My Heart Insists He’s a Good Guy.
The Alternative Means I Misread Everything
The acoustic guitar and gentle voice of the folk singer set up in the corner of the coffee bar creates a comfortable atmosphere that makes me feel more like my old self. She’s been absent for a while. Either that or it’s Seth drawing her out, which is more likely.
He walks toward the table where I’m waiting, carrying two giant cups filled with coffee. When he notices me watching, he smiles, revealing those dimples that make him so charming and endearing. It’s no wonder everyone loved him in high school.
He sets the white ceramic cups that look a lot like soup bowls on the wooden table. “You were right. These are huge.” He sets our order number which he’d stashed under his arm on the table.
“And delicious. What did you get?” I eye his cup piled high with whip cream and sprinkles
“A mocha.”
“A chocolate guy huh?”
“Is there any other flavor?”
I smile, raise my eyebrows, and take a sip of my honey latte.
Seth watches me, his gaze lingering on my mouth.
After holding my hand, the sizzling of our arms brushing for the last two hours at the game, and the eye volleys, I don’t think I’m imagining the tension straining between us. “Do I have something on my face?” I ask.
His eyes flick back to mine, and he offers me a smile with a point. “Some foam.”
I dab it with a napkin, my stomach twirling in my belly.
He tastes his mocha and runs his tongue over his lips.
My heart picks up speed, thinking about his tongue and the things he might do with it. I imagine Seth leaning over me, devouring me with his mouth. I press my knees together and blink, reaching across the table with my napkin.
Seth leans forward. “That’s really good.”
I nod and dab the whip cream from the tip of his nose, reorienting my short-circuiting thoughts with the movement. It’s been a while since I’ve felt the hunger of physical attraction. I’m touch starved, I decide, and craving physical connection.
“The food is good too,” I finally say.
“I believe you.”
With the sexual tension searing my nerve endings, I’m tongue-tied. I know I keep telling myself I wanted to focus on friendship, but I’m beginning to recognize the futility in it. I just don’t know if I’m imagining the way our bodies seem to be speaking to one another. Maybe it’s a lie I’m telling myself because I want it that way. A sexual confirmation bias.
Seth clears his throat, glances at me, and takes another sip of his mocha.
I reach out and straighten the number, making sure it’s on the edge of the table so that the server will see it. I don’t really care about the number, but it’s something to do with my hands. After taking a deep breath, I readjust my cup so the handle is on the opposite side. Then I twirl it back around.
“There’s something, right?” Seth asks.
I look up at him.
He’s smiling as if he’s amused.
“Something?” I ask, but I know what he’s alluding to.
He runs a hand through his hair. It flops back into place except for the stray waves that seem to have a mind of their own as he rests an elbow on the table, his head still in his hand, and gazes at me. Then he straightens, returning his hands to his lap, and shakes his head.
My filter stops working momentarily, and because it’s on my mind, I bring up the broken bridge between us. “Do you remember the beach? 4th of July?” I keep my eyes on the surface of what’s in my cup.
“I have a BLT with fries here. And a grilled cheese with tomato bisque,” the server interrupts.
I lean back, a mirror of Seth, who has done the same.
“BLT,” Seth says with a hand up, and thanks the server when he sets it down.
The server places my grilled cheese in front of me, and I thank him before he walks away. I put my napkin into my lap and watch as Seth does the same.
“That looks delicious,” Seth says, leaning forward and eyeing my soup and sandwich.
“Want some?”
He shakes his head. “To answer your question, yes, I remember. Hard to forget.”
His admission unlocks a piece of my heart. “You do?”
He leans back and checks under the top piece of bread before putting it back and tapping it. “Fuck, Hannah. It was hot.”
I’d thought of it as romantic—kissing on the beach with fireworks blasting overhead—but he’s right. I hadn’t had many sexual experiences by then, some make-out sessions with a couple of guys, some touching and exploration, but no penetrative sex. I remember wanting to that night—with Seth. I’ve since been intimate with two partners. It has been enjoyable, but that isn’t how I remember the beach that night. I remember the way his touch had made me feel like I was burning from the inside out. How his kiss had been lighter fluid. The way every part of me wanted to combust. Hot is a good description, and it makes me blush remembering.
Seth’s grin broadens, lighting up his amber eyes with flashing fireworks. “You’re blushing, Fleming.”
“Stop.” I press my fingers to my cheeks, but I can’t stop smiling.
“I regret that I waited so long to tell you how I felt.”
“And how did you do that?” I ask. “There wasn’t a lot of talking, if I recall correctly.”
He grins but ducks his head and picks up half of his sandwich. “I don’t recall the exact turn of phrase, but I think I remember something like, ‘I wanted to do that for a long time.’” He takes a bite.
