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Sean had come out of the shower, all wet hair and lean muscle packed into track pants and a clean T-shirt, and she’d stayed on her side of the couch as promised. He smelled unbelievably good, and he looked even better, but whatever. She’d shamed herself enough for one decade. She would make the first move again when hell froze over—and even then, she’d pick Beelzebub over Sean. The devil probably wasn’t too choosy about his sex partners.
It had taken more than an hour for the sick rush of shame in her veins to subside, the knot in her stomach to loosen and relax in a wash of wine. But now, sitting beside Sean in the darkened room, she felt okay again. Almost okay. Kind of wrung out, her eyes squinty and aching as if she’d been crying, but fine.
She would survive.
The disappointing thing was that she could see, in the wake of discovering she wasn’t going to get sex, that her interest in Sean wasn’t entirely about sex. She wanted to know what his deal was, what made him tick. Like the whole thing with having a company in California that he planned to go back to. He’d been in Camelot for months already. He worked for Caleb. Did Caleb know? What was the story there?
And the on-again, off-again stutter. She couldn’t figure it out.
Such an old, bad habit of hers, trying to figure everybody out. What made them tick, how she could make them confide in her. What they needed and whether she could give it to them. Useful when she’d been a bartender and when she needed to put Wild Ride clients at ease, but it wouldn’t get her anywhere in her efforts to become her best self.
Whatever. Her best self could have the night off. A woman could handle only so much defeat without taking some time to recuperate. In the meantime, she’d default to the old Katie and indulge her curiosity.
“Hey, Sean?” she asked when the movie went to a commercial break.
“Yeah?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“You already are.”
“You stopped stuttering.”
Silently, he stared at the screen, and she knew she’d put her foot in it. She could never figure out if it was okay to come right out and say something about stuff like this—to be verbally curious about people with scars or wheelchairs or disabilities—or if it was unforgivably rude. Was stuttering even a disability?
If it was bad enough, surely. If people treated you like a pariah because of it. But Sean wasn’t a pariah, he was hot. And she was curious.
“Sean?”
“That wasn’t a question.”
“Fine. Did you stop stuttering because you’re drunk?”
“I’m not drunk.”
When he didn’t say anything else, she tucked her feet under her and twisted back toward the screen. “Forget I said anything.”
Sean sighed. “No. It’s ffine. Ask awuh-way.”
But now she’d made him conscious of it, and he was stuttering again. Which made her even more curious. “Sorry. It’s just … sometimes you do, and sometimes you don’t, and I don’t know. I thought it was me, at first, because you said you only stutter around some people, but it can’t be me all the time. Is it when you’re nervous or something?”
He exhaled, a drawn-out, exhausted sound, and she wished she’d kept her trap shut. “It’s not you.”
“Sorry, really. I’ll shut up. You don’t have to—”
“Actually, it is yuh-you,” he interrupted. “P-partly. But it’s n-not your ffault. I c-can’t say your name, okay? In my head, I hear it, and I know if I try to say it out loud, I’m going to sstutter on the hard k ssound, and it’ll never c-come out. So I don’t even try.”
She hadn’t noticed, but now that she thought about it, he’d only ever called her Clark. Leadfoot. And one time, sweetheart. Never Katie. Though “Clark” and “Katie” started with exactly the same sound.
“You know that p-pretty much everybody stutters sometimes?” he asked. “Especially kids. Kids stutter all the t-time. One-second delays in speech. Half a second. Slight p-pauses. It’s so normal, we don’t even notice it.”
He stared at the screen. His fingers were wrapped around his mug, and he lounged against the couch with one arm tossed casually over the back, but nothing about him looked relaxed. He looked tight. Tense.
“My mom didn’t notice I sstuttered more than n-normal until I was three or four, and then the pediatrician t-told her it would go away when I got older. When I started school, though, the other kids made ffun of me for it, and I c-came home to my m-mom in tears one day. She told me, ‘Sean, there’s nothing wrong with the way you t-t-talk. You’re smarter than those k-k-kids, and you’re going to g-g-grow up to do in-c-credible things, so don’t wuh-worry about it.’ ”
Sean’s mother had been proud of him. Everybody in Camelot knew that. It was actually almost all Katie had known about him. His mom was the new tenth-grade English teacher, they’d moved from Zanesville right before freshman year, they lived over on Wiggin Street, and he was so smart, he was practically Einstein.
“I thought when she said there was nuh-nothing wrong with how I talked, she meant it was okay to ssstutter. It took me a few years to figure out she literally thought there was nothing wrong. Or at least, that’s wuh-what she pretended to think. Like she couldn’t even hear it.”
