Dropping the Ball

25. Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One

Micah

“You can prove we make sense? How, Micah?” Kaitlyn asks.

Kaitlyn keeps her voice neutral, but I wonder if she realizes how much she gives away by trying so hard. “In building design, I research a project, brainstorm, then sketch. Next I work on schematics with floor plans and building elevations. I figure out the math and materials and physics so I know it can withstand all stressors. I present the proposal to the client. They approve, and then we begin to build something. I can break down how that’s all played out between us, but we are there, at the last stage. We’re ready to build.”

“There’s no way to predict ‘all stressors,’” she argues, “and when buildings fall, the stakes are too high.”

“Kaitlyn.” I move forward until my knee almost touches hers.

She doesn’t move away, not even when I reach out to settle my hands on her shoulders and rest my forehead against hers. “Didn’t you fall eight years ago?” When she starts to draw away, I don’t let her. “And didn’t I fall ten?” I sweep my thumbs over her cheeks, soothing her.

I watch her eyes as something behind them crumbles. Common sense, hard reality, time constraints, deadlines . . . they disappear.

She lifts her chin, and there’s no mistaking the invitation, but I move my thumb down to rest against her lips, holding her still.

“Something else, Katie.” I take a breath, and it hitches on the way out. “I need to tell you something else.”

She nips at the pad of my thumb, and my breath catches again. “Tell me.”

“It’s the real proof.”

She nips again, and I move it out of reach without letting her go. I’m barely holding it together without her teeth against my skin.

“All those things in your office? Your favorite ones? They’re mine. I made them. The space you feel is most yours in this house? I’m an important part of it.”

It makes sense . That’s what I thought, standing in her office, seeing my work in her most personal space. It makes more sense than anything has ever made to me, and there isn’t a single part of me that has the discipline to let her figure that out with time.

“You . . . the perfect curves? On the lamp and the . . . ? The woman who belongs, that was your . . .”

I nod.

A look of wonder crosses her face, and she reaches for me.

No, that’s not even close. She launches herself, and I catch her, my mouth finding hers even as I fall back on the sofa, cushioning her body with mine. She picks up where she broke off the last kiss, opening her mouth to me, inviting me in, and whatever I thought was happening in my system before is nothing compared to the detonation now.

Hunger licks through my veins as we tangle. Kaitlyn tastes more addictive than she smells, her skin is even softer than her hair, and the pads of my fingers crave more texture. I explore her planes and contrasts the way I would one of my pieces as I learn it, the strong line of her jaw, the gentle curve of her waist. I’m drunk on the geometry of her.

I pull her tighter and she flows against me, like if she could figure out a way to melt into me, she would. But the temperature burns past that. This is incineration. I love knowing, as always, we are evenly matched. I’ve never experienced feeling so out-of-body while being so connected to it at the same time.

I reverse our positions and dip down, taking total control of the kiss, and when her hands slip from my hair down to my chest to bunch the fabric of my shirt and anchor me more tightly, I break the kiss to growl a wordless warning. I pull her hands away to pin them on either side of her head, our fingers laced, and I scrape my teeth over her earlobe, paying back the nip she gave me. She sighs and angles her head so I can pay back the second nip on her other ear.

To make the point about who is the boss in this moment, I bite harder, and—

Ow . I hiss and jerk my head up as evil strikes, meeting Kaitlyn’s startled eyes before I freeze.

“Kaitlyn.” My voice is strangled. “Daisy has her claws in my back.” Daisy. Daisy is the boss.

She rolls from under me to hit the floor on her knees, eye to extremely angry eye with Daisy Buchanan.

“Daisy,” she says, “good girl. It’s okay.”

“What? No, bad girl,” I say. “Also, help.”

“I am.” She keeps her voice soothing. “Daisy, I’m safe. You can let him go.” She lifts a hand to pet her. Daisy doesn’t move, but I grunt as she retracts her claws.

“Be still, Micah,” Kaitlyn says in the exact same tone she used on Daisy. “I’ll have her off you in a second. Won’t I, sweet girl? Katie is fine. See that I’m fine? I’m scratching her. Her tail is down. I’ve almost got her,” she narrates in that soothing tone.

