Flirting With Disaster

by Ruthie Knox

  Sweat beaded up along the bridge of her nose, and he brushed a knuckle along her cheekbone. “Katie,” he said. “K-katie.”

  Just the sound of her name on his lips. The weight of his palm on her back, his other hand on her shoulder, thumb at her collarbone. Drawing her closer by inches. He inhaled deeply, and she felt as if he were breathing her in, consuming her.

  God, how she wanted to be consumed.

  “Your hair’s c-coming down,” he said, his voice a low vibration that struck a tuning fork in her stomach and moved under her skin and everywhere.

  “It’s impossible to make it stay up.”

  “I love your hair.” He dropped his head and moved closer as she breathed and wondered and hoped. When his lips met the space behind her ear, she shuddered. “I love this ssspot right here, t-too. Your shivery spot.”

  “Don’t do that here,” she said.

  “Can I d-do it somewhere else?”

  “No.” But she was smiling like a fool.

  “I love your smile.” He kissed the corner of her mouth.

  “You’re making me blush.”

  “I love it wuh-when you blush.”

  The band began to play “No Woman, No Cry.”

  “They must play this song, like, a million times a year.”

  “I like this sssong.”

  “Everybody likes this song.”

  She slid her hands to his chest and pulled away a few inches to study his face. In a moment out of time, she memorized him for the hundredth time. The arch of his eyebrows. The cleft above his lip. The faint lines at the corners of his eyes that deepened when he laughed.

  He wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be stern and stubborn and inflexible, and she was supposed to be on that walkway toward the future, moving away from him. Leaving him behind.

  But here he was. The reality of Sean, the sheer physical realness of him, wasn’t something she could deny. He frustrated her, he’d hurt her, and she loved him. All of it was true at the same time. No single fact seemed capable of taking precedence over the others.

  He cupped her head in his hands, smoothed his thumbs along her cheekbones, and told her, “I love your face.”

  When he lowered his head to kiss her, she held still and closed her eyes, savoring the curtain of sensation that slipped over her.

  “I love your m-mouth,” he whispered.

  She shivered and smoothed her hands over his shoulders and down his arms.

  “You trying to tell me something, Sean?”

  Her tone was off. She’d been aiming for teasing, but confusion and alarm came through loud and clear.

  This was the moment he would back away. He would dance around the subject of what exactly she meant to him, just as they’d always danced around any discussion of what their relationship meant or didn’t mean, of how long it would last or how they felt about one another.

  He stayed right where he was. “I am,” he said. “I’m trying to t-tell you I’m in love with you, K-katie.”

  She dropped her face against his neck and closed her eyes.

  Run, run, run, she thought. But she couldn’t move.

  She rubbed her cheek against the scratchy underside of his jaw.

  When he left, she’d ached as though someone had broken her secret bones with a mallet. As though every part of her still worked, disgustingly healthy and capable, but all these other, vital, necessary parts she’d never known about had been annihilated.

  I’m moving on, she’d told herself, but it hadn’t really been possible. There were too many tiny pieces of her scattered all over the ground. Too many mirrored slivers of her heart that he’d taken with him.

  The part that matters is who you are when you’re with him, Judah had said. How he makes you feel.

  How could she run from this?

  So she stayed in his arms, and she kissed his neck, and then she found his chin with her fingers and turned his head and kissed his mouth, too, kissed him until she couldn’t think of a single good reason why she’d ever stopped.

  When she finally broke away, it was only because she remembered she had something to say. “Sean?”

  He shook his head and took her mouth again, kissed her as if he were drowning, dying, going to war. Something distressing happened to her knees, and she slumped against him, broken by pleasure and relief. When he finally stopped kissing her, she’d entirely lost track of the conversation.

  “You were ssaying?”

  “I have no idea.”

  His chest hitched like he was laughing, and his lips curved into a smile. “You were going to ssay you love me, I think.”

  “Oh, I love you. It’s stupid, but it’s the truth.”

  “You p-promised me you wouldn’t call yourself sstupid anymore.”

  “I’m making an exception for loving you. The last time I saw you, you screwed me on the floor, made the worst proposal of marriage in the history of mankind, and then left the state. You have to admit that from my perspective, loving you is probably unwise.”

  He kissed her forehead and the tip of her nose, his hands stroking up and down her back. “Probably. But I wuh-won’t let you regret it.”

  “See that you don’t,” she said, and she kissed him again.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Later, they wandered down the beach until the surf became louder than the music and the breeze off the ocean encouraged her to move closer to him. Then they stopped and kissed some more, and Sean’s hands got pretty liberal, and she forgot herself and pressed against him, needing to feel him everywhere, under her dress, inside her skin.

  But he backed off after a few heated minutes, and she was glad of it. They hadn’t actually fixed anything, and that left a lot to sort out. It wouldn’t be a good idea to complicate matters with a round of such-a-bad-idea sex.

  Sean took her hand and pulled her down to sit in the sand between his legs, facing out toward the ocean. He didn’t say anything, so she listened to the shushing of the waves and breathed and tried not to think. She had a hunch that thinking wouldn’t help them any.

