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“Does that piss you off?” Katie asked. “That you broke your own rules and talked to me?”
He shook his head.
He wanted to tell her the truth. There are no rules, Clark. There’s just what you do to me, and me trying to figure out how to handle it.
But he knew how he’d sound if he opened his mouth.
With an irritated huff, she crossed her arms and turned her back on him, walking over to the wall to gaze at the weird animal head.
He was supposed to be good at solving problems. After assigning him to brainless tough-guy work for less than a month, Caleb had figured out Sean had a head on his shoulders and started bringing him all kinds of knots to untangle instead. Logistical problems, tech problems. Judah Pratt’s stalker problem.
Sean was supposed to be good at solving problems, but he didn’t have the first fucking clue what to do about Katie.
Chapter Five
Katie bared her teeth at the wolf-robot-head. It bared its teeth back.
She felt like growling. If she had claws, she’d sink them into Sean’s neck and shake him until words started falling out of his mouth.
The whole situation was so infuriating. He didn’t talk to her, except when he did. He’d only answer yes or no, except when he didn’t feel like answering at all.
She hated him, except … well, except she couldn’t, because seeing him on the bed with the laptop, typing and clicking at warp speed, had set off a nostalgia bomb in her chest.
The sad fact was, she’d liked him once. Every Monday in math class, when she’d twisted around to copy the week’s extra-credit story problem off the board at the back of the room, she would study him at the desk behind her—the way his hand curved over his pen, his terrible handwriting, the angles of his face. He’d been painfully shy, and they hadn’t traveled in the same social circles, but he would nod at her in the hallways. She’d considered him an ally, if not a friend. What had she done to deserve this treatment now that he was back? And why the hell did she care so much?
He was different, but he was the same. On the bus, he’d blended into the vinyl seats, a boy genius surrounded by surly, muscular farmers’ sons who had stubble and stories about the Columbus girls they’d finger-banged at the state fair over the summer. He’d sprawled out sideways and kept his eyes on his book or his video game or whatever he had to occupy himself with that day.
He’d always looked as if he constituted his own world, complete in itself.
She’d envied that about him. When Caleb enlisted and Amber moved into an apartment in Mount Pleasant with her best college friend, Katie was thirteen years old, and she became almost frantic with the need to fill her parents’ apartment with noise, with presence, with people. Anything to banish the emptiness. She still didn’t know how to sit alone in a room and feel okay.
Whereas Sean could be alone in a room even with her in it. He kept himself under tight control and didn’t need anybody.
Maybe that was why she found him so unaccountably fascinating—because she needed to figure out how to be like that.
Every time she let down her guard, she fell into her worst Katie-habits again, her fretting and depending and nurturing. Always trying to figure people out, to help them and fix them and make them like her. After she came home from the epic catastrophe of her married life in Alaska, she’d diagnosed the problem as youngest-child syndrome.
But she didn’t have to spend her life being a people-pleasing weenie. That kind of behavior wouldn’t get her anywhere except where it had already gotten her: left behind when she outlived her usefulness. She needed to forge her own path—to become impossible to abandon because she was the one out front, blazing her own trail.
Hadn’t she been trying to do what Sean had done? To leave the old Katie behind and become a different person, harder and stronger and more focused than the old one? Yet here she was, out on a job at last, and she was stuck in a Louisville hotel with a reformed geek who didn’t talk to her.
A trailblazer wouldn’t moon around thinking about high school. She would be too busy blazing.
The trouble was, Katie had no compass. With Judah AWOL, she needed some kind of heading or intel or something. And that meant she had to get Sean to stop screwing around and actually speak to her so they could start working together.
If all he would do was shake his head and nod, she’d nod him to death. She’d make him nod until he got a goddamn neck spasm.
She whirled around, and he twitched. “Do you want some dinner?” she asked. “We could order room service.”
He nodded, and she grabbed the menu from where she’d found it earlier. “Want me to order? That way you don’t have to talk.”
Nod.
It was one of those menus with words she didn’t know, but she forged ahead, ordering burgers for both of them with something called “jezebel sauce,” and roasted potatoes on the side. Easy-peasy, so long as she didn’t fixate on the prices.
By the time she’d finished, Sean had returned to his clicky-typing.
“Are you working on Judah stuff now?”
