Page 32

Chapter 32

Sebastian

I didn’t manage to get home from the rink until nearly six in the evening, and every second that I’d spent away from this goddamn house had felt like an eternity.

Luke had told me what happened when the Zamboni had finished and I’d got back on the ice, and by the time I’d managed to get my skates off and run from the room in nothing but my socks, her car was pulling away out of the parking lot. I’d ignored Coach’s angry shouts on my way out, and once I was there, once I was standing outside in the muggy Atlanta heat, I didn’t care. I just wanted to know she was okay. I just wanted to apologize for not noticing.

But I didn’t have my phone, didn’t have my car keys, didn’t have anything with me, so I’d had to slink back into the rink and dig for my phone in my bag as Luke conveyed to Coach exactly why I’d left the ice and why I wasn’t getting back on it yet.

And Nelly hadn’t answered my calls.

The only reason I was able to get back on the ice was the notification I got that my front door had been opened and closed. She was home, she had Matty with her, and at least I could spend the following few hours knowing she was safe .

But as I pushed through the front door now, it felt like I’d left it too long.

“Nell?” I called out, dropping my shit by the door as hastily as I could, but the moment I looked up, I saw her there — standing in the kitchen, her arms crossed, her gaze lingering on me from across the space. Cartoons played from the living room, and I moved past the doorway, crossing the space without so much as saying hello to Matty.

I needed to check on her.

She didn’t move as I entered the kitchen. Her lips pressed into a thin line, and although she wore a shirt and pajama bottoms instead of the jeans she’d worn earlier, it was the only difference in her appearance from when I’d found her in the back area of the rink.

I crossed the space in the span of a second, taking her face in my hands. Fuck it if Matty walked in. I’d figure out a way to explain it. “Are you okay?” I breathed. “Luke told me?—”

“I’m fine,” she said. Her voice was flat, almost deadpan. But the redness around her eyes and nose told a different story.

“You’re not,” I retorted. “I should have been there. I’m sorry. I tried to run after you but by the time I was able to get my skates off, you were gone?—”

“You should have,” she agreed. Her jaw jutted out in defiance, but it wobbled, and God , I’d been a part of this, I’d made her feel like shit again by not being there. I couldn’t let this get out of control like last time. “But you were far too busy with Zoe .”

The muscles in my brow worked. How is Zoe related to this? “I… I know, I’m sorry, she just actually knows quite a bit about how to manage scar tissue in a knee joint. Her dad has a similar issue so I was trying to get as much information as possible. I shouldn’t have let it distract me as much as it did.”

She scoffed and turned her head from me, breaking out from my gentle hold on her as she slipped a couple of feet away. “Convenient. You expect me to believe that?”

What did that mean?

“Nell,” I said, taking a step toward her. But she blocked me with the fridge door as she opened it up. “I don’t understand. Help me out here, please, so we don’t end up in a stand-off again.”

“I mean that it’s clear something is going on between you two. And you trying to pass it off as getting information about your knee from some flame is fucking ridiculous when I saw you leaving that room with her,” she said, her voice wobbling as she pulled out Tupperware full of leftovers. “Did you think I didn’t notice that? I’m not blind, Sebastian.”

I blinked at her, the realization slowly sinking in. Oh God. “She’s not a flame,” I said, my stomach beginning to twist as I imagined her here, stewing in worry, panicking that I’d… “I’m so sorry, I thought you’d met her. She’s one of our massage therapists, Nell, I swear.”

She shut the fridge door a little too aggressively and turned from me, putting them on the counter without so much as a single response.

“Baby, please, please , don’t shut down on me,” I pushed, coming up alongside her. I slid between the counter and her body, taking her face in my hands again and directing her vision to me. “You can ask anyone at the rink. I…”

I thought back to that moment, the one where I’d seen her at the end of the hall after my massage. Shit… it did look damning. I’d come out in my unbuttoned jeans in a rush to get to practice after, my shirt over one shoulder and my shoes barely on. And it wasn’t as though our therapists had uniforms.

“I understand how it looked,” I explained, the panic rising in me more and more as Nelly stayed exactly the same. It didn’t feel like I was making progress. “I get it. I can see it from your side. She’d been working on my knee before practice and I was running late. That’s all that was, I swear.”

Her eyes became glassy, a little bead of moisture building in the inner corner.