“Fair enough.” I take a nibble of my sandwich, suddenly too keyed up with the conversation to focus on the food even if it looks delicious. Now, I’m thinking about that kiss, and knowing what I know now, picturing how it could be. I picture wrapping my legs around his hips as he enters me. My body clenches, imagining it.
My eyes slide from my food to Seth, who’s watching me.
I blush harder.
He covers his mouth with his napkin, but I see his eyes curl, and I know he’s grinning. I’m pretty sure he knows exactly where my mind went, and if mine went there, is that where his is too?
“You stopped talking to me.” I swirl the spoon through my soup.
He hums a noise. “I did.”
“I did too,” I admit.
“Would you have stopped if I hadn’t?” he asks.
It’s a fair question. The truth is I would never have stopped talking to him. I valued him as my friend as much as I had a crush on him, so I shake my head.
“It’s not a great excuse, but I just wasn’t in a good place back then. Me dropping off the face of the earth never had anything to do with you, Han. Just my own shit.”
I nod, offer him a smile of understanding. “I get it.” And I do; that’s where I’ve been since losing my dad. “And now?” I ask.
“Am I planning to drop off the face of the earth?”
I smile at my grilled cheese, picking at a piece of charred cheese stuck to the bread, then look up at him as I put the morsel in my mouth.
He watches my fingers, adjusts in his seat as he glances down at his plate before looking back at me. “I think I’ve come back into the atmosphere and I’m coming in for a landing.”
“Me too,” I say with a grin.
He picks up the sandwich he’s smashed together and takes another bite, chews.
I watch his throat move as he swallows.
“I’ve actually been thinking about that night a lot,” he admits.
“What night?” I ask, lost in watching him.
“The beach.”
My eyes dart back to his face, then to my food. “You have?” I take a spoonful of my soup.
“Why are you surprised?”
I sit with his question for a few seconds, mulling it over. “It has been a tough couple of years,” I finally say.
He nods with understanding. “Think it will be a smooth landing?”
I grin. “Started out a little bumpy, but it’s looking better.”
He grins back at me, then chuckles.
We finish our dinner trying to keep our conversation more focused on less personal topics. The game and school. It feels like an easier place to reside. By the time I return home, I float through the front door of my apartment with a smile. Jewel and Joy are cuddled up on the couch like blanketed caterpillars in cocoons, watching something on the computer in front of them. Jewel smiles at me. “You look all hot and bothered. So, was it a date?”
My cheeks heat, and I curse my bright tell. “I think so.”
“Not with the beast, right?” Joy asks, frowning, her dark eyes expressions of annoyance at the thought.
“Am I the only one who liked him?” I ask with an incredulous sound that comes through my nose.
“We just don’t like how he hurt you. He was shit about it,” Jewel says.
“Not Sebastian,” I say. “I met up with an old friend from high school.”
Jewel presses pause on the computer, cutting the sound. “Oh.” Her deep brown eyes are big and bright with possibility. “You didn’t mention that earlier. Talk!”
I don’t want to get into all the intricacies about Seth, but share an abbreviated version, finishing with, “Sebastian was there.”
Joy rolls her eyes, deep and thorough. “Don’t tell me. He went all alphahole on you?”
I chuckle. “No. Besides saying ‘hi’, asking if I’d read his note, and the ‘is this a date’ question, he left me alone.”
Joy’s dark eyebrows slash over her dark eyes, and she huffs a sound through her button nose.
“Why? You think he’s an alphahole?”
Joy nods. “Under the right circumstances, yes.”
This isn’t ever how I’ve seen him.
My phone pings with a new message. I fish it from my purse and smile when I see it’s from Seth.
Seth: Did you make it home safe?
Me. Just did. You?
Seth: All safe and buttoned up.
Me: Good. Thank you again for the game and dinner.
“Look at her cheesy smile,” Jewel says to Joy.
“Stop,” I tell her and giggle, my face so hot.
Jewel and Joy laugh.
Seth: When do I get to spend time with you again?
“He wants to know when he can see me again.” I look up at my friends and wiggle the phone back and forth.
Jewel unfolds herself from the cocoon, trips out of the blanket, and jumps up like a kernel of hot corn. “Let me see!” She snags the phone from my hand.
“Don’t text anything!” I grasp her hand and draw her back to me, taking the phone from her. “What should I say?”
There’s a knock at the door.
Jewel walks across the room to open it. “You should tell him you’re in need of some good dick,” she says and laughs with her nose scrunched up as she opens the door.
My smile fades.
