“I DOUBT YOU’RE INTERESTED IN excuses, right?” This was the first thing Sebastian said to me when I opened my front door the next day. He was standing there on my doorstep, surrounded by swirling snow, sporting a floppy knit winter hat and looking adorably goofy.
God, how I wanted him. But I had to get over it. “That is correct.”
“And clever conversation will probably only take me so far?” His eyes glinted, a troublemaker through and through.
“Not far at all. You’ve reached the end of that road, I’m afraid.” I invited him inside and handed him a box full of venison jerky. The snow had been coming down since Christmas Eve, so there was no way we were going to get my piece of shit snowmobile to carry us out into the woods as planned—it was a miracle his car had made it out to my place at all. Now that he was here, we were stuck chilling in my basement. It felt wrong, somehow, bringing him into my house. But we didn’t have any other options, so Sebastian followed me down the stairs and into the family den.
I grabbed the remote and put a movie on for background noise—something with Audrey Hepburn that would certainly make me feel bad about the absence of real romance in my life. I watched pretty little Audrey traipsing down a cobblestone road with an adorable short haircut and a smile. “Frankly, I don’t know why I’m even hanging out with you again,” I said. “Clearly, I’m just bored.” It was the day after Christmas, and my parents were on their way back down to Minneapolis to squeeze in some sort of clinical research appointments in while my dad had days off from the bank—so I was on my own for the night. My parents had gotten home from the hospital so late last night that we hadn’t even opened Christmas gifts yet.
“If I were to kiss you, what would happen then?” He said this through a mouth full of tough jerky.
Let’s find out, I thought, wishing he would just do that. Out loud I answered, “I’d probably slap you. Much as I enjoyed kissing you the other day, I’m not falling for your bullshit again.” He looked hurt—good. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I’m not stupid—I know you’re just a player. Which wouldn’t bother me, were it not for the fact that you put on this big show about actually caring.”
“I’m not playing you.” He sighed.
My heart skipped a beat. “I thought I’d made it pretty fucking clear that you didn’t need to get all emotional with me. I would have been perfectly content just hooking up—hanging out for a while—but you kept asking questions and making me talk.” I realized I sounded sort of shrill and majorly whiny. But I couldn’t stop. “I would have been happy to skip over all the emotional bullshit and just kiss.”
“That’s what makes you so fantastic,” he said, setting the deer meat on the floor next to the couch. “But I love talking about your ‘emotional bullshit,’ Chaz. That’s what’s messing me up.”
I tucked my feet up in front of me, physically walling myself off from him. “Why are you here?” I came out with it bluntly. “How am I messing you up?”
He ran a hand through his hair, and the way one piece dropped back down over his eyes twisted me up into knots and bows and made me feel like screaming and pounding my feet on the couch. I was smitten. A smitten kitten. Yet I hated him for messing with me. He reached out to take my hand, and I pulled it away, tucked it under my ass. He’d have to dig in and fish for it if he wanted it that bad.
“I’ve played a lot of girls, Chaz.” He stretched out on the other section of my L-couch, his fingers fiddling with a loose thread on one of the throw pillows. “In fact that’s sort of why I’m in Milton right now.”
I waited, and when he didn’t say anything more, I asked, “Is this your big emotional moment? You’re going to break down and get all weepy, making me feel bad for you because you’ve played a lot of girls?”
“Come on! This is hard for me. You’re making it worse.” He was laughing, which made my insides feel like I’d eaten a tub of frosting—all giddy and jittery and a little nauseous. I loved to make him laugh, but it made me sick that I’d fallen so hard—that I lived for his laugh.
“So what is it? You get off on a girl crying?” I was semiserious now. “Because I don’t especially like to open up to people, and you did something sneaky and tricky that made me fall for your wily ways and tell you things about myself that I didn’t particularly want to tell. You tricked me into thinking you cared. And now I’m really, really pissed at myself for being such a sucker.”
That’s when he moved over onto my section of the couch and grabbed my hand out from under my ass. He held it in his own. “You aren’t a sucker. God, Chaz, it’s not like that. It’s so different with you. I’m scared of you.”
“Good.”
“Yeah, I guess it is good. It’s making me feel bad about who I am. Who I was.”
“Poor you.”
“I’ve really screwed up, Chaz. A lot of times.” He held my hand in his, and I let him. He looked less ruggedly confident than I’d seen him before. “The girl I was with before I came here for Christmas—I really fucked her up. I don’t know how it happened, but I guess I didn’t handle things the right way. She has issues—”
“Because of you?” I broke in. “Aren’t you giving yourself an awful lot of credit? You’re so hot and desirable that girls are just literally melting and falling apart at your feet?”
“Her name is Elizabeth. I suspected she had fallen hard, but I just wanted to have fun.” He let my hand go. “But it wasn’t like that for her. She thought we were something—when I hooked up with another girl at a party during Thanksgiving break and then broke things off with Elizabeth a few days later … she just fell apart. It was the same with Sabrina, who I hung out with before Elizabeth. And Jessie, before her. It’s always been fun for me—they were all hot, sweet—but for them it was love or something, I guess.” He broke off again, fiddling with the pillow so hard that he pulled the thread loose and opened a hole in the fabric. “A part of me knows it’s happening, every single time, but I can’t stop myself.”
I watched him, fascinated. It was like watching a documentary on assholes.