I lower from the plank I’ve been holding, Daisy staying put, until after offering a few more scritches, Kaitlyn scoops up the cat and nuzzles her, reassuring her she’s the best watchcat ever.

I sit up and eye Daisy.

“You okay?” Kaitlyn asks.

“Yeah. You?”

She buries her face in Daisy’s neck to stall on an answer, but Daisy decides she’s done being worshipped and wiggles to get down. Kaitlyn lets her go, but instead of coming back to the sofa, she sits on the stool instead. Her temples are damp, the color in her cheeks high, and her hair is wrecked. I do good work.

“So,” I say.

“So,” she agrees. “What happens next?”

“Neither of us has to work tomorrow, so let’s make out all day.”

She rolls her eyes but smiles. “Be serious.”

“I’m dead serious.”

She sucks her teeth. “Not your worst idea.”

“That’s why I was valedictorian.”

She dives for me, and I catch her, deflecting the blows from the throw pillow she snatches up, laughing as I try to situate her in my lap.

She twists so she’s on my lap but facing me, sitting on my knees, hers pinning my legs together so I lose leverage.

“Keep still while I beat you around your head and neck,” she orders.

“I’ll settle you down.” I yank her by the hips until she’s wedged against me before I loosen my hold and smile up at her. She drops the pillow and lets her hands fall to my shoulders, looking right back.

“What am I going to do with you?” I ask.

“That’s exactly the reason I called this couch meeting.”

I snort. “Glad most of my meetings aren’t like this, or I’d never get anything done.”

Our smiles fade as our eyes connect.

“Your eyes have gold flecks,” she says, her voice soft. “I feel like I’ve found a new secret about you.”

I watch her back, wondering what she’s seeing in me besides the flecks. She curls to rest her forehead on my shoulder.

“I don’t know what to do next,” she says. It’s barely a murmur.

“Does there need to be a plan?”

“The only plan that will work is doing nothing. I can’t date you.”

I go still for several seconds, hating the way those words hollow out my insides. Finally, I sigh. “Is this because I am the poor son of an unmarried village woman with no prospects and I’m still making payments on my truck?”

She gives my abs a light pinch. “There’s not much to grab here.” She pats the spot, interested in this discovery, but when the pat turns to a light stroke, she balls her fists and rolls off me to sit beside me instead.

I drop my head back against the cushions, waiting for the inevitable.

She copies me, and we both stare at the vaulted ceiling, not that I’m seeing it. I’m lost in thought. I don’t have any genius arguments here.

“Katie.” I nudge her leg with mine. “You can date me. It’ll work.”

She presses the heels of her hands against her eyes. “Does it help if I say I wish I could?”

“It’s already working. This is our fourth date.”

“What are you talking about? Are you high on sugar? Zombies get your brain?”

“Lunch at the warehouse. That was our first date.”

She drops her hands and turns to look at me.

I keep my eyes on the ceiling. “We went dancing for our second. Trick-or-treating was our third. Watching the movie was number four. To be honest, I usually like a kiss after the third date, but you made up tardy points by blowing my mind with technique.”

She elbows me. “How is it possible you beat me in math? Or anything ? That’s bad logic and worse counting.”

“Is it though? I planned for us to get to this point.”

“You did not.”

“I did. I knew as soon as I realized who Madison was when she hired me for the project that this was a possibility.” I straighten and turn so she does too, and we form a perfect reflection, each of us with one foot tucked under us, our knees touching, heads propped on hands braced against the sofa as we study each other.

“You thought you and I would date even though we hadn’t spoken since high school?”

“I said I knew this was a possibility.” I gesture between the two of us. “If any of that old chemistry was there and you were single, this was a probability. There is and you are. And here we are.” I squeeze her knee lightly.

“I call BS. I wanted to punch you, not kiss you, when I ran into you.”

I let go of her knee to rub my chest, remembering the impact. “Maybe you wanted to do both.”

When she starts to object, I press a hard, fast kiss to her mouth. “I wasn’t sure until you invited me to the hospital.”

“ Madison invited you to the hospital.”

“She wouldn’t have done it if you didn’t want me there.”

She can’t deny that.

“Even though you seemed cool with me by then, it was still next to impossible to even get you down to the warehouse to be sure. To see if the probability would become a reality.”

“Because I’m so busy. That’s the whole problem.”

