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Even when he’d been living in a shitty one-bedroom in Vallejo, busting his ass to make the rent but crashing in Mike’s dorm room half the time because his neighborhood scared the hell out of him, Sean had managed to save up enough money to send that judge and that social worker a present at Christmastime. He’d asked a buddy of Mike’s to go into the liquor store for him and pick up two decent bottles of wine.
Mrs. Guzman still got a phone call every Christmas Eve, because she said the only thing she wanted was to hear the sound of his voice.
She was the first adult who’d made him believe he could get better—the first one who hadn’t gone along with his mother’s cherished charade that he was simply a shy and socially awkward boy, and he’d get over it as he matured.
Before he met Mrs. Guzman, Sean had spent most of his adolescence in a mild panic, worried someone would ask him a question that required a verbal response. Being silent was the only way he’d known to please his mother.
It hadn’t worked.
When he started therapy at seventeen, he’d been ready to try it Mrs. Guzman’s way. For nine months, everything that came out of his mouth had sounded excruciatingly bad. Mrs. Guzman hadn’t cared, and Sean had learned not to care either.
The more he talked, the less attention he paid to his stammer, and the better he sounded. By the time he’d saved up enough money to enroll at Berkeley on scholarship, he could get by okay in ordinary conversation, in class, wherever.
These days, nobody but Mike even knew about the stutter. Weeks went by when Sean didn’t think about it at all.
The problem seemed solved until he’d returned to Camelot to make funeral arrangements for his mother and found his stutter waiting for him beneath his childhood bed.
Wuh-welcome b-back, Ssssean! N-n-n-nice to sssee you again, assshole.
It had settled onto his shoulders, sharp claws gripping tight, and made itself at home.
Not that he’d actually started stuttering again, but the disorder had never been just about the stuttering—that was another thing Mrs. Guzman had taught him.
It was the anxiety. The fear of opening his mouth and being judged for the way he sounded.
It was the decision not to talk when he wasn’t sure whether he could do it without stammering. The choice to substitute an easy word for a hard one.
It was ordering lasagna for dinner instead of penne because he didn’t want to say “p-p-p-penne” in front of the waitress.
He’d thought he’d beaten all that crap at seventeen, but it seemed he’d simply left it behind in Camelot. Now it stalked him, and it was Katie who was going to make it pounce. If he tried to talk to her, he would stutter like Elmer Ffffucking Fudd.
He could handle Katie’s hatred, but he didn’t want her pity.
“You know, I’m feeling kind of grimy from the road trip,” she said. “I think I’ll take a shower.”
Fantastic. Because it wasn’t hard enough to have to smell her and hear her and look at her all the time. Now he had to think about her naked and wet on the other side of a door, the hot spray slicking back her hair and dripping off her soap-slippery breasts, bringing a flush to her skin …
Just fucking fantastic.
As soon as he heard the water going, he picked up his phone and dialed Mike’s number. Anything to distract himself.
While it rang, he toed off his shoes and stripped out of his sweater. The room was hot. Or possibly that was the fault of his raging hard-on.
Mike proved a worthy distraction. Last quarter’s financial numbers were in, and they sucked. There were rumors that two of their competitors were merging, and a third competitor wanted to buy them out. Mike wanted him to fly back to California as soon as possible. Sean promised to come on Monday.
There wasn’t much he could do before then, so he settled down on the bed with his laptop to concentrate on the far more interesting task of learning as much as possible about Judah Pratt.
He poked around old newspaper articles and fan-site bulletin boards for signs of problems with alcohol, sex, money, crazed fans—anything that might tell him what direction a threat to Judah could come from.
After a while, Katie came out of the bathroom and opened a drawer. Sean managed not to look at her. If he concentrated on work, he didn’t have to think about the fact that by refusing to talk to her, he was sparing his pride at the cost of treating a very nice woman like shit.
He concentrated hard.
He was only dimly aware of her opening and closing drawers as he pulled up Judah’s most popular fan site and started scrolling through threads in the forum. She moved around the room, a white splotch in his peripheral vision. Not a person. Hardly real at all.
It was only because he wasn’t paying attention to her that he spoke.
“Top of the fridge.”
