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Sean withdrew and moved to the side, then pulled her down onto the floor and curled around her. “Don’t stroke me. I think I’d d-die.”
She smiled. “That’s more like it.”
“K-kiss me, though, huh?”
So she turned her head, and he kissed her, sweet and undemanding. She smiled up at him. “You’re all right, you know that?”
“You’re juh-just now figuring that out?”
She shrugged. “You take some getting used to.”
Smiling, he tucked her body against his, and they lay there for a while in the dark, teasing and joking until they got cold. He helped her into her clothes, and he put his sweater on, and they sat up together. Sean turned out the light so they could look out at the storm. There was
n’t much to see. Just blackness, and wet, dark snow hitting the windows.
When she yawned, he put his arm around her. She settled her head against his shoulder.
“You’re tired,” he said. “Go to sleep.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. I’ll t-take the first watch.”
When she looked up, he was smiling down at her. It was the image she saw behind her eyelids as she drifted off.
No one came to dig them out for hours. Not until the first streaks of dawn showed above the horizon line.
Chapter Twenty-four
Katie spent Monday in a haze of sex chemicals and happiness. She hadn’t slept much, but it hardly mattered when all she could think about was the way Sean had kissed her goodbye and his promise to call her as soon as he was done with the program.
Sure, he had disappeared into his mom’s house and almost immediately sent Caleb a report that revealed, among other things, what they’d learned about the threats against Judah. Sure, she’d emailed him the results of all her research and had gotten a two-word reply.
Good work.
Be still, her heart.
Sure, sure, Caleb had read the report and subjected her to a long lecture about trust, responsibility, and not taking stupid risks. That hadn’t been a ton of fun.
But she felt so fantastic every time she thought about what had happened in Sean’s SUV, it didn’t matter. She listened to her brother, nodded when she was supposed to nod, and counted down the seconds until she’d be alone and she could moon over Sean again.
Then it was Tuesday. Caleb remained mad at her. Work remained tedious. Sean remained absent, but that was fine. It was too early. She sent him a text reminding him to eat and called her oldest friend, Cassie, who coaxed her into confessing what had happened on the way home from Buffalo. Just as Katie had pretended not to know she would.
Describing it all to Cassie, it didn’t sound quite as good as it had felt. It sounded kind of seedy and poorly thought out, actually, and Katie’s stomach started to churn when Cassie began asking pointed questions. Did she know what she was doing? Had they used protection? Why hadn’t he called her? What was he doing in Camelot, and when was he leaving?
Katie managed to dismiss all the deepest worries that her conversation with Cassie called up, but the price she paid was the loss of her bliss. Part of her started to wonder whether she’d been entirely in her right mind the other night.
If she could just see Sean, she might have reassured herself, but that wasn’t an option, which made it hard to remain confident. It made it hard not to think of him every moment of the day, and hard not to feel as though she’d made the whole thing up. That he’d never really smiled at her like that, or laughed with her, or given her grief for calling herself stupid. That he hadn’t been as wonderful as she remembered, and he wasn’t thinking about her as much as she was thinking about him.
On Wednesday morning, she woke up in a foul mood, then made it worse by cutting her thumb while slicing a piece of cheese. It throbbed all day. She spent eight hours in the office furious with herself for reasons she couldn’t quite specify and furious with Sean for reasons that didn’t make any sense. Judah called, surly about something, and Katie refused to rise to the occasion and cheer him up. She wasn’t his performing monkey. He hung up on her after a few minutes, and then she felt even worse.
With her bandaged thumb resting awkwardly on the keyboard, she typed up her notes from the various interviews she had conducted in Buffalo and tried to turn them into some kind of useful report for Sean and Caleb, but the longer she looked at the screen, the more it all just looked like a bunch of crap. She was a third wheel on this case. Sean was wheels one and two, and he hadn’t even returned her text.
On Thursday, she loathed everyone. Even people who hadn’t been born yet. She sat at her desk, drinking coffee and looking at old Garfield cartoons on the Internet that someone had re-captioned with profound and depressing statements about the condition of humanity, and she thought, Yes, this is my life.
Which didn’t even make sense. It was just the kind of morning she was having, and there wasn’t any point in fighting it.
Caleb came out and looked at her, and the longer he looked, the more she wanted to walk out of the office, go home, get in bed, and refuse to come out until life became easier.
