13. Nelly

Chapter 13

Nelly

“ W here’s your car?”

I leaned against the counter in the kitchen, watching Sebastian down the long expanse of the foyer as he shut the door behind him. He glanced at me warily while he dropped his bag on the floor and stood to his full height, hands in the pockets of his thigh-hugging jeans, a white shirt clinging to his muscular upper body.

“I left it at Smokey’s,” he sighed, crossing the foyer and heading straight toward the kitchen. Toward me.

“Are you drunk?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest. I didn’t want to consider what he’d been up to at Smokey’s, didn’t want to entertain the thought that there was a chance he’d done exactly what he’d done to me that night, but with someone else.

“No,” he insisted. He stopped in the doorway, his hand wrapping around the frame. The intensity in his gaze zeroed in on me, drinking me in from top to bottom. I hadn’t bothered trying to look presentable for him at nearly midnight, not when I’d handled bedtime with Matty, not when I’d waited up for him. I’d hung out in my bike shorts and oversized shirt since Matty had fallen asleep, and I wasn’t about to change out of them now. “I was earlier. I just wasn’t going to consider driving home since I’m still a bit tipsy.”

I shifted uncomfortably, stretching my arms down and holding my wrist. “It’s late?—”

“I know.” His nostrils flared as he watched me, the tendons in his arm flexing while he squeezed the door frame. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be out for long.”

Words died on my tongue before they could form, and I found myself just reiterating my point instead. “You said you’d keep me in the loop about your schedule?—”

“I know,” he repeated. His lips formed a hard line before he spoke. “I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t even text me?—”

He took a step toward me, releasing the door frame. “I know,” he said again, but this time it was deeper, rougher, grittier. My spine stiffened. “I’m sorry.”

There were at least ten paces between his towering frame and mine, and fuck, that felt like too few and too many at the same time. I didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know how truthful he was being, and if he was actually tipsy or just fully drunk, didn’t know what his aim was here, didn’t know why he was moving in my direction. My heart rate spiked as he took another step, thumping away in the back of my throat. “Seb,” I said cautiously.

He froze. His eyes flicked between mine across the distance, trying to read something there, trying to pick up what I’d meant by that. But I wasn’t even sure myself, so if he came up with an answer, it couldn’t have been correct. “Yeah?”

I swallowed past the words that wanted to come out, and it was like something clicked, like I’d unlocked the door. “Why didn’t you call me?”

A flicker of something flashed across the hard lines of his face, and his jaw set. “If I’m being entirely honest, Nell, I didn’t want you to be angrier with me while I was drunk, and I wanted to handle this as sober as I could.”

“No, not… not tonight,” I clarified, the words feeling like sandpaper as they left my mouth. Though his answer was good to know moving forward, it wasn’t what I was looking for.

His lips pursed, and his gaze fell, that meaning clicking for him. Apparently, the floor was far more interesting to look at now. He hesitated before he spoke, the space between his throat and his chin moving, chewing words I wanted to hear. “I never said I would.”

I never said I would. Those words made no sense, and I found myself reeling backward enough to push the counter harder into my lower back. “You took my number.”

“I did.”

“Were you just…” No, no, no, no, this is so much worse, this is ten million times worse. My stomach dropped as the realization hit me. “Fuck, you were just being polite.”

His jaw ticked as he dragged his gaze up toward the ceiling, up to the little bulbs that dotted it and lit the room in gentle, low light. He pulled his hands from his pockets, absentmindedly running one up the length of his arm while his Adam’s apple moved, but not a single sound came out of him.

Bile churned over in my gut, thrusting up into my esophagus. I wanted to throw up. I opened my mouth to speak, but the words froze, and I had to push past it, had to stuff down that urge so I could get the fuck out of here and find privacy to feel shitty about myself. “Matty’s asleep,” I said, but the sound of my voice was wrong, croaky, and foreign. I pushed off from the counter and took a step to my right, toward the glass doors, toward freedom and Carl the House Goalie and the guesthouse. “I’ll take him to school in the morning. Get some rest?—”

He moved across the floor like it was ice, his hand wrapping around my wrist and catching mine before I’d even gotten another step in. “Nelly.”

“Please don’t,” I gulped.

“That’s not…” He let out a grunt of frustration as he released me, shoving that same hand that had held my wrist into his hair instead and pushing the wavy brown strands out of his face. “That’s not what I meant. Remember the name I gave you? Sebastian Anthony?”

Well, that just felt like another stab in my self-confidence. “Please don’t remind me that you gave me a fake name,” I faltered, taking a step back from him toward the glass doors. “The number thing is enough.”

“No, that’s not— fuck , okay, just let me start over,” he said, bloodshot eyes meeting mine in a flash. He looked flustered, stressed, anxious in a way that I hadn’t seen before, not even on the morning when he’d overslept and was nearly an hour late for practice. “You know who I am, now. You know what I do for a living. If you’ve googled me, you probably know a lot of half-accurate information about my life. And at the bar, you didn’t, or at least I was somewhat convinced you didn’t.”

