20. Sebastian

Chapter 20

Sebastian

I hated this.

Every step up to my room without the back door opening and closing behind her felt like torture. Just knowing she was still down there, still upset, still locked in place as I left her in the kitchen felt like the worst thing I could do — but if she was going to go cold on me, I didn’t have another choice. I couldn’t fuck this better, and we weren’t close enough for me to feel comfortable pushing the boundary she’d clearly set.

You can go to bed.

She didn’t even want to talk it through with me.

I knew I’d been an asshole. I knew I’d gone over the line and snapped at her, but she wasn’t even giving me the chance to atone for that.

Even with the win on my shoulders, the day had been awful from the moment I’d stepped through the arena’s doors, and I knew the second they closed with her and Matty on the other side of them that I’d truly, horribly fucked up. If I was being honest with myself, I knew when the words came out of my mouth, when I was saying the things I’d said back at the rink before I’d gotten back on the ice and scooped up my son. I just hadn’t had the strength to stop them from hurting her.

But if she wasn’t capable of giving me the grace to fix the problem, then I’d begrudgingly meet her where she was. I’d go cold with her like she was with me. I’d leave it where it lay and let the problem either fizzle itself out or grow and rupture and explode.

If that’s what she wanted, that’s what she’d get.

But that didn’t stop me from waiting for the notification from the alarm system to tell me she’d left the main house to wander back downstairs and pour myself a double of whiskey. I carried the bottle up with my glass back to my room, shut off the lights, turned on an old episode of Survivor , and listened as Jeff Probst prattled on about the challenge rules while I stood in front of my window.

I sipped from the glass, and I watched, back turned to the television, as Nelly paced back and forth in her fully lit little living room, her phone clutched in her hand but her eyes anywhere and everywhere else. I watched as she picked up a throw pillow and shoved it against her face, watched as the air left her lungs in what I could only imagine was a dulled, frustrated scream.

I wanted to fix it. But she didn’t.

This was what she wanted.

————

“What are you doing?”

At six o’clock in the goddamn morning, with the sun just barely poking over the horizon, I stood on my front porch with a cup of black coffee in my hand and my head pounding, watching as Nelly uninstalled the car seat from the Porsche with less-than-precise movements.

Her ass stuck out from behind the wide-open car door, covered in a pair of tight black shorts and a loose shirt, her feet bare and her hair up in a loose bun. She nearly hit her head on the top of the car as she stood up straight, her gaze locking on mine in surprise.

“I’m…” She blinked at me, looking back and forth from my barely-awake form to the piece of the car seat in her hand. “I’m putting it in my truck.”

“No, you’re not,” I said.

“Try to stop me, then,” she grumbled. She set the cushion and plastic down on the cement. “I’m not driving your car anymore.”

“Then you might as well put it back.”

“No. I’m not taking him to school without him in a car seat,” she snapped.

“You’re right. You’re not taking him to school at all if you’re driving the truck.” I pulled my robe tighter around my body, the last of the uncharacteristically cool spring mornings doing just enough to make me chilly. It was far too early for this shit, and I was aching from the game and slightly hungover — if she thought for one second I was going to let this slide she was sorely mistaken.

She glared at me over the top of the door. “I have driven plenty of kids to school, daycare, doctor appointments, and birthday parties in that truck and never had a single problem.”

I took a sip of my coffee and held her gaze over the lip of my mug, anxious to pull my trump card. “When was the last time you took it to a shop?”

Her brows knit together as streaks of pink burst out across the sky. Matty would be up soon, but we still had another twenty to thirty minutes until we needed to worry about that — probably why she’d come out here so early. “Maybe a year and a half ago for an oil change.”

Jesus. A year and a half was far too long for that hunk of trash. “Did they mention anything about the lifter back then?”

“The what?”