Sebastian is standing on the other side, his hands shoved into his pockets. His frame takes up most of the doorway. When I see him, I recall how easy it was to feel attracted to him; he is very attractive. His handsome face is etched with perfect symmetry and proportion, his mouth framed by a strong and defined jaw covered with facial hair. His auburn hair is styled into that coif that rises over his forehead and his thick eyebrows shift over his light eyes with a question mark. Strength moves through his body even when he isn’t moving. He’s a beautiful person on the outside, and he isn’t so bad on the inside either, even if he’s hurt me.
“Speaking of dicks,” Jewel says, walking away from the open door.
“Hi to you too, Jewel.” Sebastian’s eyes jump from her back to me with a scowl on his face. There’s never been much love lost between them. “I was wondering if we could talk?” he asks me.
“We’ll watch this in my room,” Jewel announces as she and Joy shuffle down the hallway rewrapped in blankets, carting the laptop with them. When the door to her room clicks shut, it’s as loud as if she’d slammed it.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. “I think we’ve already had this conversation.”
“May I come in?”
I step back, and he steps over the threshold. I have a fleeting thought that I just invited a vampire into my home, allowed him to cross into my space to suck me dry. I take a deep breath to center and focus myself, turning to walk into the kitchen where I can put the counter between me and my ex.
After closing the door, Sebastian follows but doesn’t say anything.
I face him, leaning against the counter on the opposite side of the kitchen. A hand on either side of my hips holding the counter, I wait.
His gaze runs the length of me.
Six months ago, that look would have initiated a glowing warmth of want. Now, I just feel impatient, which is strange considering I’d thought myself in love with this man only three months ago. I’d thought he was the one I’d marry.
“You look good.”
“That’s what you came to say?”
He runs a hand through his hair, swipes it back and forth, rearranging the locks until they are in the right place, and sighs. “You didn’t text me back.”
“Right. I didn’t.”
He looks at me, waiting for a more detailed response.
“Wait. Did you think you were owed one?”
He makes a noise through his nose. “Yeah. I mean, isn’t it only polite to reply? And I wrote you a note. The least you could do–”
“The least I could do?” I lean against the counter, its edge sharp against the small of my back, and cross my arms over my chest. “The least I could do,” I repeat, shocked, shaking my head.
“I would always text you back, Hannah.”
“Really? Because I’m pretty sure there were a lot of times you didn’t.”
“You’re always so sensitive.” He shakes his head with a slight grin. “I always told you why at least.”
“You think I should tell you why?”
His lips press together in that characteristic line of annoyance. He doesn’t answer, and in the past, I would have noticed and jumped in to placate him, keep things even and easy. But that need doesn’t feel as strong. I’m settled in not being with him.
“I’m not going to tell you why. I don’t have to anymore.”
With a frustrated sound like an engine attempting to turn over, Sebastian leans over the counter toward me, elbows on the countertop. He waits several seconds, takes several breaths, as if waiting for me to fill the silence, which I would have done at one time. When I don’t, he says, “I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
I want to narrow my eyes but keep them impassive. I tilt my head. “Okay.”
“I miss you. I messed up, and I just want to know if we could start over.”
Had he asked me before I left for winter vacation, I probably would have said “yes.” I was hurt, but I would have rationalized that people make mistakes—I had, after all. I would have convinced myself that Sebastian had seen the error of his ways. That I’d never find another person like him, someone so attentive, so caring; someone who needed me.
All the reasons we failed rear their ugly heads. We’d stopped talking, really talking. We’d started existing in motions of coupledom, in the comfort of just having someone. We’d stopped kissing, and touching, and having sex. We’d started fighting. A lot. He’d insinuated that night we broke up that I wasn’t enough, and I’d believed him—still sort of did, on an emotional level even if my rational side is beginning to offer me a new narrative. He was seeing someone else before ending it with me.
Now, I shake my head.
“Don’t say no, Hannah. Not yet. Not before you’ve heard me out.”
We have nine months of history between us. There’s the first time we spoke in the stacks at the Ham, when he asked for my number. Those excited flutters in my chest told me I was special because I’d somehow captured his attention. There was our second date at a tiny little rib joint in Old Town when he offered a little vulnerability about his last girlfriend and my heart reached toward him. That’s where we shared our first kiss that same night when I’d swiped barbeque sauce from the corner of his mouth. The list of a nine-month life together stacking experiences upon experiences: meeting one another’s families, sex, planning a future—our future—beyond college, hanging out with friends, doing the things couples do. When the essence of what once made us leaked away, all that was left was a hollow version of the couple we’d become. In hindsight, I see why he’d cheated, and despite all that history, I know I can’t go forward by going backward.
“Here’s the thing, Sebastian. I don’t have to hear you out. You said what you needed to say weeks ago. You communicated all you needed to. You’re with someone new. And now, you’ve asked forgiveness. Great. I’ve heard you. Forgiven.” I hold my hands out as if letting it go.
