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He tugged at his tie, uncomfortably aware of the snugness of the knot. The shirt was too tight. Maybe his collar size had changed, but it felt more like his skin was wrong. Arid and strained, stretched too tight over his bones.
He flipped the pen again and dropped it a second time.
As he bent down to get it, the thought came unbidden, unexpected.
You hate this.
Katie’s voice. Katie’s honesty, and a hint of the compassion she couldn’t hide even at her angriest.
“Jesus,” he whispered, staring at the pen. “I do.”
He’d bought the suit he was wearing, hand-picked every one of the board members, and framed the view out the conference room window for the architect with the square edges created by his thumbs and index fingers. In a very real sense, Sean had made this building, made these people assemble here—his willpower the force that had turned a teenage prank into a successful enterprise.
He hated it.
He’d woken up this morning in a sterile house and drunk a cup of coffee alone in the kitchen. He’d thrown out the filter, rinsed the pot, put his mug in the dishwasher, and felt as much at home as he would have in a hotel room.
Except the last several hotel rooms he’d stayed in, he’d had Katie, and with Katie he always felt at home.
I don’t like my own house. The words leapt to his tongue, and he had to bite the inside of his bottom lip to hold them in.
This wasn’t his life.
He stood up and laid the pen down on top of his legal pad on the table.
His mother had given him the pen for his sixteenth birthday. Not a fountain pen, because he had terrible handwriting and would only have crushed the nib, but a weighty pen that required pricey cartridges his PA had to buy online. A heavy silver bullet that could strike terror into the hearts of his employees.
It was the sort of pen an important man would have. That was why she’d bought it for him. He’d been dutifully using it for years as he became an important man. He had other pens, better and more expensive pens, but he always used this one, because he’d loved his mother with the desperate, furious love of an only son for his sole parent, and he had wanted to please her.
“I don’t even like this p-pen.”
Ray Richardson fidgeted, and Carol Piaskowski frowned. Yet they all waited patiently for Sean to get his shit together.
He wondered how much crazy they would endure. How far they’d follow him toward the cliff edge before they put on the brakes.
“I’ve always been m-more of a p-pencil guy.”
Mike was starting to look irritated. “Sean, let’s take five,” he said.
Sean didn’t need five minutes. He needed Katie.
“Okay,” he agreed. “Ssorry, ffolks. We’ll b-be right b-back.”
Mike took his elbow and pulled him into the hallway, and with every step he took out of the conference room, Sean made a little more sense to himself.
“I don’t belong here,” he said wonderingly as the door closed behind him. “This is all—it’s all just a p-performance. The whole thing. This whole company. Juh-just to p-prove a p-point to my muh-mother.”
She’d wanted him to matter, but everything she gave him with one hand, she had taken away with the other: love with conditions, joyless opportunities, praise with asterisks. Her brand of adoration had worn him down, making him smaller and quieter, less individual, less whole, until he couldn’t separate himself from the disfluency anymore, the anxiety and loneliness and fear of mockery that dogged him every time he opened his mouth and every time he didn’t.
He’d left because he had to leave, but he’d left for her, too. She never would have been satisfied with the reality of him. He’d had to get away in order to fight his own battles and to define what success meant in his own terms.
But he’d gotten the terms wrong.
Sean didn’t want to be important. He liked screwing around on the computer and solving puzzles for Caleb and playing basketball with Mike. He liked reading science fiction and running and swimming. He liked every single thing about Katie.
He didn’t like this job, hadn’t missed it, and didn’t want it back.
As much as it unsettled him to accept it, his life was waiting for him in Camelot, Ohio. Claws and all.