  “Have you ever been here before?” she asked.

  “No. You?”

  “I’ve hardly been anywhere.”

  “Where would yuh-you like to go?”

  “Paris,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go to Paris.”

  “You had a p-picture of P-paris in your locker in high school.”

  She craned her head around, surprised. “You remember that?”

  “I remember everything.”

  “Right.”

  His eyes crinkled up at the corners, and she wanted to kiss them.

  “I’ll t-take you to Paris, K-katie.”

  “I’d like that.”

  When she turned to face the ocean again, it was with a little spark of happiness glowing in her chest. His hand rested on her knee, his chest brushed her back, his breath moved over the back of her head.

  It felt right. Sean felt right. If she could only remember that and not focus on spiky, overcomplicated reality, they might be okay.

  “I’m guh-going to m-move back to C-camelot.”

  “What about your job?”

  “I resigned.”

  “Oh, no.” She turned around all the way, an awkward job that required her to get up on her knees and scoot in the sand until she could grab his shoulders. “Don’t do that for me. Don’t give up what matters to you. We can’t be that way, with me sacrificing for you or you sacrificing for me—we’ll just end up unhappy, and then …”

  She trailed off.

  Sean’s expression shifted, the tightening of his lips and the hardening of his jawline telling her he understood what she had been about to say, and it pained him. “And then I’ll leave you?”

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  He rose to his knees and rested his hands gently on her shoulders, so they were locked together, kneeling face to face in the sand. “How about this, K-katie?” His voice was calm and gentle with understanding. �
��How about yuh-you don’t write the end for us yet, when we’re just getting sstarted?”

  “But—”

  “No, wuh-wait. Listen. I didn’t give up the c-company for you. I wuh-would, if I had to, but I d-didn’t. I gave it up because it wasn’t right. I wasn’t running it for me, I was d-doing it for my muh-mother, and my muh-mother is dead. I c-can’t be who she wanted me to b-be anymore. Or, no, that’s not even it. I won’t. I have to ffigure out my own life. I have to b-be my own man.”

  She searched his face, looking for regret or resentment, any hint that he didn’t mean what he was saying. But he did mean it. “Who do you want to be?”

  “I want to b-be whoever I am with you.”

  It hurt to hear him say that, but it was the happy kind of hurt. An empathetic pain, a recognition that maybe she and Sean hadn’t been flirting with disaster since the moment they got together. Perhaps every moment of their relationship had not, in fact, been a quick slide toward catastrophe.

  Maybe they’d both been reaching for something without understanding how badly they needed it. She could call it “hope,” or “change,” but the best name for it was probably “love.”

  “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed,” Katie said, giving him a smile as twisted up and bliss-deranged as her heart felt, “but who you are with me is kind of a mess.”

  Sean nodded, smiling back. “A sstuttering mess.”

  “And a geek, too.”

  “A hacker.”

  “You say potato …” She smiled again and let go of his shoulders to wrap her arms around his torso. The relief of closing that small gap between them swamped her.

  God, the relief.

  “I love you, K-katie C-clark,” he whispered in her ear. “And I’m guh-going to move back to C-camelot with you, and I’m going to stay with you, and sooner or later I’m going to m-marry you, and we’re going to be happy.”

  “Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves,” she said. But she nuzzled her face into his neck, smelling his skin, hoping he was right. Willing him to be right.

  “It’s all g-going to work out. I p-promise.”

  “You can’t promise something like that.”

  The world didn’t work that way, and it was okay. Love was a leap of faith. Maybe she’d fall again and break her heart. Maybe Sean would catch her. Either way, she wanted to try. She wouldn’t waste what she had with him—what they could have together—by turning away from the risk. She wouldn’t write “the end” anymore when it was still only the beginning.

  “I c-can promise it,” he said. “It’s what I d-do, remember? I m-make magic happen.”

  Katie smiled. “That’s not magic. That’s orgasms.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Not the same thing.”

  Sean tightened his arms and tipped her over into the sand, rolling her onto her back and throwing one thigh over her hips before she’d even caught her breath. “The next one’s going to be magic,” he said. “Yuh-you wait and see.”

  Katie threaded her fingers into his hair, smiling up into those midnight-blue eyes, and decided she’d give him a fair shake at proving it to her. Worst-case scenario, she got an orgasm out of the deal. Best-case scenario, she got a magical orgasm.

  Either way, he had her heart, and she had his. They’d fumble their way into the future together.

  Epilogue

  Five months later

  Sean tripped as he stepped backward onto the moving truck’s ramp. The sharp edge of the bookshelf gouged a line into his forearm. “Shit.”

  “You okay?” Caleb asked.

  “Yeah, fine.” It stung, but he ignored the pain and concentrated on keeping his grip. His palms were so slimy, he was liable to drop the shelf if he didn’t pay attention.

  God, it was hot. He’d lived in Camelot last summer, but he had no recollection of Ohio weather being this insane in August. It was hot and muggy twenty-four hours a day, and no matter how often he showered, he was always sweaty, not to mention grimy from all the packing he and Katie had been doing.