The kind of guy I’d never fallen for before.
The kind of guy I never should fall for.
The kind of guy I felt myself falling for now.
And very much like the kind of girl I was when I was with Hunter. I felt sick, sad, and embarrassed that I could draw a parallel between the asshole behavior Sebastian was describing and my own games with Hunter. “Did you love them? Any of them?”
“I loved the power I had over them. I loved that they loved me.”
“That’s not love. It’s cruel.” It was. I’d never gone that far with Hunter. Hunter had tried to push it that far, but I hadn’t let him. I’d recognized who I became when I was with him, and I’d made it clear where we drew the line. I had stopped things before I’d really hurt him … because I couldn’t stomach a happily ever after with someone like Hunter, not when being with him turned me into that version of myself.
“I know,” Sebastian admitted. “I don’t think I’m even capable of real love.” He looked at me then, for the first time, and I could see that he looked frightened. “I’m afraid that I really am the guy everyone thinks I am.” He paused, and I took his hand back in mine.
He continued, quietly. “My mom told my dad about what happened with Elizabeth—I mean, the whole thing blew up around me, and I missed a lot of classes, not to mention that most of my town knows she’s pretty much on suicide watch now, thanks to scumbag Sebastian—and I’ve spent this whole fucking break trying to prove to my dad that I’m not that guy. That I’m not the kind of guy who treats a girl like shit. That I’m not the kind of guy who picks up girls everywhere I go and throws them away when I’ve finished with them.”
He looked up at me with sad, disappointed eyes, and I wanted to touch his face—but surely that wouldn’t help just now. Sebastian held my gaze. Studied my lips. “That’s where you complicated things, Chaz. I started to fall for you, for real. I didn’t plan this. I’m afraid to tell my dad that after everything that happened with Elizabeth and Sabrina and Jessie, here I am, hooking up with some random girl and starting it all up, all over again.”
“So your next target is a three-toed girl?” I teased. It took some of the edge off, for a moment.
“Being with you … it makes me want to know you, makes me want to hold you and feel you and touch you in a way I never have wanted before. And that scares me.”
Chills went up and down my body. I knew the smartest thing would be to walk away from Sebastian now. He was a commitmentphobe with a history of playing girls to the point of hating themselves.
But I knew, somehow, that it could be different with us.
That first night he’d come into Matt’s, I hadn’t thought about this as anything other than hooking up, but suddenly it seemed like maybe there could be something more. I was free around Sebastian. For the first time in a long time I wasn’t thinking only of sex. I knew, somehow, that he and I were on common ground.
Neither of us knew what it meant to feel or actually be real with another person. But maybe we were each other’s perfect testing grounds.
I sat up on my knees, my hands still twisted into his, and crawled over to him. As our lips connected, I pressed my body against his and pushed him down on the couch. Then I pulled away, and we looked at each other. He brought one of his hands up to my face and held my cheek, his thumb playing with my lip before he kissed me again.
A quiet fear washed over me then. I was suddenly overwhelmed by something unfamiliar and overpowering and a little bit dark. I put my head down against Sebastian’s chest, with my body snuggled in against his side, and we lay there quietly for a long time, our bodies intertwined, just holding each other. My heart was racing.
His hand was on my stomach, his fingers tracing circles around my belly button. I put my hand on his chest and felt his heart leaping up to thump-thump under my palm. I turned my face up so I could kiss his chin, his cheek. I tickled his ear with my tongue, and he squeezed me tighter.
“Why are you still here?” Sebastian murmured, as I snuggled in against him.
I put my hand on his stomach, then snuck it under his shirt to feel the smooth path from his belly up to his chest. His skin was warm, but he had a trail of goose bumps running across his body in all the places I touched him. “Because I live here,” I answered. “The question is, why are you still here?”
“You haven’t kicked me out yet.”
“And I don’t plan to,” I said. “You’re keeping me warm.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes, definitely.” And then I kissed him again, and I was suddenly a lot hotter than I needed to be. I rolled onto my back, and somehow my shirt was off moments later.
Then Sebastian took his shirt off, and suddenly we were skin to skin. He stopped kissing me just long enough to murmur, “Am I keeping you warm enough still?”
I answered by pushing against him, our bodies melting into each other. He flipped me over so I was under him, and I wrapped my legs around his. We were twisted up, and I was spinning, and I wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anyone before.
And then I stopped.
One minute we were making out and so close to doing everything I’d always wanted to do with a guy (but more than anyone, him) … and the next we were just holding each other again. Cuddled up, with Audrey Hepburn dancing and laughing behind us on the TV. It felt so right, so perfect.
We lay there, cuddling and hugging for the rest of the movie, until it was over and Sebastian had to leave to get home for a late dinner with his dad. “Can I come over tomorrow?” he asked, as he put his shirt back on. I was propped up on my elbow on the couch, watching him get dressed with a big huge smile plastered across my face.
“Yes. I work until seven, though. Want to meet me at Matt’s and we can get dinner?” I thought about that, and how it would put him right smack-dab in the middle of my life. He’d been to Matt’s a million times before, but now that we’d had these afternoons together, it felt different and, somehow, more complicated—he’d be touching a very real part of my life, outside the comfort and security of our secluded afternoons together.
He nodded happily. “Okay,” he said, then leaned down to give me one last perfect kiss.
Tomorrow couldn’t come soon enough.