“Megan would’ve gotten a scholarship,” I said before I could stop myself. “She wouldn’t need it, but she would’ve gotten one. Not me.”
Surprise registered across his face. “You have a good chance—”
“It’s not what I want to do anymore,” I cut in, taking a step back. Over his shoulder, I saw Sebastian approaching. I drew in a shallow breath. “I’m sorry.” I stepped around him. “I’ve got to catch my ride.”
Coach Rogers turned. “I think you’re making a mistake.”
If so, then I’d just tack that right next to the last one I made.
“If you change your mind, you come see me,” he said. “We can make it right.”
I wasn’t going to change my mind, but I nodded and walked to where Sebastian was waiting.
Sebastian glanced down the hall, his gaze lingering on where Coach had been standing. “Everything good?”
“Yeah. Of course,” I said, letting him take my backpack from me. “I’m ready to go.”
His gaze flickered to mine and I thought for a moment he was going to say something else, but he didn’t. As we walked down the hall in silence, I couldn’t shake what Coach Rogers had said.
The twisting motion in my stomach increased. Had I done the right thing? I must have, because it was already too late if I hadn’t.
* * *
I sat at the kitchen table that night, pushing peas around on my plate with my fork. I couldn’t believe Mom still put them on my plate like I was five and thought I was actually going to eat them.
Mom had asked about my session with Dr. Perry, and I’d given her the general gist of what was going on. She then asked about Abbi and Dary, since she hadn’t seen Abbi in a while. I’d lied, claiming Abbi was busy. Mom didn’t ask about Sebastian, which for some reason made me think that she knew full well about his late-night visits but for whatever reason wasn’t saying anything.
“Lori was thinking about coming home this weekend,” Mom said, cutting into her slice of the meat loaf she’d had in the Crock-Pot all day.
“Really?” I stabbed my fork into the meat, hungry but not. “That’s a lot of traveling for her.”
“It is, but she wants to see you.” Mom looked at me from across the table. “She’s been worried.”
A piece of my meat loaf turned to dust in my throat. “Is Dad still around?”
Mom stiffened just the slightest. “He had to get back to Seattle. I do believe he tried to call you and see you before he left.”
I shrugged one shoulder. The funny thing about my dad? Nothing was stopping him from seeing me if he really wanted to. Yeah, I didn’t answer his calls, but he could’ve come over. Mom would let him. So he could’ve seen me. I also recognized how backward it was that I was angry that he didn’t try hard enough to see me when I didn’t want to see him.
I was a hot mess.
“He’s going to come back.” Mom placed her glass back down. “Over Thanksgiving. We’re going to have a dinner—”
“Like we’re one big happy family?” I replied, admittedly snottily.
“Lena.” Mom sighed, laying her fork down. “He is your father. He is a good man, and I understand that you have...unresolved issues with him, but he is, at the end of the day, your dad.”
“A good man?” I couldn’t believe my mom was defending him. “He left you—left us—because he couldn’t deal with anything. Like, legit, anything.”
“Honey.” Mom shook her head as she put her arm on the table. “It was more than his business failing and us having money issues. Way more than that. I loved your father. Part of me still does and probably always will.”
Pressing my lips together, my gaze flipped to the ceiling. Knowing what I always suspected, that Mom still loved him, just ticked me off more.
“There’s something you need to understand about me and your father,” she said, drawing in a shallow breath. “Your father—Alan—he simply didn’t love me as much as I loved him,” she said, dropping that bomb like she’d said nothing.
I gaped at her.
She focused on her plate, exhaling heavily. “I think—no, I know—I’ve always known that. All these years, he loved me. He genuinely cared about me, but it wasn’t enough. Alan tried, he really did, and I’m not making excuses for him, but how he felt was just not enough.”
I stared at her, unsure of what to say, because I...I had never heard any of this before.
“We married young, as soon as we found out I was pregnant with Lori. That is what people did back then.” Then she dropped another bomb. “Your father didn’t want to leave, Lena. He saw me—saw us—as his responsibility, and while you two were his responsibility, I wasn’t. I wanted to be his equal and his partner, not his responsibility.”
“What?” I whispered, nearly dropping my fork.
“I asked him to leave. It was me who initiated the separation.” Her smile was sad, a little bitter. “I thought that confronting what I always knew, that what he felt wasn’t enough, and asking him to leave might make him feel the way I did.” Her laugh was like glass cracking. “I may be a grown woman, Lena, but every so often, we still believe in fairy tales. Asking him to leave was the last chance. That maybe he’d—”
“Wake up and fall in love with you?” I asked, voice pitched. Had she really believed that? I briefly squeezed my eyes shut. Had she thought that by asking him to leave, she’d get her own happily-ever-after like in a book?