  Below him, Caleb hoisted the bookshelf onto his shoulder, taking some of the weight off Sean’s end. “All right?”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  Caleb walked up the ramp, and they maneuvered the unit into place, filling the final gap at the back of the moving truck. “That does it, right?”

  “It b-better,” Sean said. “We’re out of room.”

  “Who knew you guys had so much stuff?”

  Sean sure hadn’t. When he’d flown Katie back from Jamaica and taken his mother’s house off the market, it had been next to empty. Katie brought some clothes and dishes with her when she moved in, but not enough to fill a truck.

  Of course, some of the boxes were his. There were a dozen or more labeled “Jenny” that he and Katie had decided to save from the attic. He’d found a good spot in the back corner of the truck that held the remains of the shrine.

  Surveying the landscape of the packed U-Haul, he scratched the back of his neck and said, “This shit is all g-going to fall over while we’re d-driving.”

  “No way. This packing job is a thing of beauty. You and Katie are going to open the truck up in L.A., and nothing will have moved an inch.”

  “Fifty bucks says something b-breaks.”

  “You’re on.”

  Caleb jumped down from the back of the truck, and Sean followed him. He pulled the back gate most of the way down and stowed the ramp. “Can you bring my truck up here?” he asked, digging the keys out of his pocket. The SUV was parked out on the road to leave room for the U-Haul. “I’ll wheel over the trailer.”

  “Sure.” Caleb caught the keys and walked toward the street.

  Sean peeled off in the opposite direction and met Katie coming toward him, a box in her arms. He grabbed the box and glanced at the label. Katie’s Sharpie scribble read “Light Bulbs. Hammer.”

  “Seriously, ssweetheart? Your brother just bet me fifty bucks nothing was gonna b-break. I’d hate to take his m-money before we’re out of the driveway.”

  “It won’t break. I used hot pads to keep the light bulbs away from the hammer. It’ll be fine.”

  “I thought we’d loaded all the boxes already.”

  “That’s the last one,” she said. “It’s stuff we’ll need in the apartment right away—light bulbs and paper towels and hot pads. Duct tape. Trust me, you’ll be glad we have it.”

  “You know apartments usually c-come with light bulbs, right?”

  “Yeah, smart-ass, I know. But when we finally get there and somebody’s stolen all of them when they moved out, you’re going to be the one thanking me. ‘Oh, Katie,’ you’ll say. ‘What would I ever do without you?’ ”

  He ducked his head to kiss her smiling lips. “Oh, K-katie,” he said. “What would I ever do without you?”

  “Lucky for you, you don’t have to find out.”

  He walked with her down to the truck, where he raised the gate again and found a safe spot for the box. “I think you m-might have a slightly distorted view of how ghetto this apartment is going to be.”

  “You said it was ‘kind of run-down.’ ”

  “Yeah, but I was thinking of it in comparison to my house in San Jose. It’s actually more of a c-condo than an apartment.” A two-thousand-square-foot condo in a nice, safe neighborhood within walking distance of the private college where Katie would be taking classes while he got the L.A. office of Camelot Security off the ground.

  Two years. That was the plan. Sean had agreed to launch Camelot’s new L.A. branch while Katie finished her bachelor’s in psychology, and then they would move back home so she could go to grad school at OSU. She wanted to be a therapist. She’d been practicing on him, much to his dismay.

  It was one thing to try to confront the legacy of his past and another thing altogether to live with a woman who came after him with theories from all the psych books she’d started devouring. Last week, she’d analyzed his dreams. This week, she was fascinated with a book a
bout maternal abandonment. Needless to say, Sean displayed all the classic symptoms of an abandoned child.

  He displayed all the classic symptoms of everything.

  “You know, the more I hear about this apartment,” she said, “the more I think it was a really bad idea to let you surprise me with where we’re going to live.”

  She’d been so busy with summer classes and helping Caleb expand the downtown office, he’d flown out to L.A. to scout apartments on his own, hoping to make at least this one thing easier for her. Katie had a tendency to think she could and should do everything herself. The better Sean got to know the Clarks, the more obvious it became that it ran in the family.

  “You’ll like it,” he promised.

  She put her arms around him. “I would like a cardboard box if you were living in it. But I didn’t want you to spend too much money.”

  Katie never wanted him to spend too much money. Ever since he’d sold his house and his share of the company and rolled the profits into an investment in half of Camelot Security, she’d been convinced he was a pauper. He’d tried to explain to her that he had some money in the bank, a too-generous IRA, and a savings account to boot, but she now divided the world into “people with private jets” and “everybody else.” In Katie’s book, everybody else didn’t waste money on movers. Everybody else packed their own boxes and rented a U-Haul.

  He didn’t mind the work, so he played along. But his indulgence of Katie didn’t extend to finding a truly run-down place for them to live in. He was taking her away from her home, even if only temporarily, and he sure as hell intended to make sure she was safe and comfortable and happy in the substitute he’d found them in Los Angeles.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll make sure I have enough m-money left over so you can open your therapist’s office after graduation.”