CHAPTER 27
TAYLOR
The house wasdark when I let myself in. I dropped my bag by the door, shrugged off my coat, and let it fall to the floor. I loosened my tie, pulled it free, and tossed it to the side, not really caring where it landed.
I stood there in my empty foyer for a long moment, my keys still in my hand, feeling listless and unmoored.
The Marauders had unexpectedly won tonight. I should have been riding high—Brooklyn was a tough team, and I had fed Bell a gorgeous pass in the third that he’d buried top shelf.
Everyone else had been buzzing on the flight home. Not me, though. I’d sat by a window with my headphones in, curled in on myself, listening to nothing but white noise.
I unbuttoned my shirt collar and headed to the kitchen for a drink of water. My body was sore and dehydrated, and I hadn’t eaten enough today. I could practically hear Bell’s voice in my head, reminding me that I needed to take better care of myself.
Before I reached the fridge, my phone rang. I fumbled it out of my pocket to see Sebastian’s face lighting up the screen.
My heart slammed into my ribs so hard I had to grip the edge of the counter with my free hand to steady myself. For half a second, I was convinced I was hallucinating—that myexhausted, sleep-deprived brain had finally snapped and was showing me what I wanted to see.
“Sebastian?”
A low sob came through the line, followed by, “I miss you.”
My knees gave out. I turned and pressed my back against the fridge, sliding down until I was sitting on the kitchen floor, the cold tile bleeding through my dress pants.
“Seb,” I breathed out, not trusting myself to say more.
Everything I wanted to tell him—that the last couple of weeks had been the worst of my life, that I’d barely slept, that I’d picked up my phone a hundred times even though he’d told me not to contact him—all of it was fighting to come out at once, and I was terrified that if I said too much, I’d spook him and we’d be back to square one.
“I know I told you I need space,” he said, his voice raw and shaking in a way I’d never heard it before. “I know I told you not to contact me, and that I shut you down when you tried.”
The Sebastian I knew simply didn’t sound like this. He was measured and precise and very nearly always in control.
“It’s okay,” was all I could think to say.
Itwasn’tokay. Not by a long shot. But if agreeing kept him on the line, I’d have said the sky was green, and the grass was blue.
“None of it’s okay, Tay.” He pulled in a shaky breath and then sniffed. “You were right about Wyatt and me. About all of it. I was too … I reacted like an asshole. I was being a coward.”
I pressed the heel of my free hand against one of my eyes and breathed through the pressure in my sinuses. “You’re not a coward.”
Yes, I’d called him that. And I’d meant it at the time, when my anger was boiling over, and I couldn’t see past it. I’d been so focused on what Sebastian wouldn’t give me that I’d never stopped to consider what his relationship with Wyatt had costhim. He’d spent years with a man who was never going to choose him, and rather than walking away, he’d made himself indispensable instead. It took a certain kind of bravery to show up every day for someone you knew was never going to put you first.
And when Sebastian had asked me to be patient, to trust him, to love him even when the situation was impossibly hard, I’d lasted all of five minutes.
“I said shit I shouldn’t have,” I managed, my voice thick. “I was jealous and cruel, and I used things you’d told me in confidence, and I don’t … I don’t know how to take that back. How to make it right.”
“You weren’t wrong, though,” he said, his voice tired and shaky.
I’d been second-guessing every word I’d said during our fight, wondering if my jealousy had warped everything—if I’d seen threats where none existed, or if I’d been so terrified of losing him that I’d manufactured reasons to push him away first.
I’d been drowning in doubt, and those four words managed to pull me to the surface.
I felt like I could breathe again for the first time in weeks.
I dragged the phone away from my ear to swipe at my eyes with the back of my wrist before bringing it back to my ear in time to hear him say, “I’ve been thinking about how long I’ve been hiding. I used to tell myself it was for Wyatt, for the cause, for something bigger than me. But the reality is, I couldn’t even remember what I was protecting anymore. It just became the way things were. I hate to say it was a habit, because that’s too simple an explanation, but yeah. Something close to that, at least.”
Easy as it was to blame Hastings, he was only part of the equation. Sebastian’s parents—the Carruthers name and thepolitics attached to it—had been shaping Sebastian’s choices long before he had ever entered the picture. I might have missed a lot back in college, but I hadn't missed that.
“And your parents?” I asked, afraid to open a can of worms that he might not be ready to open.