Rolling my eyes, I stepped down off the porch, my bare feet meeting the cold cement of the little pathway between the steps and the driveway. “I took your truck to the shop a few weeks ago,” I said, picking up the hunk of cushion and plastic. “In the simplest terms possible, the thing that makes your engine work at all is rusted to shit, Penelope. You’re lucky it hasn’t broken already. It could give out at any second and blow your entire engine.”

She stood there, mouth hanging open, little lines sprouting at the very top of the bridge of her nose. “You’re lying.”

I pushed myself between her and the open back seat, shoving the car seat back into place on its base until it clicked into position. “I’m not. I’ve got the report inside. Your serpentine belt is fucked, too, if that makes a difference.”

“What the fuck? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you’ve been driving the Porsche,” I snapped.

“You took my truck all the way to a shop, had it checked up, and then didn’t even get it fixed ?”

I shot her a glare as I slammed the door of the Porsche shut. “It would cost more to fix than it’s worth.”

“So, I just don’t have a vehicle now?” she scoffed, her eyes flicking between me and the truck parked on the other side of the driveway.

“You have the Porsche.” I stepped around her and crossed the pathway back to the steps, careful not to spill a drop of my coffee as I climbed them.

“The Porsche isn’t mine, you fucking ass!” she shouted from behind me.

I whipped around too quickly, too angrily, spilling just a tad bit of coffee onto the top of my foot. “First of all, Penelope, do not test me at six in the goddamn morning,” I warned, narrowing my gaze at her from across the twenty-odd feet between us. “Second of all, unless you want the neighbors to complain again , I suggest not shouting at me outside this early.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off.

“Thirdly, and most fucking importantly, you could say thank you for the wildly expensive gift.”

Her eyes went wide as saucers in an instant. “What?”

“Close enough,” I grumbled, shoving the front door back open and going back inside. I didn’t have the patience for this, not after last night and her no , not after the game and the chaos with Bryan, not when I had a pounding hangover and my muscles ached, not when my knee was already starting to scream at me again.

I hadn’t wanted to give it to her like that. I’d wanted to make at least a small show of it, offer it as a thank you for her amenability and grace in handling the hiccups and roadblocks that my schedule had been lately, but that seemed pointless now. I was almost tempted to take it back, but I wouldn’t feel right without her having a car that was hers, and I certainly wasn’t about to let her onto the roads even by herself in that goddamn deathtrap she called a truck .

“Sebastian,” she hissed, right on my heels as she shut the door behind her. “You can’t be serious.”

I rolled my eyes and kept moving, heading right toward the stairs. At least I knew with a decent amount of certainty that she wouldn’t follow me up shouting at me — she knew better than to wake Matty. “I already put it in your name.”

“I can’t accept that.”

I didn’t bother to look at her as I started ascending the stairs. “Then don’t,” I snapped. “I’ll take Matty to school and you can walk to wherever you’re going today.”

————

Three days.

Three days of taking Matty to school and picking him up, three days of putting up with her stubborn pity party where she refused to drive the car. She was lucky that I had the time and ability to handle it myself, but I wouldn’t after today, and she knew that. She had to know that. If she’d looked at my schedule even once, she’d know that I had an away game tomorrow that meant I’d be out of town from the early afternoon until around two in the morning.

But she hadn’t said a word to me.

She was testing me, and I was losing my patience.

So, when Matty finally went down after a long day of school and hanging out with Nelly while I hit the rink for extra practice, I poured myself a single glass of whiskey to calm myself down and gather my thoughts while I mustered up the patience to trek across the lawn .

Every single interaction I’d had with Nelly over the last few days had been tense and quick and angry. I’d been distant with her as much as I could allow for, tried to keep things contained to the moments where Matty couldn’t hear, but it was horrible and grating and I was starting to lose my mind. I needed her to be civil with me.

And I was starting to need her in far more nefarious ways.

I was smart enough to know that it wasn’t good or safe or right to carry my frustrations into the bedroom with her, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t touched myself to the idea of shoving her down into the pillows and burying myself in her until she screamed my name over, and over, and over . It didn’t mean I hadn’t thought about painting her ass bright red and purple from slapping it, didn’t mean I didn’t crave the sound of her gagging around my cock.

