“So,” Sebastian said, cutting into his omelet. “Tell me about your place in Portland. Do you like it?”
Ah. So we weren’t just calling a time-out on our conversation; we were moving on from it entirely.
That’s probably for the best,I thought, pouring myself a glass of orange juice. “You mean The Money Pit?”
“Sounds like there’s a story there?” he observed, shaking salt on his eggs.
“Not a good one.”
“Tell me anyway,” he said, passing me a small carafe of syrup.
I drizzled it over my pancakes, telling him, “I bought this old ship captain’s house from the 1700s. Second worst financial decision of my life.” I set down the syrup and reached for my coffee, taking a sip. “Turns out ‘character’ is code for ‘everything is broken and costs a fortune to fix.’ Assuming you can even find someone willing to take the job in the first place. It’s also on twoacres, and it turns out I’m allergic to grass and pollen, so every spring and summer is basically Hell.”
Sebastian laughed. “Why’d you buy it then?”
I shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea at the time. Piece of New England history and all that.”
He raised a skeptical brow. “Why do I get the impression that’s not the whole story?”
I chewed slowly, trying to figure out how to tell him the true reason without sounding absolutely pathetic. Realizing that there was no way to do that, I launched in.
“Honestly? I think I was trying to prove something. I’d been traded six times when I landed with the Marauders. Never really lived up to my potential, you know?” I set down my fork and made air quotes with my fingers. “I wasn’t a joke—not really—but I wasn’tnota joke either.”
Sebastian’s fork clattered against his plate. “Taylor?—”
“It’s fine. It is what it is.” I pulled in a deep breath, readying myself to confess what an actual fuckup I was. “Anyway, I got into some financial trouble a couple of years back, and I was desperate to prove I finally had my shit together. Since I wasn’t looking to settle down and have kids, I did the next worst thing: sunk all my money into a house instead.”
“All of it?”
“Most of it anyway,” I answered with a shrug. “The house itself was reasonably priced, but when you have 300-year-old everything, nothing comes cheap.” I scrubbed my palm over my jaw, thinking about all the repairs I still had to make. The work on a house like mine was never-ending. “I’ve got contractors there right now updating the heating system. Next summer, I’ll need to restore the siding, and at some point in the not-too-distant-future, I’ll have to decide if I want to save the barn or tear it down.”
Sebastian choked on his coffee, the liquid dribbling down his chin. He couldn’t have looked any more surprised than if I told him I’d been abducted by aliens. “You have a barn?” he asked, wiping his face.
I leaned back in my chair, bringing my own coffee to my lips. “Who woulda thunk?”
“Not me, that’s for sure.”
Not me either, but here I was.
“But you like your team?”
“Ilovethe team. We’re terrible. Well, everyone but Stryker Bell and Cam Bonelli are anyway, but it’s nice being somewhere that finally feels like home, you know? Even if my actual home is falling down around me.”
I picked up my fork again, realizing I’d been monopolizing the conversation and my food was probably getting cold. “What about you? What’s your place like?”
Sebastian pulled his phone out, swiping across the screen a few times, and then passed it my way.
“Wow,” I said, flipping through the photos, and realizing it was nothing like what I’d been expecting. “Nice guitars.”
Four of them hung in a neat row above low shelves lined with framed photos, more books than I could count, and other knick-knacks that looked like personal mementos instead of mass products tchotchkes or something chosen by a decorator because it looked cool.
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I’m not. You always said you wanted to learn.”
“I dabble,” he admitted with a shrug. “Mostly, they’re decor at this point.”
I handed his phone back, our fingers brushing. “It’s beautiful, Seb. Very you.”
