by Ruthie Knox
He attacked the house with brutal efficiency. They’d been putting in long, dirty hours, stopping only to eat. He’d had a Dumpster delivered, and they both made endless trips up and down the stairs, carrying boxes of stuff he’d decided was trash. When the rain started coming down late this morning, she’d stopped taking boxes outside, but Sean hadn’t. She set them by the door now, and he carried them out, sometimes doubling up in a way that made his biceps flex and the cords in his neck stand out.
In the garage, he’d shown her a tarp where they put the things he wanted to keep, but so far the pile was pitiably small. A few of his mother’s dishes and her Riverside Shakespeare. A box of things from her closet marked “William,” which he said was his father’s name. The unframed Star Wars posters, rolled up and secured with rubber bands.
He had very little to say to her, but when he spoke, he stuttered so badly that one time he’d punched a wall in frustration and stalked out of the room.
“I m-m-might have thrown out the B-b-b-band-Aids.” His thumb traced a line across the arch of her foot and pressed into the ball.
“I don’t need a Band-Aid.”
He looked down at his hand and set her foot on the floor, and she missed his touch immediately. He’d stopped touching her after they returned from Pella. Katie guessed he’d decided they were finished having sex.
Too risky.
“P-p-p-put on yuh-your sh-shoes,” he ordered. “Yuh-you c-c-could sssstep on sssomething.”
“All right.”
He turned to leave the room, somehow managing not to look at the empty wall, the box on the floor, or her. So skilled at navigating minefields, her guy.
“Sean?” she asked before he made it out the door.
“Wuh-what?”
“What do you want me to do with the box?”
“Throw it awuh-way.”
She listened to the hollow thumping of his feet on the treads as he made his way back up to the attic, where he was sorting through and discarding 99.9 percent of his childhood. She’d watched him walk by with boxes that contained clothes, books, gaming systems, yearbooks. All of it headed outside.
An act of erasure on an impressive scale. But what would he do when he had to deal with the urn on the kitchen counter? And what would he say when the time came to deal with her?
She found her socks on the mat inside the front door, damp from the rain. Her toes recoiled at the cold wool, but the socks warmed quickly as she laced on her winter boots. They left a trail of wet prints into the room, where she hauled the box into her arms. Her tracks followed her all the way up the stairs.
She’d heard Sean tell the realtor it didn’t matter what the house sold for, so long as it sold quickly. He wouldn’t care about the footprints.
He couldn’t care. Caring would sever the ropes that kept the knot in place in the center of his chest. If he cared too much, he’d go limp as a cut marionette, incapable of speaking or functioning in the absence of the tight control he’d imposed on himself all those years ago.
At least, that’s how she imagined it felt to be him. So dangerously close to breaking irrevocably.
She kept waiting for him to break. Hoping for it.
Katie took the narrow stairs to the attic, memorizing the gaudy blossoms of the out-of-date wallpaper as the edges of the cardboard box gnawed at the tender insides of her arms. She found Sean on his knees by the window, surrounded by shoe boxes full of papers. He bent toward the weak light, reading something printed on a sheet of loose-leaf.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“A sstory I wrote for ssschool. Ssecond grade.”
“What’s it about?”
“My d-dog. Fffrank.”
“You had a dog?”
“N-no.” He looked up at her, saw the box, and frowned. “It sseems I m-made wuh-one up.”
He offered her the page, and she put down the box and took it. Impossible not to smile at his uncontrolled, childish print, his poor spelling, and the clumsy drawing of a dachshund.
“You really shouldn’t throw any of this away.”
“I c-c-c-can’t k-k-keep all this juh-junk.”
“You’re going to want it someday.”
He shook his head. “Sh-she k-k-kept everything.”
“I know.”
His eyes shone when he looked at her. “Sh-she wuh-was sso ffucking p-p-p-proud.”
“She loved you.”
“I hated her.”
Her heart twisted. He wanted her to judge him, but she couldn’t be his judge or his jury. She couldn’t absolve him. She could only love him, listen, wait for him to figure out how to absolve himself. “No, you didn’t.”
He grabbed her wrist and pulled her closer, beseeching her with eyes as dark as ink. The rain hammered against the windows, drummed down on the roof, and Sean begged. “I d-d-did. I had to. I either had t-to hate her or luh-love her, and I c-c-c-couldn’t k-k-keep luh-loving her when she—when she—”
He dropped his head and sank to his haunches. Katie stepped into his body, and he wrapped his arms around her waist to bury his face against her stomach. She held his head between her hands, thinking, Here it is. The guilt that had kept him in Camelot, finally coming out. This was the moment of collapse he needed so desperately.
