Page 19 of In the Net (Sin Bin Stories #5)

HARPER

A knock at my door wakes me up.

I sit up in bed. Only dim orange light from the streetlamp outside filters through the window. Checking the bedside clock, I find that it’s almost midnight.

The knocks sound again, hard and insistent against my door.

Is it Sebastian? Why would he be checking on me this late at night? I fling off my covers and approach the door.

“Hello?” I ask. There’s some caution in my tone because, after all, I am in a different country and this is a sudden, loud knocking on my door in the middle of the night. Not the most comforting scenario in the world.

“Harper.” It’s clearly Sebastian’s voice saying my name from the hallway. But the way he sounds has concern prickling up my back. His voice is spent, his speech slurred.

I open the door. My lips part in surprise when I see him.

His hair is disheveled, tufts tangled and sticking up, like he’s spent the last couple hours running his fingers through it.

His shoulders are slumped, his weight supported by leaning against the wall next to my door.

His brow is damp with sweat, his eyes are glossy, and his face is flushed, obviously from having drunk way too much alcohol, because he reeks of it.

“Geeze, Sebastian,” I say, scrunching my nose. “You know our flight is tomorrow, right?”

“I … there …” he’s trying to say something, but can’t get the words out. And it’s not just because all the alcohol he’s clearly consumed is making his speech slurred. His voice sounds choked with emotion in a way that has my heart clenching with worry.

“Come in,” I tell him. After he takes one step past the doorjamb, I realize I have to hold his arm for support with the way he’s stumbling.

I curl my arm around his, feeling the thick, jagged muscles against my skin.

I shoulder him to my bed, where he plops down like a sack of potatoes.

Sebastian rolls onto his back, and the palm of his right hand goes to his face, clasping it over his eyes.

His jaw muscles pop like he’s grinding his teeth.

This isn’t good. Something’s wrong with him. Did he drink so much that he has alcohol poisoning?

“Sebastian, why in the world did you drink so much?” Even back at Brumehill, I’ve never known him to go overboard like this, not even at one of the house party ragers his team likes to throw.

“Because I … he … when I saw …” His words are still slurred, but again, that’s not what really has my chest clenching. It’s the choked sound of pain, of hurt, the way his voice cracks each time he trails off and tries to form a new thought, that has concern shooting through me.

I kneel next to him, my knees on the floor while he’s crumpled on the bed. He rakes his palm down his face, dragging his glasses down his nose. His eyes are watery, and so much emotion swims in them.

I remove his glasses so he doesn’t break them, setting them on the bedside table. Grabbing him by the shoulders, I force him to sit up. He slumps forward, elbows on his knees and hands spearing into the thick tufts of his black hair.

“Tell me what happened,” I say.

His eyes find mine, and the turmoil boiling in them steals my breath.

“Bryce,” he says.

Panic floods through my veins. His former best friend. Someone I grew up with, too, and still think of as a friendly acquaintance. Someone I’m always happy to see when I go back home.

“What happened to him?” I ask, my voice thick with urgency.

He opens his mouth, but his throat is too clogged with emotion for any words to come through.

Immediately, my mind jumps to the worst conclusion.

I’m friends with Bryce on Instagram. I get my phone, thinking that if something truly awful did happen, there might be news on there.

Maybe that’s how Sebastian found out about it. When I pull up the app, sure enough, a post from Bryce’s account is at the top of my feed, already with comments and reactions from just about everyone else I’m still following from our hometown.

The first thing I notice is the picture. Bryce in a hospital bed, tubes sticking out of him, hooked up to machines.

Then I read the text. It explains that it’s his mom writing. Hours ago, Bryce was in a car accident, hit by a distracted driver, and he’s currently fighting for his life in critical condition.

Heat sears at the corners of my eyes. I was never close friends with Bryce, but I always liked him. We always got along. The thought of this happening to him makes me want to cry.

I’m now on my feet next to Sebastian on the bed. He turns his head to me. “You saw?”

I pull in a breath, my nose sniffling. “Yeah, I saw.” My voice is a squeak.

“Fuck, Harper,” Sebastian says, his voice almost a wail. His eyes clench tight, his fingers steepled at the bridge of his nose. “If he dies, he’ll never know …” His voice cracks, and there’s nothing but heavy silence in the room for a stretch of time.

I sit next to him on the edge of the mattress. “Don’t talk about Bryce dying, Sebastian. He’s alive, and he’s fighting.”

Sebastian sniffles loudly. “When I saw … I had to have a drink to keep myself from going crazy. Then I couldn’t stop.

