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Katie spun around. She’d been searching for a corkscrew, and some part of his brain had apparently noticed.
She looked on top of the fridge and located the Rabbit corkscrew he’d seen on the way in. “Thanks,” she said. After a moment of fumbling with it, she figured out how to work it, removed the cork, and poured herself a glass.
Sean resumed his work, curious about what he’d just done.
He’d erased her as a person, and then it had been possible to talk to her. Could he do it again?
&n
bsp; Make her anonymous. Not the girl you fixated on in high school—not the Katie Clark who was one of the only bright spots in an otherwise miserable two years.
Make her nobody.
She plucked a microbrew out of the fridge and removed the cap. When she put it on the table by his left hand, he didn’t look up. He let a few minutes go by, then took a drink.
Your PA brought you a beer. A waitress. A stranger.
“Thanks,” he said.
“What are you working on?” she asked.
For a second, he thought he might be able to do it. To open his mouth and let the words come out, perfectly clear, perfectly ordinary. He inhaled and relaxed his tongue.
He thought about sibilants and fricatives.
Then she smiled, and he choked.
God, that smile.
With a shake of his head, he went back to clicking and typing. It wasn’t going to happen.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “You were talking to me a few seconds ago, and now you’re not? Could you type me up a list of rules, maybe? Because I have no idea where I went wrong with you, and I’d really like some help figuring out how to get you to include me in the circle of people you speak to.”
He kept his eyes on the screen, and his hands returned to the keyboard for a burst of machine-gun-fire typing.
“No list, huh? No rules?”
He shook his head without lifting his eyes, and he thought, I’m not even supposed to be here.
When his mother died, he’d flown to Camelot thinking he’d stay a week or two. Someone had to take care of the funeral, and it seemed that someone was him. Afterward, he’d found out she had named him her heir and executor—a surprise, considering they’d effectively disowned each other. But he’d accepted the charge as the least of what he owed her.
For a few weeks, he’d tried to handle the estate while also running Anderson Owens. He’d spent most of his time cooped up in the tiny house he’d grown up in, a headset in his ear and his computer open on his lap, firing off emails and talking to people on the other side of the country.
The leave of absence had been Mike’s idea. He’d gotten tired of having his head bitten off by the stir-crazy, short-tempered asshat Sean had become the second he set foot in Camelot.
“You talked to me by accident, didn’t you?” Katie asked. “Both times.”
He nodded.
An accident. The whole fucking thing had been an accident. After he’d been in Camelot a month or so, he’d met Caleb at the pub. They’d watched a baseball game side by side at the bar and bought each other a few rounds when it turned out they were rooting for the same team. One thing led to another, and by the end of the night, Sean had a job offer.
He took it, because being on leave turned out to be boring. His mom’s estate required eight hours of work one day and none whatsoever the next, and he’d taken to going on long runs and longer bike rides, drifting into the community center gym at weird hours to lift weights, eating alone at the Village Inn and drinking alone at the pub. Anything to avoid his single most important job: packing up the house he’d grown up in and selling it.
The real estate agent he’d spoken to called him every few days, but Sean remained frozen, incapable of sending his mother’s clothes to Goodwill or throwing away all the toiletries in the bathroom closet.
Partly it was that he couldn’t work up any real enthusiasm about going back to San Jose. Released from the endless meetings, phone calls, and schmoozing, he found he didn’t miss it.
Partly it was that. But mostly it was the past, rising up to kick his ass.
