Flirting With Disaster

by Ruthie Knox

  Sean opened his mouth, but she wasn’t done.

  “You know what the difference is between you and Levi? At least Levi had some nobility. At least he was chasing a dream. He had a grand plan, and I wanted to get in on it. You—you’re just running. You’re too freaked out by the way you feel about Camelot, and your mom, and everything bad that ever happened to you to even consider figuring out how to make peace with the place.”

  “I’m n-n-not ruh-ruh-running—”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “D-d-d-don’t inter-ruh-rupt m-m-me when I’m trying t-t-to t-t-t-talk.”

  “Don’t propose to me just because you don’t want to have to deal with all this shit!” she cried, flinging her arms wide.

  “That’s n-n-not wuh-what this is.”

  “Yes, Sean, it is. I know it’s not the done thing to freak out when the man you love asks you to marry him, but damn it, what am I supposed to do with you? You need therapy, not a wife. You think you want to marry me, but you won’t even say my name.”

  “I c-c-c-can’t sssay yuh-your n-name.”

  “Yes, you can. You don’t want to. You don’t like the way it would sound. It wouldn’t match up to your precious ideal, so you refuse to try. Camelot makes you feel things you don’t want to feel, and you think if you leave it will get better. You’re going to take the solution you came up with in Ohio and present it to your board in California as the shiny way forward.”

  “It’s n-n-not like that.”

  “It is. It’s worse than that. You’re going to steal a piece of Camelot and use it to fix your company. And hey, if you can steal one, why not steal two? Take Katie along for the ride. You think you’ll be able to say my name there, Sean? You think I’ll be your dream girl, and everything will come up roses?”

  “D-damn it, I’ll give you anything you wuh-want.”

  “Stay.”

  “Anything b-but that.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t even—you won’t consider it, Sean. You can’t see what you need, and you never thought about what I want.”

  “Wuh-wuh-wuh-what d-do yuh-you wuh-wuh—”

  “I don’t know!” she shouted.

  The attic fell quiet. Katie stopped moving. In a low, ragged voice he’d never heard her use before, she told him, “I don’t know. I thought I did, before we went to Kentucky, but I was wrong. I thought I was doing better, since I met you, but obviously not, or I wouldn’t have just flipped out when you proposed. That’s not normal. I get that. And I’m flattered, sort of, that you care enough to ask. But … it’s not good enough. I’m trying to figure myself out. I’d like to be with somebody who cared enough to stick around and help me.”

  “I c-c-care.”

  She put her hands on her hips and stared, breathing hard. Her eyes were glistening, her throat all red and her skin blotchy, and she looked down that royal nose at him and said, “Not enough.”

  She spoke gently, but the words hit him hard.

  He’d been selfish with her from the beginning. Refusing to say her name because he didn’t want to hurt his pride. Kissing her for the first time in front of a stranger he wanted to best, with no regard for her feelings. Fucking her in the backseat of his truck because he wanted her, and telling himself it was okay because she wanted him, too.

  And now this. This grasping invitation.

  “I’m not your dream girl, Sean,” she said. “I’m not anybody’s dream girl. And I guess I’m not all that tough, and we both know I’m not as smart as you. But even so, I deserve better than what you’re offering me.”

  The words took on weight inside him and became a force that pushed closed the door on his hope and left him in a familiar place. A cold, dark place that felt like home.

  She was right. He didn’t deserve her. He had never done one thing to deserve her. He wanted her, but if life had taught him anything, it was that want was irrelevant. You played the cards you were dealt, used the talents you had to get ahead, and ignored what you wanted.

  Sean stood still and said nothing as what he wanted walked out on him.

  Chapter Forty-two

  “It can’t be over.”

  Katie leaned forward in her office chair and punched the speaker button on her phone. She dropped the receiver on her desk and tipped back her office chair so she could contemplate the ceiling.

  “Katie, it can’t be over,” Judah repeated, and this time his voice came from farther away, which seemed fitting, since she couldn’t really absorb this conversation. A translucent emotional dam held the whole world at a distance.

  One of the speckled white panels on the office ceiling had swollen in the heavy rain overnight, and this morning she’d found it dripping, the carpet a sodden mess. She’d put a popcorn bowl under it.

  No doubt if Caleb were here, he would fix it, but he was already in Jamaica getting ready for the wedding, blissfully unaware of what had happened to her, and Katie couldn’t help but feel as though the sopping disaster in the corner of the room matched the pain-flooded landscape of her body.

  “It can, actually,” she said.

  Judah made a dismissive noise, a sound that traveled through space and into her ears and put a picture in her head of his nose wrinkled and his eyes sly and mischievous. A happier Judah than she’d ever seen. “What did he do?”

  “He asked me to marry him.”

  She would have preferred it if he’d shot her. It would have hurt so much less than getting proposed to. Any other leave-taking she might have handled with more grace, but he’d pushed the biggest button she had, poked the worst wound she’d ever inflicted on herself, and surely he should have known.

  He hadn’t even said that he loved her.

  “That bastard,” Judah said, and she managed a bitter laugh.

  “You had to be there.”