“Don’t you think I would have panicked when I spotted you like that if that’s what I was doing?” I asked, brushing the sides of her cheeks with my thumb. Behind her, in the doorway, a little mop of brown hair and wide blue eyes appeared around the corner. I bit back the urge to drop my hands, to step away from her, to shield Matty from that — it wouldn’t help the situation with Nelly if I did, and Matty would find out eventually. I could tackle that after. “That’s not who I am. It’s not.”

“I don’t know that,” she croaked. “You went all wide-eyed?—”

“I was just surprised you were back there on your own,” I insisted. I pulled her head toward me, pressing a kiss to her forehead, holding her there for a moment as I tried to breathe through the rising panic. I didn’t want her to leave again. I didn’t want this to dissolve into the chaos we’d had when I’d lost my temper with her. And I knew, I knew , that this was pushing those same buttons for her, igniting fires where they didn’t need to be. “I’m not him,” I added, my lips moving against her forehead .

I dropped one hand from her face and wrapped it around her waist, pulling her body into my chest gently. A choked little sob broke from her, and all I could do was hold onto her, wishing I’d picked up on how that looked back at the arena. I watched over her head as Matty stood there, his eyes locked on us, his confused expression asking so many silent questions. I closed my eyes to block it out.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“You weren’t there,” she whimpered. “I kept looking across and seeing you laughing with her.”

Fuck. I’d messed up. I’d messed up again . “I swear, I have nothing to hide from you. Nothing, baby.” I pulled her head back, not giving two shits anymore what Matty saw, and pressed a kiss to her lips. “I know that’s hard for you to believe after what happened with him, I do, but I need you to trust me.”

“I don’t know if I?—”

“Daddy?”

Nelly’s watery eyes went wide as I held her head in place, staring up at me with her back going rigid. She went to move, but I kept her place with enough pressure that made it clear I wanted her to stay — but not too much that she felt unable to break free if she needed to.

I didn’t take my eyes off her. “Yeah, bud?” I said, making it explicitly clear to her that I didn’t have it in me to hide this from him right now. This was far too important to me to drop it.

“I don’t think Nelly likes that,” he said, his voice small but closer. An ache blossomed and burned in my chest. Fuck. He’d seen it at the rink.

I was going to fucking kill Bryan.

I didn’t want to answer that for her. I didn’t want to insist that she would push me away if she didn’t want me touching her, didn’t want to imply to my son that I was assuming anything here, even if I was. Not when he could get that mixed up with what happened at the rink.

“It’s okay,” Nelly said, unlatching her head from my hand and wiping her eyes. She turned to him, and I let my eyes follow, let myself release her begrudgingly as she pulled from me completely. She knelt down to him, her hands on his shoulders, and gave him the faintest little smile. “This isn’t like what happened earlier, okay? Your daddy is trying to make me feel better. Bryan wasn’t.”

Matty’s confused expression only deepened. “What if Bryan was trying to make you feel better?”

She shook her head. “He wasn’t. And even if he was, it wasn’t okay because Bryan and I haven’t communicated that it’s okay for him to touch me like that.”

I scrubbed my face with my hands, the stress of it all building even more. Here she was, trying to have an honest, heartfelt conversation about consent with my son, and none of it would have had to happen at all if I’d just been paying attention.

“Okay,” Matty said, his confusion still painfully evident. “But you and Daddy have?”

She nodded. “Yeah,” she breathed. “We have. So it’s okay. But thank you for checking. It’s always, always good to check if you’re worried about that.”

“But you’re crying,” he said, wrapping his arms around his midsection.

“There’s just a lot going on, bud,” I interjected, putting my now-free hand on top of his head and ruffling his hair. “Nothing you need to worry about. I promise.”

“But you kissed her.”

More panic, more problems I had created for myself. “I know. We can talk about that if you want.”

He nodded, and Nelly stood, wiping her eyes with the base of her palms again.

“Hey,” I said to her, getting her attention. “If you don’t want to have to deal with this right now, I can handle the conversation with him. And I’ll sort out dinner, okay? But please don’t think that’s me telling you to go.”

She sniffled. “Okay. I need a shower anyway.”

I pushed the hair from her cheeks, my mouth flattening as I watched her eyes well up again. “You don’t have to be alone if you don’t want to be,” I said softly.

Her throat worked on a swallow. “I know.”

