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Since Caleb was no longer around to see her cheat, she skipped the last five push-ups and got on the treadmill, turning off the music in favor of the wall-mounted TV. She liked to watch the celebrity gossip while she cooled down.
After a few minutes, she heard the door at the top of the stairs open, and Caleb said, “Katie, can you come up here?”
“Why, what’s up?”
“Sean’s here. He wants you.”
She misstepped, kicked the plastic guard in front of the treadmill belt, and fell over. Luckily, she’d clipped the emergency shut-off thingy to her shorts, or she would have shot off the end of the treadmill like a cartoon character. Instead, she landed in an inelegant pile of limbs at the end of the belt, one arm still clinging to the safety rail.
Katie Clark: World’s Least Coordinated Woman.
“I’ll be right up,” she said, grateful Sean didn’t have X-ray vision. So far as she knew.
He stood by the couch, leather jacket draped over one arm, and he looked larger in her living room, rougher and ever-so-slightly scarier than she remembered him. She wished fervently she were wearing a shirt over her sweaty red sports bra.
“Have a seat,” Caleb said to Sean.
“Excuse me for a second,” Katie said to both of them.
She nipped into her bedroom and pulled a T-shirt out of the closet. No way was she going to sit down shirtless in front of Sean Owens. She was in good shape, but nobody was in that good a shape. Things would fold over other things. Pieces of her would bulge unattractively. But they would do it underneath a T-shirt, as nature had intended.
When she reemerged, Caleb disappeared into the kitchen, saying, “I’ll make some coffee.”
Left alone with Granite Man. He handed her a stack of papers bound with a black clip.
“What’s this?” she asked, flipping through the pages as she collapsed onto Caleb’s beat-up leather chair opposite Sean, who took a seat on the matching sofa.
“A report,” he said.
Katie’s head snapped up. “Whoa. Did you just talk to me? Voluntarily?”
Sean said, “Yes.”
She had no idea what he was doing here, she didn’t know why he’d started talking to her, and she didn’t know why it made her happy. But it did.
This didn’t bode well for her ability to forget he existed.
“Will wonders never cease?”
“Juh-just read it.”
She did. She stopped wondering soon enough, distracted by the document. “This is all about Judah?”
He didn’t answer.
She read. Caleb brought two cups of coffee and left them alone in the room. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she registered the sound of the shower coming on in the master bath off his bedroom.
“How did you get this stuff?” she asked after a few minutes.
“Hacked it.”
That got her attention. “Hacked it, as in the computer kind of hacking?”
“Is there another k-k-kind?”
“You’re a hacker.” Now she was just repeating herself like a moron, but it wasn’t as if she’d ever met a hacker before. She felt like she’d dropped into a movie.
Of course, she was also being charm-stalked by a celebrity. Her life had taken a turn toward the surreal a few weeks ago. Sean turning out to be the sort of computer genius who could do shady code-slinging things probably shouldn’t surprise her. Wasn’t that what geeks did in college? Flirt with the dark side?
