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Sean pulled his headphones off as he rose, tossing them on the table by the keyboard. Done.
The rush lasted a full five seconds before he regained enough self-awareness to remember he was alone in his mother’s house, talking shit to computer code.
Old habits died pathetic.
He grabbed his phone off the table and tapped out a quick message to Katie. It’s done. Come over?
Stretching out his shoulders in the door frame, he lifted his feet off the floor and hung for a few seconds to straighten his spine. When had he last stood up? He tried to remember, but the whole period since he’d arrived in Camelot on Sunday morning was kind of a blur.
No surprise there. It was always like this. At least this time, Katie had sent him a few texts reminding him to eat. There were three empty delivery boxes sitting on the dining-room table, a testament to his willingness to follow orders.
He’d thought about her, which both surprised him and didn’t. When he was coding, he didn’t normally think of anyone or anything but the screen in front of him, but for Katie he seemed to have a separate set of rules.
Every time the servers were engaged in processing something for more than a couple of seconds, his brain had skipped to Katie and that night in the back of the SUV, and he’d looked at his phone and wanted to call her. But he’d known that if he called her, he’d ask her over, and if she came over, he’d do his level best to take her to bed, and if he took her to bed he wouldn’t finish the work.
He didn’t like Judah Pratt all that much, but he didn’t want it on his conscience if the guy somehow managed to get killed because Sean hadn’t been able to keep his dick in his pants.
His phone vibrated. Katie. I’ll be 30 min.
It was four thirty. He managed to shower, shave, brush his teeth, throw some laundry in the washer, and clean up the worst of the mess around the computer before the doorbell rang.
Sean had learned a long time ago that women didn’t appreciate being neglected for days on end by men too absorbed in their hacker crap to remember to call, and he’d formulated a reentry routine that featured the careful avoidance of expectations. As he reached for the doorknob, he reminded himself that Katie might be happy to see him or she might be furious. She could be irritable or conflicted, distant or horny.
Horny would be nice, but the trick was to be ready for anything.
When the door swung all the way open, he realized he’d failed. He hadn’t been ready for her to not be there.
A sniffle drew his eyes downward to where Katie was sitting in the icy slush on his front step, inspecting her ankle.
“I fell,” she explained. “It’s really freaking slippery out here.”
“Jesus, I’m ssorry. I haven’t so much as looked out the window in … Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I think so.” He offered her his hand, and she took it and stood. With a frown, she put weight on her ankle, and after a moment her expression cleared. “It’s fine. I thought I might’ve twisted it—I do that sometimes hiking, always the same ankle—but it feels okay.”
“Good. C-come on in.”
She brushed past him and stood on the throw rug, toeing off her shoes and looking around. The curtains were closed, and he hadn’t turned on the light, so the room was too dark. CPUs and monitors covered his mother’s Amish oak table, awash in a tangle of keyboards and cables. His headphones were still blasting Thom Yorke from the tabletop, the sound rendered tinny by distance.
“This is quite the nerd cave you have going here,” she said.
He flipped the light switch on. “I think this would’ve k-killed my muh-mother.” He wrinkled his nose. “If she wuh-weren’t already dead, I mean. T-tactless. Sorry.”
Katie did her usual, wonderful appearing-not-to-notice-or-care-about-the-stutter thing, which helped. He’d have to tell her sometime how much it helped. Preferably after he figured out how to quit fucking stuttering around her.
“I think you’re allowed to make tactless comments about your own dead mother,” she said. “It’s just other people who aren’t supposed to.”
“That’s a c-comfort.”
She wore a navy wool peacoat and a white knit cap. One whole side of her jeans was soaking wet from butt to knee. She was a breath of fresh air and perfect in his mother’s dark, stagnant house.
He, by contrast, was off his game. Nobody had visited him here since he’d come back, and he hadn’t stopped to consider the logistics. He had no food, nothing to offer her to drink, and apparently no social skills whatsoever.
And now that Katie was looking at his mother’s house, he was looking at it, too, which was something he no longer did. He’d been living here, but not really looking. Not since the first few days, when he’d pushed open the front door into this museum of his childhood and reeled at the strength of the sense memories the house evoked.
The smell of old books and Pine-Sol and the air freshener she plugged into the bathroom outlet. The way the winter light filtered weakly through the kitchen curtains. His fleeting certainty that his mother would descend the stairs any moment, and he wouldn’t be able to talk. He would gag on all the things he’d never managed to say to her.
He shook off the memory. “Ssssorry about the w-walk. I sh-should have sh-shoveled it. I wuh-wasn’t thinking, and I didn’t n-notice all the ssnow, b-but—”
