Flirting With Disaster (36 page)

Anderson Owens would be at the vanguard, and the vanguard paid well. It was time to stop screwing around and go home.

“I have to be evil ssometimes,” he said. “Mike isn’t any good at it.”

She reached up, uncertain fingers briefly landing on his cheek, his neck, the side of his face. Her eyes bothered him. Something off there, too.

“You ssstill have a headache?”

“A little one.”

“I think there’s some aspirin in the b-bathroom.”

She smiled sadly at her lap. “See what I mean? Personal jet. I need one of these.” Without looking up, she found his hand with hers and twined their fingers together. “I can’t imagine you ever being evil.”

“That’s because you’re good.”

She met his eyes. “When do you go back?”

He wished he had some means to turn away from her. It wasn’t a blessing, loving someone this much. It was a constant ache, a stitched-up wound always threatening to rip open and make a mess of him.

“Next week.”

She looked out the window. They’d ascended through the rain, and water streamed off the glass in crooked ribbons. “You’ll need help packing up the house,” she said to the sky.

There was nothing spectacular about the words, but they broke him. A crucial support snapped, and he listed sideways into her, wrapping her in his arms, burying his face in her neck. “Help me,” he said.

He didn’t mean for it to come out the way it did, an utterance seamed with desperation, visibly cracked and dangerously vulnerable. He didn’t mean for her to see him like that.

She only turned and kissed him. “Of course.”

Katie lifted the next-to-last piece of the shrine off the living room wall. His kindergarten diploma. Across the top, a row of crayon children held hands like paper dolls, and she imagined Mrs. Owens choosing the frame. Hammering in the nail.

Pointless tears welled up in her eyes, and she lifted one hand to dismiss them and lost her grip on the frame. It slipped from her fingers. The corner stabbed into the top of her foot before flopping over onto the carpeted floor.

“Mother
fucker
!” Katie lifted her injured foot to cradle it in her hands. She lost her balance, hopped a few times, and came down on her butt, her fall cushioned by the scraping of her back against the edge of the couch. A stacked tower of books slid to the floor.

“What was that?” Sean called from the attic.

“I’m all right,” she said, but she was too out of breath to shout properly, and his feet were already pounding down the stairs. He burst into the room as if he expected to find her dead, and she looked down at her foot, sort of hoping the injury would be terrible.

No such luck. A white-edged scrape, some toothed skin, an anemic welling of blood. If she’d been wearing shoes like a sensible person, she wouldn’t even have the blood to show off.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I just dropped a picture frame on my foot. Sorry if I scared you.”

Sean looked at the wall in front of her. Only a grade school portrait remained, abandoned among rectilinear areas of darker paint that hadn’t faded over the years. A ghost shrine.

“You p-p-packed it up.”

“I thought it was time.”

He dropped to the floor next to her, his head lowered so she couldn’t see his expression. “Luh-let m-me ssseee yuh-your ffoot.”

She didn’t need to glimpse his expression, not when that telltale thickening of his stutter spoke volumes. He had to hate it—not just the sound of his own voice, but the way it tipped his hand whenever he felt vulnerable or threatened.

He’d been tipping his hand a lot since they started packing up the house four days ago.
They’d begun in the attic. Katie wore old jeans and brought along her dad’s ancient portable radio, guessing correctly that Sean would want to work without talking and without a lot of fuss.

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 idea 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.

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.