The doors opened, and we stepped inside. Despite the chill from my damp clothes, his body heat enveloped the small space.
I almost wished my aunties would pop up again so they could serve as a buffer between us, but no such luck. The doors closed, the elevator rumbled into motion, and the heat thickened to unbearable levels.
I stared straight ahead. The stainless-steel doors warped our reflections, but I could see Sebastian looking at me.
“You forgot to press the button,” I said when he didn’t call for his floor.
“I didn’t. We need to talk.”
A sliver of dread curled in my chest. I’d known it was coming, but I’d hoped to avoid it somehow. Morning-after conversations were always awkward, but with Sebastian, it was guaranteed to be painful.
Last night hadn’t been a one-night stand with some random I’d met at a bar. It’d been… transformative. And terrifying. It’d stirred up feelings I wished I didn’t have, and I didn’t want to talk about them because that would make them real. Real things could be broken; hypotheticals couldn’t. If I had a choice, we’d return to our status quo and pretend what happened didn’t matter.
“You should change first,” I said in an attempt to delay the inevitable. I needed time to gather my thoughts or, ideally, hole up in my room until Sebastian got tired of waiting for me.
“Fuck changing,” he said. “I’m not letting you lock yourself in your room so you can try to wait me out.”
“I wasn’t going to do that,” I lied, but I didn’t protest again as we got off on my floor and entered my suite.
It was twenty times larger than the elevator, but Sebastian’s presence expanded to fill the space. It followed me into the bathroom, where I quickly changed into dry clothes, and it doubled in potency when I rejoined him in the living area, sweatshirt in hand. He was still standing by the door, but the weight of his gaze compressed the air into something thick and heavy.
I tossed the sweatshirt at him, making sure to keep a few feet of distance between us.
He caught it easily with one hand. He looked at it, then looked back at me. His expression was inscrutable.
“I forgot to give it back to you after Vermont. I only brought it with me because I knew I would see you,” I said.
I didn’t mention how I sometimes wore it at home because it was so comforting, and I could still smell him when I buried my nose in the thick material. It’d somehow become an emotional support item, but I couldn’t keep it. Not after last night.
“We live in the same city,” Sebastian said.
I didn’t have an answer to that.
He walked toward me, his stride unhurried but deliberate. An electric current sparked with every step, and when he came within touching distance, it took everything I had not to bury my face in his chest the way I had in his sweatshirt.
“Do you regret what happened last night?” His question was calm, even, but I detected an underlying hint of uncertainty that made my chest crack.
I wished the answer were a simple yes or no.
Our kiss had blown every other kiss I’d had out of the water; that was undeniable. Sebastian’s touch set me on fire the way no one else’s could, and I’d never felt as alive orwantedaswhen I was with him. The nagging doubts in my head had quieted, and I’d experienced what it was like to be with someone who desired me as much as I desired him. In an ideal world, I’d let myself fall completely and see where we landed.
But that was my heart talking. Myheadinsisted on spinning a thousand scenarios of what would happen if I gave in to my emotions, and only a handful of them were good. If I took this further with Sebastian, our relationship would change forever. Maybe it already had, but it was still potentially salvageable. For better or for worse, he’d always been the one constant in my life. I didn’t want to risk that certainty for something that might or might not pan out.
What if last night had simply been the conclusion to years of tension masquerading as something more? Would Sebastian still be interested later, once the lust cleared and he got me out of his system?
With the countdown to my engagement deadline ticking, I had to evaluate every choice I made. Even if wedidgive this a shot, was I willing to put a stake in the ground and say he was the one I wanted to marry someday?
A storm of conflicting emotions roiled inside me.
Sebastian’s expression wavered the longer my silence stretched on.
“I’ll answer first,” he said, his eyes never leaving mine. “I don’t. If I could rewind time and spend the night with anyone in the world, I’d still choose you. Every time.”
His words rattled in my veins. “Why?” I whispered.
“Why what?”
“Why do you want to be with me?” I gestured between us.“We’re always fighting. Always competing. We can’t even enjoy a boat ride without it ending in disaster.”
