Flirting With Disaster by Ruthie Knox

you do.” He took a seat next to Sean against the building, and they sat in silence for a minute, staring at the sky. Too blue for February.
    “I k-kissed her,” Sean said.
    Mike whistled. “No shit?”
    “No shit.”
    Rubbing his hand over his scalp with a familiar scraping sound, Mike asked, “Did she like it?”
    “Yeah, I think she did.” He smiled slightly, remembering those ten minutes in the hallway when things had been going his way. “But that was b-before she went up to his room.”
    “She slept with him?”
    “I doubt it. I think she planned to.”
    “That’s kind of fucked up.”
    “Yep.”
    “You didn’t ask her?”
    Sean didn’t reply.
    “Don’t even tell me you still aren’t talking to her.”
    “Even if I were, I wouldn’t have asked her. She was pretty pissed at me for k-kissing her. I didn’t exactly get permission.”
    He thought of the hot challenge in her eyes when she’d put her foot up on the chair to strap her shoe on. Her naked leg and the flash of pink panties she’d given him.
    The back of his skull hit the wall with a dull thud.
    “You want my advice?” Mike asked. “Give it up, man. I know it can’t be easy for you, dealing with all your shit back home, but you’re not going to figure it out just by hanging around there. It’s messing with your head. I can come out and pack up your mom’s stuff, or we can hire somebody to do it. You need to get out of there and focus on what’s really important.”
    There was no arguing with him. Even this week, when the business needed him, he’d been staying up late every night, trawling cyberspace for data about Judah Pratt. His brain felt sludgy, off-kilter from too much coffee and too much Camelot, Ohio.
    “You know what people ssay to me, everywhere I go?” he asked. “They say, ‘Sean! You grew!’ ”
    Mike snorted. “No arguing with that.”
    “It’s been more than a decade, Mikey. You’d think they’d get over it. But no, every time I leave the house, I have to hear about it. I stop at the post office to mail something, and B-bev behind the counter says, ‘Sean! I can’t get over how tall you are. I thought you’d never hit your growth spurt.’ ”
    “People don’t forget anything there.”
    Sean nodded his head in agreement.
    Rolling the ball back and forth between his knees, Mike said, “You know she’s just a girl, right?” Mike asked.
    Sean stiffened. “Drop it.”
    “She’s an average small-town girl. Kinda pretty, but nothing special. She’s not worth it.”
    Katie wasn’t just a girl. She
was
special. She was kind and open-hearted, and he’d been awful to her.
    The next time he saw her, he would talk. If he sounded like shit, it was no worse than he deserved.
    “Drop it,” he repeated. He snagged the ball from under Mike’s knee.
    “Well, if you’re going to be in love with her, can you do something about it? Can you get her into bed or ask her out, or at least talk to her? Because it’s kind of painful watching you suck at this from the other side of the country.”
    “I’m not in love with her, and I
am
doing something,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out Pratt.”
    Sean would solve this one last puzzle for Caleb, pack up the house, and sell it. Apologize to Katie and show her he could behave like a normal human being, albeit a stammering one.
    Then he would get the hell out of Dodge. Get back where his tongue worked and he knew who he was.
    “What about him are you trying to figure out?”
    “What he wants from Katie.”
    Mike ran his hands over his head again. “I thought you said he wanted to get in her pants.”
    “No,” Sean said. “That’s the weird thing. He acted like he d-did, but I’m pretty sure Judah Pratt is gay.”

Chapter Eleven
    Katie raised her torso off the floor for another crunch, singing along to “I Will Survive,” which she’d turned all the way up to eleven for therapeutic purposes.
    “I hate this song,” her brother complained from his