Mom nodded. “I did. And looking back, there was a tiny part of me that knew you couldn’t scare someone into loving you more. That’s not how things work.”
All I could do was sit there.
“I love him—unconditionally. But when I could no longer lie to myself and I could no longer let him lie to himself, I knew the marriage was over.”
I sat back in the chair, hands falling into my lap. “Why...why didn’t you tell us any of this?”
That faint, sad smile faded. “Pride? Embarrassment? When we divorced, you were still too young for that kind of conversation. So was Lori, even though she was a teenager. It’s not something easy to talk about, to admit to your young daughters that you stayed with a man who didn’t love you like he should’ve.”
“But I...” But I’d always believed that Dad had just checked out and left. “You made him leave?”
“It was the right thing to do, and I know we should’ve been more honest with you girls, but...” She trailed off, staring out the window into the backyard. Her fingers folded on her mouth and she blinked rapidly. “But we don’t always make the right choices. Not even when you’re an adult and you’re supposed to know better.”
* * *
Like clockwork, the balcony door opened a little after eight. I wasn’t napping. I was just staring aimlessly at my textbook, rereading the same paragraph for about the fifth time. Nothing was sticking in my head since dinner.
Sebastian grinned when he saw me. “Nice shirt,” he said when he closed the door behind him.
“My shirt is awesome.” It was an oversize black shirt with baby Deadpool on it.
He stalked toward the bed in a long-legged prowl and my stomach dipped crazily. “Yeah, but when you wear my old jersey shirt is better.”
Flushing, I knocked a loose strand of hair back from my face. “I threw it away.”
“Sure you did.” He dropped into the computer chair, just like Abbi used to, when she actually liked me. “What have you been doing?”
“Nothing much.” I watched him kick his legs up, planting his feet next to my hip. He was barefoot, always barefoot. I dropped my highlighter into my notebook. “You?”
“The usual. Practice.” He folded his arms across his chest. “I also showered.”
I cracked a grin. “Good for you.”
Tipping his head back, he chuckled. “I live an exciting life.”
My gaze flickered over him and our eyes met and held for a moment. A liquid heat slipped over my throat and into my chest, then spread much, much lower. Looking awa
y, I took a deep, even breath. “So...um, my mom kind of dropped a bomb on me tonight.”
“About what?”
“She told me why Dad left.” I flicked the highlighter. “You know how I always thought he just checked out because he couldn’t deal with everything?”
“Yeah.” He dropped his feet onto the floor and leaned forward, fully invested. “That’s why, right?”
I shook my head. “Come to find out, it’s because he didn’t really love my mom. Like he loved her but wasn’t in love with her.” I told him what my mom had said as I pushed the highlighter back and forth. “Crazy, right?”
“Damn.” His brows were raised. “How do you feel about all that, since you and your dad...?”
He didn’t need to finish the statement. I’d held a major grudge, obviously, after my dad had left. I lifted my hands up. “I have no idea. I still think I’m too shocked to be angry, you know? Like how did she keep that from us this long? But at the same time I feel terrible for her, because a part of me can understand not wanting to tell anyone.”
And just not wanting to talk about it. That, I could totally understand.
“I got way too much in my head,” I admitted. “Like it’s just going to explode. Mom had basically let me and even Lori think Dad was just crap. I mean, he is still kind of crap, I guess, for marrying someone he didn’t really, truly love, but... I don’t know.”
“Time to clear your head.” He stood and walked over. Picking up my textbook, he closed it and placed it on my table.
“Hey,” I said. “I was doing my homework.”
“Uh-huh.” The notebook, pen and highlighter joined my textbook. Then he sat on the bed, in front of me, one knee up and bent, pressing against my calf. “So it’s Monday night.”
“Yeah.” I dropped my hands into my lap. “Thanks for clearing that up. I was so confused.”
One side of his lips kicked up. “You know what that means?”
“I’d have a whole week before the next episode of The Walking Dead if it was on?”
“No,” he replied drily.
I watched him plant his right hand next to my left knee. “Um. There’s only four more days left in the week?”
“Well, yes. There’s that.” He leaned in just the slightest, and my heart rate sped up in response. The absolute crappiness of the day faded away. “But Monday night means something else, something far more important?”
“And that is?” My gaze dropped to his mouth briefly, and I felt the clench in my lower stomach.
His head tilted slightly to the side. “It’s time for no more talking.”
