SEBASTIAN
“Thanks for meetingwith me on a Sunday.” Kendra gave me a warm smile in greeting and slid into the seat across from me, pushing a fresh coffee my way. “I figured you’d be downtown today anyway.”
“Taylor’s last home game before the holiday break,” I said, lifting the cup and taking a small sip. It was still too hot for anything more than that.
“I like him,” she said approvingly. “He seems incredibly sweet.”
“The sweetest,” I agreed.
I’d been walking around in a fog since the blowup with my parents last week, and Taylor had been on a mission to pull me out of it.
Just two days ago, he’d dragged me to some Christmas tree farm where we spent forever debating the merits of different tree species. Then, just when I thought we were leaving with a Balsam fir strapped to the top of his Range Rover, he led me around the back of a big red barn to where three goats were head-butting each other and climbing over everything. A brown-and-white one came bounding over to me, immediately going for my jacket.
“Sugarplum, no!” shouted an attractive blond man wrangling the other two. “Leave that man’s Ralph Lauren alone.” I felt my face crack into a smile, the first real one I’d experienced in days.
We’d spent another hour there, striking up a conversation with the man—Harrison—and his boyfriend, Jeremy, a former hockey player turned lumberjack. We even had plans to go back in the new year for a cheese tasting event that Harrison was hosting.
But it wasn’t all grand gestures and field trips pulling me out of my funk.
It was the smaller things. The way Taylor didn’t push when I went quiet, how he’d kiss the top of my head on his way up to bed, never commenting on the late nights I spent trying to track down my sister, or the way he’d draw me a hot bath when I felt myself starting to spiral.
He really was the best thing that’d ever happened to me.
Neither of us had been in a hurry to discuss what happened after the holidays, and I could feel that conversation looming between us every minute of every day.
At some point, I’d have to go back to Washington. Not that I was necessarily looking forward to it. While the gossip around Wyatt and me had somewhat died down, so had incoming job opportunities. I hadn’t let myself worry too much about that yet, mostly because it felt like the least of my current concerns.
Kendra wrapped her hands around her mug and looked at me with that focused, no-nonsense expression I’d come to recognize over the last several months. “I’ll get right to the point. I want you to be my chief of staff.”
I couldn’t help it—I barked out a laugh. Talk about irony. “You’re kidding.”
Kendra raised an eyebrow. “Have you ever known me to kid about something like this?”
“No,” I admitted, sobering quickly, setting my coffee to the side. “I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting this.”
Should I have? Maybe. Why else would she have asked to meet today?
Maybe if I hadn’t been so caught up in everything else going on in my life right now, I would have seen it coming.
“I know it’s not what you were doing before, and I’m not going to pretend Portland is Washington. But from day one, you've understood what my constituents need, and then you almost single-handedly turned my campaign around to deliver on that. You’re exceptionally good at this, Sebastian.”
She paused, letting the compliment land, which I appreciated more than I could say. I’d spent the last several days feeling like a fraud. It felt good to have someone remind me that just because I’d missed the warning signs with my family, I wasn’t completely clueless.
The brackets around her mouth relaxed, the sharp, professional focus softening into something much more personal. The kind of look you’d give a friend who was going through it.
“I also get the impression you might not be in a hurry to go back.”
The accuracy of her observation was what made Kendra such an effective politician. She was able to read between the lines, see things and understand them beyond surface-level bullshit. It was what had made Wyatt so effective, too, at the beginning. But Kendra possessed a type of warmth he’d never had. I wasn’t worried about ambition leading her astray.
“You’re not wrong,” I said with a wry smile.
She nodded. “So. What do you say?”
I didn’t even have to think about my answer.
“Yes,” I said. “Absolutely yes.”
Marauders’players’ spouses, partners, and parents clustered in small groups, kids chasing each other around the room, while a toddler made a determined beeline for the snack table, his dad scooping him up and blowing a raspberry on his belly.
