake it. Ssome people do, you know. They juh-just manage to k-kick it to the curb. Permanently.”
He raised his mug to his lips for a deep swallow. She knew without asking that he’d thought he was one of the ones who’d managed a permanent recovery, and he wasn’t happy to discover otherwise.
“And then she d-died, and I came back to Camelot to p-pack up her stuff, and now I sssound like this, at least ssome of the time. Not just with you, either. It’s sspreading. The wuhwonders of the human b-brain, eh?”
“You sound fine,” she said.
A muscle jumped in his jaw.
“I mean, you don’t. I’m not trying to say you’re not stuttering, or that I don’t notice …” Katie sighed, feeling like a moron. She didn’t know what the protocols were for a conversation like this. Somehow, she and Sean had gone from barely knowing each other this morning to blundering into what felt like every possible avenue of personal revelation. It was awkward, and part of her wished they could just go back to the way things had been a week ago, with her thinking he hated her and him never speaking.
Except that had sucked, too.
“I don’t care how you sound,” she said finally.
“Thanks.”
She wondered if there was something more she was supposed to say. Something nice, like, I like you, so what does it matter what you sound like? Or empathy. Parents really do screw us up, don’t they?
But Sean didn’t invite further conversation. He stared at the TV as though naked girls were going to jump out of it any second. He stared at it as though his life depended on it.
So she stared at it, too, and drank her wine, and listened to the snow fling itself against the windows. And when the movie ended, she touched his shoulder with two fingers, said good night, and went back to her room to sleep.
Chapter Nineteen
Judah didn’t get Sean.
Tapping a Sharpie against the clipboard that bore the set list, he dropped into a folding chair with enough force to send it skating along the concrete floor. The green room of Nellie’s, the seedy bar that boasted Buffalo’s best wings and a surprisingly excellent sound system, was not high class. Folding chairs and card tables were the only furniture a dive like this ever had backstage. Anything nicer got trashed.
From across the room, Judah watched Katie’s partner issue directions to Ginny as if she worked for him, and he tried to make the guy add up.
Katie, he’d expected to be good. She’d done a hell of a job getting him to spill his guts, after all. This morning at breakfast, she’d questioned Paul, tucking into her pancakes with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old and asking him a dozen pointed questions that his manager had answered in gruff monosyllables.
Paul lived to manage, and for the past fifteen years he’d lived to manage Judah. He tolerated interlopers, but only when Judah pulled rank and told him he had to.
Eventually, Katie had abandoned the full frontal assault and started lobbing Paul fan-girl questions about his influence on the recording sessions and how he’d handled the logistics of the heavy touring years. She worked the conversation around to Paul’s wife and nineteen-year-old twin daughters back in Chicago, and by the time the check came she had him laughing at all her jokes and volunteering the answers he’d kept to himself earlier.
She was a pro. Judah had known it, even if she didn’t.
Sean was something different. He was supposed to be an hourly employee of Caleb’s company, but he wore a deceptively modest ten-thousand-dollar watch and carried himself like someone who was used to getting his way.
Most of the time, he looked as if he’d just as soon shoot you as talk to you, but Judah had caught him watching Katie when her back was turned with this small, secret smile on his face.
Then there was the computer-detective thing. Judah didn’t know how Sean had gained access to all the incriminating shit he’d dug up, but the man clearly had skills.
“Ginny,” Judah said, and her head snapped up, her eyes finding his from across the room and softening the way they always did.
The girl was nuts about him. It was getting bad enough that he’d started thinking about firing her. Admiration was one thing, but all that syrupy sweetness in her eyes made him irritable. He’d flat-out told her she was too young for him, but it made no difference. Ginny seemed content to wait for his love to blossom. She’d been especially attentive when he was in rehab, no doubt hoping he would hit rock bottom so she could scoop him up on the rebound.
It never failed to amaze him, how women would contort themselves to fall in love with him. He made it difficult as hell, and still they persisted.
“What should I close with?” he asked.
Annoying as she could be, Ginny knew his songs better than he did, and she had an intuitive knack for knowing what the fans would want to hear.
She cocked her head to one side. “ ‘Destroying Ahab,’ ” she said after a moment.
He hesitated, marker hovering over the page. “That’s such a sad one.”
“It’s a sad town.”
He nodded and wrote it down, the chemical-marker-induced lump in his throat reminding him of a thousand other rooms like this. A thousand other shows.
She was right. The Rust Belt cities liked the sad songs. He’d have to do one of the old crowd-pleasers as an encore, though. They’d want to wave their non-ironic Zippos in the air and belt out all the words of their favorite Pratt tune before they buttoned up and braved the cold to drive home.
Sean spoke to Ginny for another minute, and then she left. The cowboy pulled up a chair.
“You see the new one yet?” he asked.
The message had come to Judah’s personal email account. Judah hadn’t given Sean the address of that account, much less the password. Still,
he wasn’t surprised.
“Yeah.”
“When were you going to get around to telling us about it?”
“Didn’t want to make life any harder for Katie than it already is,” Judah said with a smile, and Sean looked down at his hands.
He’d guessed as much. Sean didn’t look like a man who’d gotten lucky last night. He looked like a man who needed to find release before he rattled apart at the seams.
Katie hadn’t caught him yet.
“She can take it,” Sean muttered.
“Can she? She’s not as tough as she acts, you know.”
“She’s tougher than you think.”
Judah leaned back in the chair and asked, “How long have you two known each other, anyway?”
“Depends how you c-count.” Sean settled against his own chair, making his body a mirror of Judah’s. “He knows where you are,” he added.
“He?”
“Your psycho.”
“Yeah.” The message that had greeted him when he woke up mentioned the snowstorm that had Buffalo in its grip and questioned whether cowards’ blood ran red or yellow.
Not the most pleasant way to meet the day.
“Did you hack all my accounts before I gave you the log-ins yesterday?”
Sean snorted. “I only had to hack one. You should really c-come up with more passwords.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“What do you want her for?”
“What do you want her for?” Judah replied.
Neither of them would answer. Stalemate.
Sean scrubbed his hand across his face. “I’m going to figure out where those messages are c-coming from.”
“It might be a dead end,” he said. “They all come from different accounts, plus—”
“It’s not a dead end. But it would be a hell of a lot easier if you’d let me talk to the service providers.”
“No. Somebody will leak it.”
“I know a few guys at Google, and—”
“No. Figure something else out.”