“No more talking?” I repeated dumbly as a flutter started deep in my chest and moved south. Did he mean what I thought he meant?
“Yeah.” He inched his upper body closer and I felt his breath dance across my cheek. “I’ve deemed Monday night officially No-Talk-Monday. And you know what that means?”
My right hand closed into a loose fist. “What?”
“We find better uses for our lips and our tongues.”
Eyes wide, I coughed out a laugh. “Did you really just say that out loud?”
“Yes. Yeah, I did, and I don’t take it back.” He leaned in, and I jerked when his forehead rested against mine. “No shame in my game.”
“I don’t think you have any game.”
“Oh, I have game,” he replied smoothly. “So much you wouldn’t know what to do with all of it.”
A quiet laugh escaped me. “Sebastian—”
“This Monday’s going to be different.” His left hand found my right one. Just the tips of his fingers grazed my hand. “Can I show you how?” he asked, coasting his fingers up my bare arm, eliciting an acute shiver, stopping at the sleeve of my shirt. “Would that be okay?”
That would be amazing, but I...thought about what my mom had told me at dinner. Sebastian and I had been friends forever. Literally. I knew he genuinely cared about me, probably did love me, but did he really love me? I thought about how he drove me to school, worried about what I was eating and suddenly showered me with all kinds of attention. It wasn’t exactly like Mom and Dad. I didn’t get pregnant. But I did almost die. “Am I your responsibility?”
“What?” he asked.
“Do you feel like you’re responsible for me?”
“In what way?”
What was I even asking him? “Forget it.”
“No. I’m curious. What do you mean by that?”
Crap. I should’ve just kept my mouth shut. “I mean, do you do things for me because you feel like you have to because of what happened?”
“What? No. I do them because I want to.”
That...that was the right answer, but it didn’t change anything else. His forehead moved against mine, and that breath was on my lips now, and I wanted so badly to fall headfirst into this, to delve right in and deal with the eventual fallout later. “Is this smart?”
“I think it’s brilliant.” His fingers grazed over the loose sleeve of my nightshirt. “I think the last thing you need to be doing right now is thinking.”
I seriously doubted Dr. Perry would agree to that, but then again, maybe he would. He’d talked about living and moving forward and facing the trauma, the grief, and no one made me feel like I was living as deeply as Sebastian.
Though I wasn’t sure Dr. Perry considered making out as moving forward.
Drawing back, I saw a muscle flex in his cheek. His eyes searched mine. “You know how I feel about you.”
My heart nearly came out of my chest. “Seb—”
“I love you,” he continued, drawing his hand around to the nape of my neck, and my breath caught and my heart squeezed at those words. “I’ve been in love with you for years.”
“Sebastian,” I pleaded, finding myself close to tears.
“And I know things are twisted up in your head right now and I can only be right here, right next to you, while you untangle them, however long that takes.” His fingers sifted through the wisps of hair. “But there is something I’m going to untwist for you right now. What I feel for you is real, has been real—”
My heart was pounding so fast it hurt. “I need to tell you something.”
“You don’t need to tell me anything.”
Tears clogged my throat. “You don’t understand.”
“I don’t need to.” His thumb moved along my neck, comforting and energizing at the same time.
I shook my head as much as I could. “Why now?” I asked again. “Why—”
“Because we were too stupid to do it before and because we’re still alive right now.”
I don’t know who moved first, if it was him or me or both of us at the same time, but our mouths came together in a clash. His lips. Mine. I tasted him, my fingers landing on his chest and my hand sliding up to his shoulder. And he kissed in a way that consumed me, lit a fire that burned through my skin, turned my muscles into lava and my bones to ash. There was tongue and teeth, and Andre had never kissed me like that. No boy ever had, and that was frightening and exhilarating all at the same time.
Sebastian doled out kisses like there was an endless supply and I had a high demand for them, and somehow, without knowing how, I was lying on my back, and he’d lowered me so gently, so carefully.
“My turn,” he murmured against my mouth.
I didn’t want to stop him.
Sebastian mirrored my explorations from last week. As his lips mapped out the curve of mine, his hand trailed down the center of my chest, over my stomach. The flutter was back in my chest, a pounding of wings that met my out-of-control pulse. His fingers slipped under my shirt, fingers splayed against my stomach.
He lifted his head, a question in his eyes, and when I nodded, a promise filled them, a promise I could barely look at because it was...it was almost too much.
I gripped him, tugging on the longer strands of hair, and his hand went up, his touch like a feather over my healing ribs, and his fingers kept moving. I gasped against his mouth,
and he made this sound that had my back arching even though it put pressure on my ribs.