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“Yes, you can. You don’t want to. You don’t like the way it would sound. It wouldn’t match up to your precious ideal, so you refuse to try. Camelot makes you feel things you don’t want to feel, and you think if you leave it will get better. You’re going to take the solution you came up with in Ohio and present it to your board in California as the shiny way forward.”
“It’s n-n-not like that.”
“It is. It’s worse than that. You’re going to steal a piece of Camelot and use it to fix your company. And hey, if you can steal one, why not steal two? Take Katie along for the ride. You think you’ll be able to say my name there, Sean? You think I’ll be your dream girl, and everything will come up roses?”
“D-damn it, I’ll give you anything you wuh-want.”
“Stay.”
“Anything b-but that.”
She shook her head. “I can’t even—you won’t consider it, Sean. You can’t see what you need, and you never thought about what I want.”
“Wuh-wuh-wuh-what d-do yuh-you wuh-wuh—”
“I don’t know!” she shouted.
The attic fell quiet. Katie stopped moving. In a low, ragged voice he’d never heard her use before, she told him, “I don’t know. I thought I did, before we went to Kentucky, but I was wrong. I thought I was doing better, since I met you, but obviously not, or I wouldn’t have just flipped out when you proposed. That’s not normal. I get that. And I’m flattered, sort of, that you care enough to ask. But … it’s not good enough. I’m trying to figure myself out. I’d like to be with somebody who cared enough to stick around and help me.”
“I c-c-care.”
She put her hands on her hips and stared, breathing hard. Her eyes were glistening, her throat all red and her skin blotchy, and she looked down that royal nose at him and said, “Not enough.”
She spoke gently, but the words hit him hard.
He’d been selfish with her from the beginning. Refusing to say her name because he didn’t want to hurt his pride. Kissing her for the first time in front of a stranger he wanted to best, with no regard for her feelings. Fucking her in the backseat of his truck because he wanted her, and telling himself it was okay because she wanted him, too.
And now this. This grasping invitation.
“I’m not your dream girl, Sean,” she said. “I’m not anybody’s dream girl. And I guess I’m not all that tough, and we both know I’m not as smart as you. But even so, I deserve better than what you’re offering me.”
The words took on weight inside him and became a force that pushed closed the door on his hope and left him in a familiar place. A cold, dark place that felt like home.
She was right. He didn’t deserve her. He had never done one thing to deserve her. He wanted her, but if life had taught him anything, it was that want was irrelevant. You played the cards you were dealt, used the talents you had to get ahead, and ignored what you wanted.
Sean stood still and said nothing as what he wanted walked out on him.
Chapter Forty-two
“It can’t be over.”
Katie leaned forward in her office chair and punched the speaker button on her phone. She dropped the receiver on her desk and tipped back her office chair so she could contemplate the ceiling.
“Katie, it can’t be over,” Judah repeated, and this time his voice came from farther away, which seemed fitting, since she couldn’t really absorb this conversation. A translucent emotional dam held the whole world at a distance.
One of the speckled white panels on the office ceiling had swollen in the heavy rain overnight, and this morning she’d found it dripping, the carpet a sodden mess. She’d put a popcorn bowl under it.
No doubt if Caleb were here, he would fix it, but he was already in Jamaica getting ready for the wedding, blissfully unaware of what had happened to her, and Katie couldn’t help but feel as though the sopping disaster in the corner of the room matched the pain-flooded landscape of her body.
“It can, actually,” she said.
Judah made a dismissive noise, a sound that traveled through space and into her ears and put a picture in her head of his nose wrinkled and his eyes sly and mischievous. A happier Judah than she’d ever seen. “What did he do?”
“He asked me to marry him.”
She would have preferred it if he’d shot her. It would have hurt so much less than getting proposed to. Any other leave-taking she might have handled with more grace, but he’d pushed the biggest button she had, poked the worst wound she’d ever inflicted on herself, and surely he should have known.
He hadn’t even said that he loved her.