  The worst part was, she knew exactly what he’d been trying to do. She understood too well his need to escape, his desire to take her with him. A big part of her had thrilled to the whole idea—had packed its bags and skipped across the tarmac to fling herself onto his jet to San Jose and marriage and endless, loving bliss.

  That part of her was a hopeless idiot.

  She’d sacrificed her own dreams for Levi’s, and now Sean wanted her to sacrifice her present so he could escape his past. She couldn’t be happy with him that way.

  Let him have his sterile life in California. She would stay here with the leaking ceiling and crumbling tiles, wasted and wrecked and wallowing in life.

  “I said no,” she added, unsure whether that was sufficiently obvious.

  Judah chuckled. “Yeah, I got that. Care to tell me why?”

  “It’s kind of a long story. I’ll tell you sometime, if you ever come visit.”

  “I’d love to visit. Maybe I’ll bring Ben after this circus blows over.”

  Katie glanced at the picture on her computer monitor. It filled half the screen—Judah and Ben holding hands. An advance peek at the cover of next week’s People magazine. Leave it to Judah to come out of the closet with a big splash. It had been all over the news this morning, though Katie hadn’t seen it until she got on her office computer and fired up one of her favorite gossip sites, hoping to distract herself from her misery with snarky comments about celebrities.

  She’d called him right away, but he hadn’t returned her message for a few hours, and in the meantime she’d left that picture where she could see it, wanting the reminder that Judah, at least, had wrested a happy ending out of the last few weeks’ adventures.

  In the time since she’d left Pella—days she’d spent packing up Sean’s house and waiting for their relationship to slip under the surf for good—Judah and Ben had been talking and kissing, falling in love all over again.

  Not that they’d had an easy time of it. Melissa was part of their equation, too, and she remained hostile toward Judah and Ben’s reconciliation. But she and Ben had met with her psychiatrist and talked about the situation, and she’d agreed to engage in a
much more intense program of therapy, with Ben’s involvement.

  Katie could see the change in Judah in the picture, hear it in his voice. A joy so overwhelming, it made her cry.

  Which was how he’d figured out something was wrong when he called. The crying.

  “I’d like it if you could visit,” she said, and it came out a desperate, hoarse sort of whine that she hated but couldn’t do anything about.

  Half her life, she’d never cried. Not like this, with snot and puffy eyes and all this unattractive leaking. Now she couldn’t seem to quit.

  “Good. So tell me what you’re going to do to fix this.”

  “I can’t fix it. It’s over.”

  “Don’t be stupid. What happened?”

  “He went home to California, just like he said he would.”

  “But he asked you to go with him, didn’t he? Isn’t that what the proposal was about?”

  “Yeah, but I can’t do that. He’s a mess, Judah. I can’t let him use me as a patch or—or some kind of drug.”

  “You let me.”

  “I wanted to help you.”

  “So why don’t you want to help him? You like him a hell of a lot more than you like me.”

  Katie sighed and rubbed the back of her hand over the spiky clumps of her eyelashes. Judah didn’t know the whole story, so he couldn’t understand how it worked. People didn’t leave him, no matter how awful he was. They left her.

  “Because it’s not a relationship if I just give and give until he’s taken everything he needs and then he’s over it. It’s a dysfunctional disaster. I need somebody who wants to help back, you know? I need a partner who cares about what I need, too.”

  “You don’t think Sean cares?”

  “I don’t think he can care the way I need him to.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, Katie. That man is in love with you. It’s blindingly obvious to anybody who’s spent five minutes with the two of you. And even if it weren’t, I can see it in his damn aura.”

  “Stop with the auras.”

  “I’m just saying, he loves you, he wants you, he has issues. Who doesn’t have issues? That’s not the part that matters. The part that matters is who you are when you’re with him. How he makes you feel. Everything else is just bullshit your brain is crapping out because you’re scared.”

  “When did you become my love therapist?”

  “When you started needing one. We’re friends, right? You helped me. Now I help you.”

  “I appreciate it. But it’s over.”

  “It’s not over, Katie,” he said again. “Look at me and Ben—fifteen years, for fuck’s sake. It’s never over until you don’t love him anymore. And to tell you the truth, I’d rather you pulled your head out of your ass sooner, because I don’t want to put up with your moping for a decade.”

  “I’m not going to mope. I’m going to move on.”

  She’d made up her mind already. She could have one morning of this. Lunch was in an hour, and tomorrow she had to fly to Jamaica, and she absolutely would not infect her brother’s wedding with her sorrow. In an hour, she would be finished crying for Sean Owens. Done.

  “Good luck with that. Seriously. But you might be surprised how hard it is, and how much it’s going to hurt.”

  “God, you’re just full of pleasant thoughts this morning.”

  “I’m trying to be straight with you. If I suck at it, I’m sorry. I don’t have a lot of practice playing girlfriend. But I can tell you that from where I’m standing, love is what matters. And since I’m not the one who’s crying, I’m positive I’m right.”

  That set her off again. The welling in her throat, the pressure in her sinuses. Fucking tears. “I have to go,” she mewled. “I’ll call you.”