“I had a feeling you were avoiding me more than you needed to. But I could also see your schedule is pretty tight for real, so I came up with a plan to show you that you didn’t need to worry.”

“Your plan was to date me without telling me?”

I’m trying to decide if she’s tipped from being incredulous to getting mad. “Did you feel like you wasted any of those trips to the warehouse? Or did you leave feeling like you had a good understanding of how the installation is going?”

She frowns.

Not mad yet. “Did you also leave each time feeling like you understood me better? Learned something new about me, maybe?”

Her face says yes, but her mouth says, “You can’t trick people like that.”

“I didn’t. I brought you down for business. We conducted business. You deciding to stay for anything else was always up to you.”

“But it’s not a date if we don’t agree it’s a date.”

“Okay. Strong argument. You want to say they weren’t dates, they weren’t dates.”

“They weren’t dates!”

“Okay.” I’m unbothered since I expected this reaction.

“The whole point of a date is to get to know someone and see if you’re the right fit. We haven’t done that. Like, we haven’t specifically decided that’s what we’re both trying to figure out. When I think about you—” She breaks off, and I sense a confession in the unfinished sentence.

I lean forward. “When you think about me, you . . . what?”

“I think ‘interesting’ and then ‘wish I had time.’ If this was meant to be, neither of us would have to work so hard to talk me into it. If you’d asked me out for real, you’d know I can’t say yes.” She crosses her arms over her chest, daring me to contradict her.

“Because you’re busy? Busy isn’t forever.”

“Busy is for the next year, minimum.” She gets up and wanders toward the windows, not that there’s anything to see but our reflections. “Everything I do costs me something else. Something important. I barely make my life work as it is. I should have been studying tonight, Micah. And I didn’t, and that is the problem.”

“Are you sorry I came over?”

“No.” She turns to me again. “But what happens when I take the bar in February, and I screw up something and then I realize the four hours I lost tonight are the four hours I needed to study?”

“Lost.” My voice is flat. I can’t help it. That’s a hell of a way to describe spending time together.

“And it’s not just that. With our family name on the gala, I have to make sure it comes off without a hitch. When those donations are totaled at the end of the night, if it’s anything less than two million dollars, it will be a failure. Failing means screwing up Madison’s goals. Failing all the people in Dhaka I met this summer who are waiting for a chance they need because Armstrong Industries ruined everything ten years ago.”

I turn toward her, both feet on the ground, and rest my arms on my knees as I study the floor. “It’s been okay. The last couple of months. How often we’ve been able to see each other. It doesn’t have to be more than that until things calm down.” I look up to meet her eyes. Hers are guarded again.

“That’s not how I work. I’m all in or all out.”

“You had a whole two-year relationship with someone because it was convenient. That doesn’t sound all in.” Frustration clips my words.

“I was second to school for him. He was third to school and Threadwork for me.” She copies my gesture, pointing between the two of us. “Is that what this is? You want to play a distant third?”

I rub my forehead. “No.”

“For what it’s worth, you wouldn’t be a distant third.” Her voice is tired. Regretful. “You would become the main thing, which means I would ultimately fail at what should be the main things, and that will inevitably make me blame getting caught up in you, and then . . . you. I would blame you.”

“You’re making some leaps there.”

A shrug. “Maybe before tonight I was. But after . . .” She waves at the sofa. “Now I’m sure. Can you honestly say that tonight won’t change the way we interact professionally?”

Instead of answering, I stand, gaze back on the floor, thinking, trying to decide if I should argue her out of this. But I don’t want to. She’s right. Anything that went wrong, she’d blame me. I dig my keys from my pocket and meet her eyes.

“That’s the one thing I can promise you. Because you’re right, you shouldn’t have to be talked into this. And that’s not even about pride. I don’t want to wonder when I’ll have to do it again.” I flick a glance at the door. “Look, I should go. But don’t worry about the installation. I don’t want to let down Madison either.”

Her lips part like she’s about to say something else. But she doesn’t. She turns toward the door too. “I’ll walk you out.”

I feel her eyes on me as I head down the walkway outside and pause. “Seriously, don’t stress about the warehouse. You don’t understand how good I really am. Put your energy toward the rest of it. I got this.”

Then she disappears as I round the corner toward my truck.