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“It does matter. We’re talking about my life.”
“What d-d-do yuh-you wuh-want to d-do?”
“I don’t know. But I know you haven’t given it a second’s thought. You expect me to follow you to California, but you forgot all about my job, my friends, my—”
She kept talking, but he couldn’t hear her over the rising panic. It wasn’t working. There had to be something else, some way to make her see—
When he opened his mouth, the words tumbled out.
“We could get married.”
It was the wrong thing. He knew it even before she took a step back. Another one, and she slipped out of his grip. With the third step, she ran the bac
k of her head into a beam, and she raised her arms to grip it in both hands, the first joint of every digit going white with the effort. She closed her eyes. “Please tell me you did not just propose to me.”
The boards creaked as Sean moved toward her. “I d-did. And I m-m-muh-meant it.”
Amazing. He did.
Katie scanned the floor until her eyes found the shoe box he’d been sorting through earlier. She picked it up and dumped it on the floor and kicked the papers all over the place. She found the story he’d been looking at and flung it at his chest.
She started to cry.
“Sweetheart—”
She toppled over the box full of framed memorabilia that had been the shrine, put one boot on top of the pile, and weighted it. Sean winced at the sound of splintering glass and cracking wood.
“Stop that,” he said, and she jumped on the pile, slipped, and nearly fell, but she was crazed now, and she wasn’t listening. She was just pounding at the frames with her boot as if his past were made of snakes, and she wanted them dead.
“Jesus, honey, stop!” He reached out for her, but she evaded his grasp and moved behind him, around him, circling warily as her eyes darted back and forth from his face to the other boxes, measuring the distance and calculating whether she could get to them before him. She must have decided she couldn’t, because she turned the offensive on him.
“Do you know how many times in her life a girl needs to receive a half-assed, why-don’t-we-just-go-ahead-and-get-married proposal?”
There was no good way to answer that question.
“None,” she said. “None is the correct number of times. And now I’ve had two.”
“I’m n-n-not Levi Rider.”
“Aren’t you?” she asked. “Aren’t you, Sean? Because it seems like you just asked me to marry you without saying a single word about love. It seems like you want to drag me off to the other side of the country to be your accessory, just like he did. You seem to not give a rat’s ass what I need, what I want, what I plan to do with my life. Even just now, I was trying to tell you some of my reservations about this ingenious plan of yours, and you weren’t listening. You were thinking about what you could say to make me do what you wanted. ‘Marry me, Katie.’ What kind of solution is that?”
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.”