I stared at him across the few feet between us. “I don’t under?—”

“The handful of times I’ve gotten involved with anyone since my divorce, they’ve either known who I am or they’ve quickly learned who I am. And every fucking time, Nell, they didn’t care about me or Matty or anything else,” he said, leaning just a little closer to me as he put one hand on the counter for stability. His brows lowered, his mouth formed a hard line, but then he was speaking again, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to run. I wasn’t sure what I wanted at all. “They cared about what I could do for them, what I could give them, how many season tickets they could get or how much of my money they could use, and how many images of their face next to mine would show up in the recaps the day after a game. None of them have ever been interested in me as a person.”

His jaw worked back and forth as he thought about the words he wanted to say, and I gave him that space. I wasn’t sure if it was my freeze response or a choice to stay at this point, but I wasn’t moving, wasn’t going anywhere.

“When that happens enough times, you start to expect it,” he continued. “I had no idea if you were just playing coy with me to try to weasel your way in. And then you showed up at fucking practice, and I saw red because that was all I could think. So yes, I took your number to be polite and didn’t call you because I’d made my peace with not seeing you again the moment I spoke to you. I gave you my middle name instead of my last. I’m sorry for all of those things. But I don’t know how to navigate being a regular person with this kind of stuff anymore, not since I made NHL, not since Taryn.”

Taryn? I wanted to ask who that was, but I thought better of it before the question could leave my mouth. Instead, I took a deep breath in through my nose and let it out through a tiny gap between my lips. I could understand what he was saying, could understand his reasoning, but that little flame in my mind that had sparked a wildfire of an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy was still burning, even with the worst parts doused and put out by his words. This made him more human, more real , and I almost wished I could have just taken the hit-and-run instead of hearing this .

This hit close to home on too many levels.

I’d had to watch Morris go through similar things. He was a music producer, and although he wasn’t anywhere as sought-after as Sebastian probably was, he was hounded by wannabe musicians and up-and-comers constantly. It made him not want to work with anyone he hadn’t reached out to personally, made him not want to allow talent to find him. They all wanted the things he could give them instead of wanting to work with him as a person.

But Morris was a piece of shit. And as much as I wanted to assume Sebastian was the same as Morris with everything else outside of the bedroom, it was looking more and more like he wasn’t.

And that was… unsettling.

Upsetting.

Attractive.

“It wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy my night,” he added softly, throwing emphasis on almost every word as he stared directly at me, searching me, reading me.

Sebastian reached out again, almost hesitantly, as if I’d set him on fire, too, and slowly, gently wrapped his fingers around my forearm. Heat spread and consumed me from the point of contact, and my mind went blank, anything and everything I wanted to say lost and replaced with a black void.

He pulled, and my body moved, taking a step closer to him, and another, and another, until I was nearly as close to him as I’d been that night I’d met him at Smokey’s weeks ago. That scent of cedarwood and ocean salt invaded my senses, tempting me, testing me. Touch him.

“I wanted to call you,” he breathed, his hold on my arm turning softer and softer until it was practically featherlight. I could break free if I wanted to. “I forced myself not to.”

I wanted to call you.

God, this was so much worse. I could have made myself forget it all and stuff it down into a nice, neat box that I buried in the recesses of my mind if he’d just simply not had a good time and didn’t like me. Yes, it would have stung, especially after Morris’s constant battering of you’re shitty in bed , but I could have been fine.

I could have made sense of it.

But that wasn’t the case. Seb enjoyed himself. Seb wanted to call me. And now I was working for him, nannying his son, standing in his goddamn kitchen at midnight with no one else but him around. Now, I was standing beneath the intensity and heat of his tipsy gaze, and he was touching me, barely.

“That doesn’t explain why you seem to have a problem with me now,” I croaked. It was the only thing I could think to say, the only thing that still didn’t make sense. I needed to know, desperately, because if he hadn’t enjoyed himself, it would have been easy to explain — no one wants to be stuck in close contact with someone they thought they’d never have to see again. But from what he was saying, that wasn’t the case.

He huffed out a barely audible chuckle, his jaw working and ticking, and slid that featherlight touch on my forearm up. Fingers brushed across my upper arm, my shoulder, my collarbone, and I caught my breath the moment they touched my neck. His eyes followed them with precision, his lips parting just slightly. He moved them slowly until they settled just beneath my chin, tipping it up, forcing me to stretch my neck enough to still see his face as he took another step closer. I could feel the heat rippling off his body, could have put a single hand between us and touched him easily.

But his eyes didn’t find mine. They stared at my lips instead, light blue irises focusing in and making my mouth water.

“I don’t have a problem with you, Penelope,” he rasped.

My pulse thundered in my ears, my head, my throat, and he shifted his hand, his thumb taking over beneath my chin to keep my head up, his fingers splaying out across the side of my neck and taking up residence beneath my ear. His breathing was even and measured, too quiet as if they were shallow, but I could see his chest rising and falling, his shoulders shifting as he kept himself in place.

“I have a problem with fighting the urge to touch you every time I see you.”

As if chains had come unshackled and the world had finally started moving again, I regained an ounce of control.

I only wished it hadn’t shifted from freeze to flight .

There weren’t words, only actions — I took a step back, out of his hold, out of his scent, out of his warmth. Despite the strength he could have easily used, he let me go, locked in position as his eyes followed me.

Shakily, I pulled the glass door open.

He didn’t say a word.

Slipping from the house like a gazelle just narrowly outrunning a lion, I shut it behind me and walked back to the guesthouse in a blur, not even bothering to say goodnight to Carl the House Goalie.