  “Think about what I said. And keep me posted. I don’t like worrying about you. It’s new for me, all this worrying crap.”

  “Okay. ’Bye.”

  Katie disconnected the call with her big toe and tipped her head back again. Rain drummed down on the roof, and stupid tears leaked from the corners of her stupid eyes and ran into her hair, wetting her temples.

  One hour to wallow in it. One hour to worry that Judah was right and love really was everything. The only thing. One hour, and she would be finished with this.

  But she couldn’t even wallow properly. Not with Judah’s terrible advice on auto-playback inside her head. The part that matters is who you are when you’re with him. How he makes you feel.

  He made her feel safe. Appreciated, confident, sufficient. That if she could be with him, she could be anyone she wanted to be, and he would stand behind her shoulder and root for her all the way.

  Only he made her feel like this, too, and this was awful. This empty worthlessness. This old, familiar sense that she was alone in the world. As a thirteen-year-old, she’d tried to fill the sudden silence in her family’s apartment with jokes and conversation and Levi. All those years in Alaska—all those long, arid, not-quite-right years when she’d been on the other side of the world from her family—she’d worked hard to make something work that was fundamentally broken. She’d done everything she could think of to be what Levi needed so he’d give her his love and his attention.

  And now with Sean, same old story. She’d tried to keep her heart out of it, tried not to cleave to him, but she’d done it anyway, and he’d left her, and it hurt the same way it always hurt.

  Worse, actually.

  She needed to learn to be enough all by herself.

  I’ll give you anything you want, he’d said. But he couldn’t. Only she could.

  One hour. Then she had a future to plan.

  You missed your calling, babe, Judah had said that night in the alley. Should have been a therapist.

  He’d been mocking her, but she had decided it fit. Marriage counseling, family therapy, or maybe something more glamorous and useful to Camelot Security, like criminal profiling. She would have to figure out what classes she needed to get a psychology degree. Look at grad programs at OSU. Figure out what path would carry her toward the life she wanted and turn her interests, her talents, into the shape of her future.

  She wouldn’t waste months or years grieving the end of a relationship that had been ill-advised from day one. She had to move forward or lose her grip on everything important. She had to keep her attention on the future, because when she thought about college and grad schools and careers, she felt marginally less like she was on a moving walkway being dragged backward away from the world’s supply of clean air, laughter, and light.

  Right now, it was all she could do to stay in one place, but if she kept walking long enough, she’d begin to inch forward. It would take some time, but it would happen.

  She would make it happen.

  Chapter Forty-three

  Twelve faces stared up at him from their places around the mahogany conference table.

  Tell us the plan, their expressions said. Tell us what’s next.

  Sean had seen this before, this blank expectancy, but he’d never really thought about it. Surely this wasn’t how a board was supposed to work, with one man leading and all the others following. He must have done something wrong, taken too much power onto his own shoulders somewhere along the way to have ended up with this imbalance.

  Tell us the plan, the faces said, and for the first time he wanted to say, Figure it out yourselves.

  But that wasn’t right. That wasn’t why he was here.

  He picked up a stack of stapled handouts and tapped them on the table, lining up the edges unnecessarily before dividing the pile in two and handing it off to the men on either side of him. Mike took the second stack and gave him a confident grin.

  Showtime.

  Sean couldn’t be more ready. He’d finished the presentation on the plane and polished it up with Mike this morning. He would begin with the market report on the first page, covering all the doom-and-gloom numbers before he eased into an introduction of the solution he’d devised. Then, later on, Mike
would present the offer that had come in from Syntek, and the board would reject it. No need for it, because Owens has the situation under control.

  The shiny way forward, Katie had called it.

  But he couldn’t think about Katie.

  Sean took a sip of water. He looked around the table, meeting each set of eyes. Carl, his marketing director. Kelly, the CFO. Eight board members, six of them men, two women. Ray Richardson the oldest, the man who’d helped Sean snag his first major capital investment in the days when the company was just a vision and a dog-eared proposal Sean was flogging all over town. And next to Ray, Carol Piaskowski, a trim woman in a red suit who was Sean’s favorite person on the board.

  His people, hand-picked and capable.

  “Good morning, everyone.”

  Another sip of water as they waited. Tell us.

  “Customer surveys show that our clients are losing confidence in us. The gap between what they think we can do for them and what they think our competitors can offer is closing, and we’re seeing it in the numbers. Three major canceled contracts last month, and a dozen in the past four quarters. These are clients who are going to SafeSoft and Huckabee and Bishop Price, where they’re getting exactly the same service we offer at a lower cost.”

  He retrieved the remote from the table so he could bring up the first of his slides. “If you’ll take a look here, you’ll see the numbers over the past three years, and a slow but steady downward slide …”

  Sean walked through the presentation without having to think. It was easy. The mantle of power had slipped over his shoulders, and he wanted to grin at all of them. Follow me. I can do this.

  He kept himself back, though. They wouldn’t recognize him if he grinned. He didn’t have a reputation for smiling.

  “Now take a look at this one,” he said. “These are our three biggest competitors. There’s really no question, if you look, that they’re closing the gap. Bishop Price had a great quarter …”