Flirting With Disaster (Camelot 3)

“Does it?” The smile he offered said he wasn’t too sure. “Anyway, once I started thinking about Ben, it was like this tap I couldn’t turn off, and I drank so much I ended up in rehab. That got me to ease up on the drinking, but it made the thinking worse.

“He was the biggest supporter I ever had. Ben and Mel. They came to every show, and afterward we’d go back to Mel’s, and Ben and I would wait for her to go to bed. Give her some time to fall asleep in the other room. And then, in the dark, in this complete quiet, it was …”

He sighed and folded his arms on the bar, laying his cheek against his forearm. “You don’t want to hear about that.”

“It’s okay.” She’d become transparent, listening to him. A glassine envelope, she received what he told her and held it. Whatever good she might do him, she knew she had to hear him first. He had to get this out.

“It was the only time in my life it’s been like that. With Ben. I guess I thought there would be others, sooner or later, but there was only ever him. Do you know what that’s like, Katie?”

She wanted to say no, that she’d never found it.

She hadn’t. It had found her.

He fixed her with his dark eyes, pupils huge in the dim bar but focused. He wasn’t as drunk as she’d thought. He knew what he was saying, and he saw her clearly enough.

“You have the brightest, cleanest aura of anyone I’ve ever met,” he said. “Like a new leaf, just unfurling. It’s really something to see.”

“Sorry, did you just tell me you see my … aura?”

“Yeah.”

“You know that’s completely nuts, right?”

“I know. Ben’s is green, too. A deeper green. Very peaceful. Healing. I bet he’s a great nurse.”

“What color’s yours?”

“Dunno. Can’t see my own. It’s only some people. Yours has changed since you got together with Sean. It’s bigger and, I don’t know, happier. Like looking at pure joy.”

Katie finished her drink in one huge gulp. “You’re getting kind of pushy with the crystal ball crap.”

Judah chuckled. “I can’t see the future, Katie. If I could, I never would’ve taken Ben to his father’s house for dinner.”

He raised two fingers, signaling to Patty for another round. She mixed the drinks, then cleared out, obviously smart enough to recognize that they wanted to be alone.

Katie waited at the center of the story for Judah to find her. She’d done this before—done it for her mother, done it for Levi, done it as a barista and a bartender and occasionally as a river guide. People needed someone to listen, and she was good at it.

She was good at it.

The recognition tumbled into place with a click. How many times had she promised herself she wouldn’t listen anymore? She wouldn’t receive other people’s problems and make them her own, wouldn’t be the one who heard the story instead of the one who wrote it. Katie the sidekick. Katie the wingman.

All her life, she’d been a pushover. Tough on the outside because she cared too much, but inside she was soft and malleable, too easily swayed by another point of view, too unsure of what she wanted for herself.

But here in the bar with Judah, it seemed obvious. This wasn’t an insignificant role. The listener mattered a great deal to the person who needed to be heard.

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

Judah swirled his ice, staring into his glass as if the story were in there. “His father figured us out. We were sitting at the dinner table, talking. It was going fine. Not fantastic, but it was something. The old man seemed to be making an effort. But then Ben said something—I don’t even remember what, something political, I think—and his dad lit into him.

“I was so proud of Ben. Every thought he had, I agreed with. So I came to his defense, and his dad got this considering look. He sat back in his chair, looking from me to Ben and back again. And he said, ‘Son of a bitch. You little faggot.’ ”

Judah and Katie both took a drink then, synchronized.

“All hell broke loose. Melissa jumped in to deny it, I started shouting, their dad turned red and got going, spit flying as he gave this drill-sergeant-type lecture about honor and disgrace and butt-fucking punks and who the hell knows what. And Ben just sat there and took it. It didn’t even diminish him. It was like he became untouchable, and I absorbed all of it. The injustice and the anger and the … the hate.”

Katie waited for Judah’s eyes to meet hers. When they did, they were wet and anguished. “I flew to pieces,” he said. “I can’t even describe it.”

She reached out and found his knee, needing a fixed point.