Flirting With Disaster (Camelot 3)

“You don’t think Sean cares?”

“I don’t think he can care the way I need him to.”

“Don’t kid yourself, Katie. That man is in love with you. It’s blindingly obvious to anybody who’s spent five minutes with the two of you. And even if it weren’t, I can see it in his damn aura.”

“Stop with the auras.”

“I’m just saying, he loves you, he wants you, he has issues. Who doesn’t have issues? That’s not the part that matters. The part that matters is who you are when you’re with him. How he makes you feel. Everything else is just bullshit your brain is crapping out because you’re scared.”

“When did you become my love therapist?”

“When you started needing one. We’re friends, right? You helped me. Now I help you.”

“I appreciate it. But it’s over.”

“It’s not over, Katie,” he said again. “Look at me and Ben—fifteen years, for fuck’s sake. It’s never over until you don’t love him anymore. And to tell you the truth, I’d rather you pulled your head out of your ass sooner, because I don’t want to put up with your moping for a decade.”

“I’m not going to mope. I’m going to move on.”

She’d made up her mind already. She could have one morning of this. Lunch was in an hour, and tomorrow she had to fly to Jamaica, and she absolutely would not infect her brother’s wedding with her sorrow. In an hour, she would be finished crying for Sean Owens. Done.

“Good luck with that. Seriously. But you might be surprised how hard it is, and how much it’s going to hurt.”

“God, you’re just full of pleasant thoughts this morning.”

“I’m trying to be straight with you. If I suck at it, I’m sorry. I don’t have a lot of practice playing girlfriend. But I can tell you that from where I’m standing, love is what matters. And since I’m not the one who’s crying, I’m positive I’m right.”

That set her off again. The welling in her throat, the pressure in her sinuses. Fucking tears. “I have to go,” she mewled. “I’ll call you.”

“Think about what I said. And keep me posted. I don’t like worrying about you. It’s new for me, all this worrying crap.”

“Okay. ’Bye.”

Katie disconnected the call with her big toe and tipped her head back again. Rain drummed down on the roof, and stupid tears leaked from the corners of her stupid eyes and ran into her hair, wetting her temples.

One hour to wallow in it. One hour to worry that Judah was right and love really was everything. The only thing. One hour, and she would be finished with this.

But she couldn’t even wallow properly. Not with Judah’s terrible advice on auto-playback inside her head. The part that matters is who you are when you’re with him. How he makes you feel.

He made her feel safe. Appreciated, confident, sufficient. That if she could be with him, she could be anyone she wanted to be, and he would stand behind her shoulder and root for her all the way.

Only he made her feel like this, too, and this was awful. This empty worthlessness. This old, familiar sense that she was alone in the world. As a thirteen-year-old, she’d tried to fill the sudden silence in her family’s apartment with jokes and conversation and Levi. All those years in Alaska—all those long, arid, not-quite-right years when she’d been on the other side of the world from her family—she’d worked hard to make something work that was fundamentally broken. She’d done everything she could think of to be what Levi needed so he’d give her his love and his attention.

And now with Sean, same old story. She’d tried to keep her heart out of it, tried not to cleave to him, but she’d done it anyway, and he’d left her, and it hurt the same way it always hurt.

Worse, actually.

She needed to learn to be enough all by herself.

I’ll give you anything you want, he’d said. But he couldn’t. Only she could.

One hour. Then she had a future to plan.

You missed your calling, babe, Judah had said that night in the alley. Should have been a therapist.

He’d been mocking her, but she had decided it fit. Marriage counseling, family therapy, or maybe something more glamorous and useful to Camelot Security, like criminal profiling. She would have to figure out what classes she needed to get a psychology degree. Look at grad programs at OSU. Figure out what path would carry her toward the life she wanted and turn her interests, her talents, into the shape of her future.

She wouldn’t waste months or years grieving the end of a relationship that had been ill-advised from day one. She had to move forward or lose her grip on everything important. She had to keep her attention on the future, because when she thought about college and grad schools and careers, she felt marginally less like she was on a moving walkway being dragged backward away from the world’s supply of clean air, laughter, and light.