Fuck. Even when I was angry with her, I couldn’t get enough.

I knocked back the rest of my whiskey and made sure that the little bit of blood pooling between my thighs wasn’t obvious through my pajama bottoms before I stepped through the glass sliding doors and walked across the stepping stones outside. I even gave a courtesy nod to Carl the House Goalie.

She saw me coming, though.

Relaxed on the couch with a mug of whipped cream in her hand and her feet up on the coffee table, I could see her through the glass doors of the guesthouse, her eyes locked on me despite the reflection of the glow of the television.

She hadn’t moved by the time I got to the door. Pushing aside my irritation at her reluctance to even get up and let me in, I tried it anyway — and it slid right open. She didn’t lock it ?

“You’re using your car tomorrow,” I said, throwing the keys into her lap as I shut the door behind me.

She picked them up and inspected them before letting out a disgruntled huff. “These aren’t my keys.”

Oh my God. I forced myself to take a steadying breath. “They are the same keys you have been using since you moved in.”

“Oh, you mean the keys to your car?”

My hands tightened into fists, and I shoved them into my pockets to keep them at bay. “Nelly, please. You know I have an away game tomorrow.”

She looked at me silently, the keys jangling in her hand as she lowered them. “I know.”

“I need to know that you can handle drop off and pick up tomorrow. And if you can’t… If you genuinely can’t, then I need to arrange for Dani to get him. And we’ll need to discuss this. All of this,” I swallowed.

Her gaze drifted down to the mug of whipped cream, her eyes focusing intently on it.

“Look at me,” I said, the words barely more than a breath. But she listened, and her head snapped right back up. “I need us to be civil enough to look after my son. Whatever that entails.”

Slowly, she lowered her feet from the coffee table and sat forward, setting her mug down. “I can’t accept the car, Sebastian.”

“I need you to.”

She sucked her teeth for a moment before she finally spoke again. “I can’t afford the payments on it or the insurance for it.”

“It’s already paid off, and I’m covering the insurance. You don’t need to worry about either of those,” I sighed, leaning back against the glass door and forcing my hands to unfist themselves. “Please just accept it.”

Scrubbing her face with her hands, she groaned again, and I tried not to react in a way that wasn’t appropriate for the situation. “It’s a whole car.”

“You told me to buy you one. Did you not? I didn’t even spend money on this, Nell, I’m giving you a spare .”

She glanced at me for a moment before she found something far more interesting in the whipped cream. “Fine,” she breathed. “I’ll take it.”

Thank God. “Great. So you can take him tomorrow?”

She nodded.

“And we can try to be civil, please?”

Again, she nodded.

“All right.” I pushed off the glass, hopeful that she’d say something, anything, now — hopeful she’d ask to talk about what happened, hopeful that she’d ask me to stay. Even with her acting like this, even with how much she’d stressed me out and hurt me with her frigidity these last few days, I still wanted things to be okay. I wanted her to be Nelly again.

Not whatever shell of a person this was.

And I knew that I’d created it. That was the worst part. I’d forced this to happen with what had gone down at the arena. But she’d shot down my attempt to apologize and right the wrong, and now we were here, stuck in limbo, stuck in this never-ending argument that felt like someone had dropped a goddamn ocean between us. I wasn’t sure what we’d been before, but it didn’t even feel like we were friends now.

I pulled on the door, sliding it open easily.

She still didn’t look at me.

“For what it’s worth, Nelly, I’d been planning to give it to you for weeks as a thank you for all you’ve done for me and Matty,” I said, watching as her thumb traced the side of the mug with the Survivor logo on the side of it. “I do appreciate it. All of it.”

Her mouth started to move, and all I wanted her to say was wait, or stop , or don’t go . But all that came out was the quietest, “Thank you.”