————

I hadn’t been sure I’d handled the conversation I’d had with Matty the best I could have, but we’d ended it on a positive note instead of a confused one. I’d been vague, trying to keep my intentions clear and as non-confusing as I possibly could, but he’d presented me with a question toward the end that I hadn’t known what to do with.

Do you love her?

It wasn’t like we’d had a massive amount of time to figure that out. It wasn’t like I’d gone into the conversation prepared to be asked that. I’d had to bite my tongue, had to think of an answer that would be enough to satisfy him without creating further complications.

“I could,” I’d said. “I don’t know yet.”

But the longer I sat with it, the more I felt like I knew the answer. And it scared the shit out of me.

The light was on in the guesthouse, and as much as I wanted to go over there and speak to her now that Matty was asleep, I didn’t want to go in unprepared. I didn’t want to fumble it like I had the last time we’d fallen out.

So, I did the one thing I could think of to help me.

“Seb, it’s like ten-thirty. What do you want?”

My sister didn’t exactly sound pleased to hear from me, but she’d always been a bit of a fickle one, even if her heart was made of pure gold. “I need your advice,” I said down the phone, leaning back into the couch and propping my feet up. I stared directly to my right, watching as a shadow moved in the guesthouse. “Desperately.”

“If you want therapy, you have to actually pay me,” she deadpanned.

“Oh, I’m sorry, should I just allocate a thousand dollars in the family pot for you?” I snorted.

I could have sworn I could hear her eyes roll. “What do you need my advice on?”

I took a deep breath.

And I told her everything.

From the start to the bottom, from the first night at Smokey’s to tonight. I gave her as much detail as I possibly could, told her about Morris, told her about the wedding, told her about the situation with Matty, and everything in between. I told her about Nelly’s lessons that she absolutely didn’t need. I told her about what happened earlier today, how she’d found me, the assumptions she’d made, and how I’d not thought to tell her otherwise until she brought it up.

I told her as much as I could.

“I don’t know what to do, Dani,” I said into the deafening silence. “I don’t want to fuck up with her. Not again.”

Her heavy-hearted sigh was so loud it blew through the speaker. “I mean… look, I’m not a relationship coach. I’m a th erapist. But in my opinion, you need to tell her how you feel, if you know how you feel.”

“I’ve tried,” I insisted. “I did, back at the wedding. I told her I wanted her, wanted this , and it seemed like she believed me. But she just doesn’t trust me. And I can understand why, honestly, but I feel like I’m hitting these impenetrable roadblocks with her that either means she disappears until I can figure it out, or we’re screwed.”

“You telling her that you want her sounds more like a sexual thing than a relationship thing,” she said. “Is she aware that you want her in that capacity, too?”

“I mean, I’d be surprised if she wasn’t. I kissed her in front of Matty for the first time earlier. I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t want her like that.”

She groaned in frustration. “But have you told her directly?”

“Well, no?—”

“Do that.”

“That won’t fix the problem of her thinking that I’m cheating on her,” I snapped.

“No, but it could help her feel more secure about the situation,” she retorted. “Do you love her?”

“Why is everyone asking me that today?” I grumbled.

“That’s not an answer, Seb.”

I sucked on my teeth, watching out the goddamn glass doors as the light shut off in the guesthouse. I wanted to tell her what I’d told Matty, but it felt insincere, it felt flaky. Like I wasn’t sure when I should be, when I was . “Can you even love someone that quickly, Dani?”

“I don’t know, Seb, can you?”

The silence that fell between us as I thought it over made me nauseous. “Yeah,” I rasped. “I guess you can. ”

“Great, okay, so you love her,” Dani said, her voice completely deadpan. “You should tell her that.”

“She’ll think I’m insane.”

“Better she thinks you’re overzealous and head over heels for her than a cheater, no?”

“I just don’t know if it’ll cancel out the way you think it will,” I sighed. “Besides, you only date women.”

“Surely that just gives me more authority on this,” she said, a snort breaking through her laugh. “I am a woman. And I date women. I know how they work.”

“You know how to date women as a woman,” I shot back. “Aren’t lesbian relationships notorious for moving insanely quickly?”

“I mean, yeah, but that’s just a stereotype.”

“You literally moved in with Cassie after a month.”

“We were just speedrunning it,” she laughed. “Just, listen. Talk to her, alone, without your kid in the room. Tell her everything. And hope it works.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” I sighed. “But I can try to show her.”