He groans and moves around the counter, leans against it opposite me, his hands on the countertop framing his hips.
I consider putting more distance between us by walking past him into the living room, but I hold my position.
“I’m not with Chelsey. I mean, we went out a couple of times, but I promise, Hannah, over the break all I thought about was you. She isn’t you.”
“And you didn’t call? No text. No Merry Christmas. No Happy New Year. You waited until two weeks after we returned to school.”
He looks down at his feet. “I was trying to figure some stuff out.”
“Did you?”
He looks up and pins me with that disconcerting stare of his. A stare I once found difficult to extricate from the dendrites of my brain firing on Sebastian cylinders. “Yes. I did. I realized I’d made a gigantic mistake ending things with you. I want you back. What we had–”
Only those Sebastian cylinders have weakened in my head and aren’t in my heart anymore. “You were right to do it,” I admit. “And an us isn’t going to happen.”
He shakes his head and straightens. “No. No.” He closes the distance between us.
I straighten, backed against the counter, tense and trapped. He’s so close, and large, and encompasses the space around me, sucking up all the oxygen. I’m not afraid of him; Sebastian hasn’t ever been anything but respectful of me physically, but now, he’s invaded my space, and I’m not liking it. The good, nice girl in me—who justifies that we’ve been closer than this before—wars with the one who would like to shove him away. He isn’t touching me, but I’m caught between his arms, his hands on either side of me, hemming me in between him and the counter. I suddenly feel very small.
“That’s not how this is supposed to go,” he says.
“It was over long before you ended it,” I say, staring at his chest, somehow finding the bravery to express the truth, but my voice has a thready quality to it. “It just took you walking away to make me see it.”
He shakes his head and presses his forehead to mine. “Hannah. Please. We were good together. I miss you.”
I smell the spearmint of his breath, a scent that at one time I found pleasing. I press a hand to his chest and push him away. He capitulates, stepping back.
“I need you to go.”
He looks shocked, as if this wasn’t the outcome he expected, and I can probably imagine the outcome he did. Twelve-weeks-ago Hannah would have taken him back. I’d have acquiesced, found a way to accommodate his needs and silence my own. There’s even a fraction of me who wants to do it now, so I don’t upset the balance of things, to return to what’s easy, comfortable, the path of least resistance. Except there’s been a shift inside me. It’s not a seismic earthquake upending me, but cracks shifting my perspective from what it was, to expose the truth and the pain from which I’ve been trying to rebuild. I’m noticing.
When I sat with Seth, and we laughed like we used to. When he took my hand, offering me comfort rather than the other way around. When the underside of my skin burned with just the reminder of our shared kiss. I was more alive than I have been in a long time, like the version of Hannah I once liked, long before my dad died.
“But–” Sebastian stops, his brows shifting over his eyes with confusion. He’s reeling and confused because he’s not getting what he wants.
My phone, still in one of my hands, pings, but I don’t move.
Sebastian takes a fraction of another step away. “Is that him?”
Tiny kindling of an angry fire ignites in my gut. “I’m not sure what business it is of yours.”
His frown deepens. “Marco says you knew him from high school. Is he the one? That crush you had?”
I don’t respond because I’m annoyed, and it’s suddenly clear why Sebastian is here. This isn’t about me at all, and I think that hurts even worse. To know that the only reason he’s here is because there might be someone else in my life. That he didn’t want me nine weeks ago, but now he doesn’t want to let me go so I can find my own happiness. It makes me feel sick.
“I need you to go.”
“I’m going to win you back,” he says. “He’s not right for you.”
“That’s not for you to decide. Please go,” I say again.
“Hannah!” I hear Jewel before I see her. She rounds the corner from the hallway into the kitchen. “I wondered if–” She pauses, coming to an abrupt stop at the edge of the linoleum. Her eyes narrow as she crosses her arms over her chest. “Oh. I thought you’d gone.”
Sebastian takes another look at me, his face a strange mixture of crestfallen and determined. His eyes are large and pleading, while his mouth is shaped with a frown. Shaking his head, then looks at Jewel and says, “I was just leaving.” He turns and disappears through the front door.
“Are you okay?” Jewel asks after he’s gone.
“You were listening.”
“Fuck yeah, I was. He wasn’t going to go. You asked him like a thousand times.”
“Two.”
“One too many.”
“Thanks, Jewels.”
“That’s why I’m here, sis.” She backs out of the kitchen. “Got a movie to finish and a girl to take care of.” She wiggles her eyebrows. As she backs away, she says, “See.” She points at me. “Strong.” She smiles.
I smile to reassure her, because I love her, and when I’m alone, I take several deep breaths to calm the way my heart bounces around erratically inside my chest, not wanting to consider any more sinister possibilities had Sebastian been less than a good guy.