Finding Katie

Chapter 19

Ben

I gave my address to the taxi driver and then sat back beside Katie, taking my phone from my inside pocket. "What would you like for dinner?"

She clasped my hand on my knee as she glanced at the screen. "I'd love some rice paper rolls."

"Vietnamese it is." I placed our order in the app and put the phone away again. Then looked to my side when Katie squeezed my hand.

"I meant what I said. I missed you."

My smile grew smug again as I leaned across the middle seat to kiss her, straining the seatbelt and ignoring the glance from the driver in the rear-view mirror. "So I gathered from your enthusiastic welcome."

Just thinking about that interlude was making me shift in the seat, and Katie's words about her shower didn't help. It only made me think about my shower. With both Katie and me in it. And all the blood in my body that had just returned to its rightful place after our door-shenanigans rushed south again.

"I'm almost looking forward to my next trip away simply for another homecoming like that."

Katie pressed her lips tight, but there was a wicked glint in her eyes. "I'm sure another can be arranged. When is it?"

"In three weeks."

"Manchester again?"

"No, it's a new client. I'm going to Liverpool, then."

Only because I was looking at Katie did I notice the shift in her expression. It lasted but a fraction of a second, and whereas the jerk of her hand could be from the motion of the taxi, the fleeting slip of her smile was not. It was my words that caused it.

I didn't bother trying to smooth the frown that grew back on my forehead. It didn't matter; she wasn't looking at me anymore. She was staring out of the window on her side of the taxi, her face turned away from me.

My gut tightened again. Something pounded in my chest, right where my heart was.

I shifted a little in the seat, turned towards her, and made sure to keep my voice light. I didn't yet know the reason for her reaction. It might be nothing. Please, let it be nothing. "Do you know Liverpool?"

Katie hesitated, but eventually said, "A little."

"You've been there?"

This time it took longer before she replied. The knuckles on her clasped hands in her lap where white. "Yes. I... I grew up there."

"I didn't know that," I said haltingly, my mind stuttering. We'd been together for more than three weeks and I didn't know were Katie was from?

That couldn't be right. Surely she'd told me at some point. Along with all those other facts that were a part of getting to know someone. Surely, by now I knew lots of all those ordinary things about her.

I turned to the window on my side of the taxi, but I noticed very little of the buildings we passed as my mind flew back over the last few weeks; every conversation I could remember, every word Katie had said about herself, to construct a mental list.

The pounding in my chest grew fiercer, my frown deeper and deeper, as I came up with a very short list. There had to be more than only a handful of facts about Katie's past that I knew for sure.

She'd told me her age when I'd mentioned my mother's birthday, and she'd told me about her parents and that she had travelled the world after her mother had died, she'd told me about some of the sights she'd seen and the cities she'd visited, and... That was it. That was all I knew about Katie's past.