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Katie wasn’t just a girl. She was special. She was kind and open-hearted, and he’d been awful to her.
The next time he saw her, he would talk. If he sounded like shit, it was no worse than he deserved.
“Drop it,” he repeated. He snagged the ball from under Mike’s knee.
“Well, if you’re going to be in love with her, can you do something about it? Can you get her into bed or ask her out, or at least talk to her? Because it’s kind of painful watching you suck at this from the other side of the country.”
“I’m not in love with her, and I am doing something,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out Pratt.”
Sean would solve this one last puzzle for Caleb, pack up the house, and sell it. Apologize to Katie and show her he could behave like a normal human being, albeit a stammering one.
Then he would get the hell out of Dodge. Get back where his tongue worked and he knew who he was.
“What about him are you trying to figure out?”
“What he wants from Katie.”
Mike ran his hands over his head again. “I thought you said he wanted to get in her pants.”
“No,” Sean said. “That’s the weird thing. He acted like he d-did, but I’m pretty sure Judah Pratt is gay.”
Chapter Eleven
Katie raised her torso off the floor for another crunch, singing along to “I Will Survive,” which she’d turned all the way up to eleven for therapeutic purposes.
“I hate this song,” her brother complained from his position holding her feet. “More than all the other songs that have ever been recorded put together.”
“You just have a problem—” Crunch. “—with female empowerment.” Crunch.
Caleb shook his head wearily. His gray T-shirt was dark with sweat. He’d dragged himself out of Ellen’s bed at six a.m. to run on the treadmill in his basement while Katie used the stair-climber, had spotted her while she lifted weights, and here he was counting her crunches—all evidence of the fact that her brother had no issues whatsoever with female empowerment. She knew she shouldn’t give him such a hard time, but she’d woken up feeling sassy, and this song epitomized her mental state.
Her best self was rising from the ashes of the Louisville debacle. Yes, she’d walked out before completing her first assignment as a security guard. Yes, she’d sucked at casual sex. Yes, it was taking her longer than anticipated to flush all stray thoughts of the inscrutable Sean Owens out of her head.
But she wouldn’t give up. Being your best self was an ongoing project. You couldn’t let the little setbacks throw you. You had to drag yourself out of bed and throw yourself at your workout. You had to badger your brother into giving you a new assignment. You had to—
“Time for push-ups,” Caleb said. “With the medicine ball.”
“You’re evil.”
He smiled. “If you let me pick out the music, you can do normal ones. Hell, you can do the girl ones with your knees bent if we can listen to Pearl Jam.”
“Not a chance.”
Katie found the medicine ball and began a set of push-ups, rolling the ball from one hand to the other so each dip became an exercise in core stabilization. She hated these, just loathed them. But then Beyoncé came on, demanding that her cheating boyfriend put all his worldly possessions in a box to the left, and that cheered her up.
“I take it back,” Caleb said from the space at the bottom of the stairs, where he was doing one-armed pull-ups from the bar he’d mounted on the ceiling. “I hate this song more.”
Katie smiled and sang louder.
The doorbell rang upstairs. Caleb dropped to the floor. “Expecting anybody?”
“At seven thirty in the morning?”
“I’ll see who it is.”
Katie did another push-up and geared up for the chorus. It was probably just one of the neighbors letting them know the garbage cans had gotten knocked over or something. They had friendly neighbors, and everybody knew Caleb got up early because he was Mr. Army Guy.
Though he’d been out of the army more than a year now.