But it didn’t come. His breath heaved into his lungs, and she waited for the sobbing, the broken confession, but he was soundless, so quiet and private even with his fingers digging into her hips and his face in her belly. So polite in his grief.
He wouldn’t let go of the control that had saved him all those years ago, and until he did, there was nothing she could do for him. No chance for them.
She sank her fingers into the short, dense thicket of his hair. “You can’t throw away the shrine.”
He stilled but said nothing.
“You’re going to want it.” She stroked his neck, his back, his shoulders. “You’re going to have a wife, a family, and they’ll wonder what you were like when you were young. It will matter to you. All of it.”
She tried to picture him in California with a wife. Tried to picture Sean’s children picking through boxes of history that smelled of yellowing paper and inferior glue. But all she could see was the too-bright sun he’d told her about, the too-green grass, and Sean pacing a hallway in some too-big, too-empty house, barking perfectly articulated orders into his phone.
Stay here, she thought. Stay here with me and stutter.
Tell me something. Anything.
He didn’t say a word. Instead, his fingers found the bottom of her T-shirt, unbuttoned her jeans, stroked up and over her ribs and cupped her breasts. Sean pulled her down to the attic floor, his chin scraping over her lips, the wet plane of his cheek pressing against hers before his questing mouth found hers and claimed it, and, God, she loved him, she loved him, she loved him.
Condemned kisses. Gallows passion. Her ponytail made an uncomfortable lump between her head and the floor while her traitorous body roused to the feel of his dirty palms against her breasts, to the attic smell and the single-minded focus he brought to this desperate act. Such a bad idea. Such a bad memory she’d be left with, of her jeans bunched above her boots, her shirt pooled at her armpits, her unfocused eyes on the ceiling beams as beautiful, broken Sean pinned her hips with his weight and tested her readiness with his fingers.
Wet for him. She wanted him even now, even as he hurt her with this endless, deferred leave-taking. Even as he denied her the confrontation, the clean break that might have made it possible for her to hate him, she opened her legs to him, opened her mouth in an astonished inhalation when he fumbled open his jeans, centered himself, and thrust inside her. He grunted, an animal sound that matched their hot, slick mating, their uncoordinated thrusting and lifting and oh, how everything bad in her wanted to do this. How everything craven hoped that this would be the time he realized he couldn’t give her up. She would snare him with sex if she could, her body a trap.
She grimaced at the i
dea and the futility of this last sacrificial gesture, and he made a sound like a sob and kissed her hard, hard, pushing his hands beneath her head so he could hold her where he wanted her and use her how he needed her.
God damn him for doing it.
God damn her for letting him.
When she couldn’t breathe, she broke the kiss and turned her face away. His lips against her ear. The rhythmic pistoning of his hips as she met him every time, just right, that deep, dark, unbearable pleasure. They knew how to do this one thing well, to speak in this one language honestly when they’d failed to tell the truth in any of the others. She’d never say she loved him, and he would never say it back.
His palm smoothed over a few inches of bare thigh to bring her leg up. Impossible. Her ankles were caught in her jeans, her weight trapped by his legs, her heart in her throat.
She strained toward him, and he hurtled toward obliteration. Running. Always running. His breath harsher with every deep stroke, her own body betraying her by tightening, accelerating them both toward the end.
He reached it first. If she could have held off her orgasm, she would have, just to deny him something. But in the end, the sound he made took her choice away. A hitched inhale, a held breath as his cables pulled tight, a moan deep in his chest, and she came.
In the placid moment afterward, she became aware of her hands first. They rested against his skin inside his T-shirt, flat and limp now where she’d been clinging to his back only moments ago.
The rain assaulted the roof. Sean breathed against her neck.
Katie lifted her palms, floated them over the plane of his back, and dropped them to her sides against the floorboards.
There. She’d done it.
Letting go wasn’t impossible after all.
Chapter Forty-one
When Katie dropped her hands, Sean understood he was supposed to haul himself up on his elbows and move off her. He just didn’t want to do it.
He didn’t want to stand up, zip his jeans, help her to her feet, apologize. He didn’t want to find dinner in a few hours, say good night and goodbye, and watch her walk out to her car alone in the rain.
It should be possible for him to engineer some kind of genteel end to this thing. A parting moment where they acknowledged that it had been good between them—it had been great—but they had no future together.
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 bac
k 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?”