I couldn’t stand the thought of … of him never knowing how fucking sorry I am.

” He turns to me, and our eyes lock, the look in them going right to my heart.

“Then I came here, because where else was I supposed to go?”

So many emotions are rocketing through me I can’t begin to catalogue them.

“Sorry?” I ask, latching onto that word he used.

His throat works hard on a swallow. “For how I treated him the whole last year we were friends. For how I lashed out at him when he called me out on it. For letting our fight last so damn long when I was the one who needed to apologize. For not reaching out even though I miss our friendship every day.”

The pain he’s in rolls off him in waves, in a way I can physically feel. Every line on his face is etched with it, and every glimmer in his watery, red-rimmed eyes broadcasts it.

It has me questioning some of the judgments I’ve held about him for years. I always assumed he just dropped Bryce like a hot potato, not caring about him once he had his rich prep school friends to hang around with.

I thought he was an egotist who was only too eager to cut ties with the people he grew up with once he felt he’d risen above them.

Maybe the truth is a lot more complicated than that.

It has to be, because if that were the truth, Sebastian wouldn’t be in the kind of agony he is now.

“I need some water.” Sebastian’s words are garbled. When he rises from the bed, he only makes it one step toward the bathroom before he stumbles and falls to the floor.

“Sebastian!” I exclaim. I try to help him up, but he’s too heavy.

His limbs are like noodles, and he can’t even get his own feet under him.

I settle for letting him sit on the floor, back propped against the bed.

I get him a glass of water and hold it to his lips for him to sip, just like he did for me yesterday.

“I’m the worst friend ever,” he groans, voice coated with guilt.

I frown. “You know that’s not true.” Sebastian’s attitude has pissed me off a lot over the last couple years, sure. But I know he’s grown up from who he was freshman year, even if that old personality of his always shines through whenever we’re interacting.

Not to mention, an actual bad person wouldn’t spend his day looking after me like Sebastian did yesterday.

“It is. I treated Bryce like he didn’t matter to me because my prep school friends made me feel like I was some big shot.

But you know what? I don’t even talk to any of them anymore.

I don’t even try to. When we graduated high school, I just wanted to cut ties.

To leave my whole past behind me and start new in college.

I kicked my best friend in the world to the curb for them, for people who didn’t even mean enough for me to stay in touch with. What does that say about me?”

I frown, looking at his emotion-worn face with sympathy. “It means you were a dumb kid who made some mistakes. Your life wasn’t what you wanted it to be, and you screwed up a couple times trying to change it.”

“So what? A lot of people’s lives aren’t what they want them to be. They don’t treat the people they grew up with like crap.”

I sigh. “Actually, a lot of people do.”

“You don’t.”

Something about his words makes my heart pulse.

“Well, I treat you like crap,” I say, trying to force the weakest smile onto my face to lighten the mood.

Sebastian just shakes his head, his eyes softening. “No you don’t. You just give me back what I deserve, because no one else will.”

A long silence stretches between us. Sebastian’s lids are droopy, his eyes unfocused and drifting around the room, while mine stay locked on him.

“I wish he knew how sorry I am. Even if he doesn’t care, even if he still wants to hate me. I just wish he knew.”

“Bryce is strong. He can get better, and you can tell him.”

A sad, defeated sigh that seems to deflate his broad chest escapes his lips.

A pang of sympathy expands in my chest. I wish there was something I could say to make what Sebastian is going through easier, but there isn’t.

The person he was close as a brother to for years is in the ICU while he’s across an ocean, utterly powerless to do anything about it, facing down the possibility that he’ll never be able to make amends for how their friendship ended.

If I were in his shoes, I’d be feeling the same.

“Come on, you need to get to sleep,” I tell him. “Our flight is early.”

I help Sebastian hoist himself onto my bed. I think he might have already passed out, but as I’m tugging off his shoes, his voice rasps, “Harper?”

“Yeah?”

“I really was a jerk freshman year. You were right to hate me.”

My lips press together. “I didn’t hate you.”

He grunts. “Wouldn’t like to see how you act toward people you do , in that case.”

There’s a slight twitch at the edge of my mouth. “Well, I wouldn’t let them sleep in my bed.”

Sebastian groans. “I shouldn’t take your bed. That’s not fair.”

“Yeah, well, what do you think the odds of you making it across the hallway before passing out are?”

A low, rumbling snore is my answer.

With sympathy for Sebastian and concern for Bryce swirling through me, I settle into the hotel room chair and close my eyes, just like Sebastian did last night.