34. Sebastian

Chapter 34

Sebastian

I ’d kept my head for the entirety of practice.

I’d kept my head when Coach rattled on about how Bryan and I would swap off at the game on Saturday.

I’d kept my head as we got off the ice, kept my head as we cleaned up and showered, kept my head as we walked out of the arena.

But the moment my shoes hit the tarmac of the parking lot, I didn’t need to hold back anymore.

“Bryan!” I shouted, and he paused with the door of his car open, his back to me. “Don’t you dare fucking leave without talking to me.”

Slowly, he turned, his head cocked to one side as I crossed the pavement toward him. “Doesn’t look like you want to talk, Bluesy.”

“Seb,” Luke called, the worry evident in his voice. I ignored him.

“No,” I laughed, coming up between the two cars he stood between. “I don’t.”

My hand darted out, grabbing a fistful of his shirt and pulling him to me. He stumbled forward, his eyes widening for a split second before narrowing into a smug little glare that ignited every bit of fire burning inside of me. “What’s this about?” he asked, so nonchalant it was obscene. His hand reached out, pushing against my arm and dislodging it from him. “You mad I’m a better right wing than you?”

“Don’t play dumb,” I snapped. My pulse roared in my ears, my fists clenching so tightly that my knuckles ached. “You know exactly what this is about.”

The smirk he bore deepened, so infuriatingly casual. “Oh, you mean the thing with Nelly?” He brushed his shirt flat with his hand as if I’d somehow dirtied it. “What, I can’t talk to her now? I didn’t realize you owned her.”

His words hit me like a punch in the chest, like gasoline on an open flame. “Talk to her?” I hissed, taking a step closer to him. “Is that what you call touching her when she clearly wasn’t okay with it? In front of my fucking son ? She didn’t want that. You knew that.”

Bryan laughed, low and sharp and angering, and shook his head. “God, you’re such a boy scout. She’s fine. Women like a little passion, Bluesy. You’d know that if you weren’t such a?—”

I didn’t let him finish.

My fist connected with his jaw so quickly that it even shocked me , swift and angry and strong , and he staggered back, slamming against the doorframe of his car. His eyes went wide with surprise, then turned into something wilder, darker, that I hadn’t quite expected.

“You fucked up, Bluesy,” he growled, straightening up.

And he lunged.

His shoulder caught me in the chest, knocking me back a couple of steps from the surprise blow of it, but it didn’t matter — the tension here had been building for months, and it had finally snapped. I pushed forward, locking both hands on his shoulders, and shoved him hard, slamming him against the side of his car.

“You don’t touch her,” I barked, my voice barely under control as it cracked under the strain of it. “Not her, not anyone . Do you understand, Addaway?”

Bryan swung for me immediately, his fist grazing my shoulder as I ducked out of the way. The parking lot around us seemed to blur, the shouts from Luke and a handful of others ringing out, but I barely heard them, barely registered a single word. All I could see was Bryan’s face in front of me, that smug, self-satisfied smirk that had pushed me too far for the last time — and in my mind, all I could see was Nelly, crying in the kitchen with her head tucked into my chest because I hadn’t fucking been there to stop him.

This wasn’t a game. This wasn’t hockey. This was me making sure he understood, once and for all, that he’d crossed a line he’d never be able to cross again.

But he came at me again, faster this time, his fist swinging wide. I ducked low again and drove my shoulder into his stomach, slamming him back against the car once more, the metal groaning under the impact.

“Get off me, you fucking psycho,” Bryan seethed, his hands shoving at my shoulders wildly. He spat somewhere off to my right, a hint of blood tinging the edge of his mouth, and just as I was caught off guard by it enough, his knee jammed against my right one, igniting the ache from the scar tissue.

That rattled me. I wasn’t prepared to block out the pain of it.

He shoved me back hard, finally breaking my stance on him. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Bluesy?”

He swung again, and I wasn’t ready. His fist collided with my cheek, a sharp burst of pain sprouting instantly and sending little shockwaves across my head and shooting stars through my vision. I stumbled back, my legs and rear walking straight into the car behind me, but I found my footing. I surged forward again, slamming my forearm and elbow into his chest to pin him to his car.

“You don’t get it, do you?” I rasped, my breaths and throat ragged. “You’ve fucked up. You’re lucky she didn’t call the fucking police and get a restraining order on you. You’re done, Bryan. With her, with me, and with this goddamn team if I have any say in it.”

“Big words,” he laughed, his hands fumbling to grip my arm and get it off him. “You think you’re so righteous, Bluesy? You think you’re her fucking hero? Maybe you should have been there.”

He laughed. He knew, he knew his words hit a nerve. He wanted to rile me up, wanted to make me lose control completely — he wanted to push every button he could in the hopes it would get me kicked off the team. I couldn’t give him the satisfaction. “Say whatever you want,” I shot back. “It doesn’t change what you did. It doesn’t change this.”

I dug my fingers into his shirt again and pulled him toward me just enough to shove him to my left, sending him sprawling out onto the pavement. He landed square on his back with a loud grunt, his hands splayed out on either side in an attempt to catch himself. For a moment, he just lay there, chest heaving as he stared up at me.

“Enough!” Luke’s voice finally cut through the haze, and I turned my head. He rushed toward us, his eyes wide with a mix of panic and frustration coating his features. “Seb, stop!”

Bryan coughed once, propping himself up on one elbow. His gaze met mine, a twisted, bloodied grin spreading across his cheeks. “You fucking idiot.”

I stepped forward, fists clenched, but Luke’s body reached mine too quickly. He grabbed my arm, pulling me back. “Don’t,” Luke warned, a deepness in his voice that I wasn’t used to. “He’s not worth it, man.”

Bryan laughed and wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, pushing himself until he was sitting fully upright. “Listen to your little babysitter, Bluesy. He’s right.”

I glared at him as he picked himself up off the tarmac, my chest heaving, and for a second, I considered lunging at him again. But Luke’s grip tightened, pulling me, and I forced myself to take a step back from him. “You go near her again, and I swear to God, Addaway, I will finish this,” I seethed.

Bryan scoffed as he brushed loose gravel from himself. “Whatever. You’re all bark. We’ll see.” He yanked his car door open and climbed in before I could consider breaking free from Luke, his engine roaring to life a second later.

I stood there, fists still clenched, adrenaline coursing through every inch of my body, staring — watching as his car disappeared out the exit. I waited and waited, and waited until I didn’t have the patience anymore. I let out a shaky breath and leaned against the car behind me as Luke finally let go of my arm.

“Seriously, Seb?” he mumbled, his head shaking as he looked from me to the empty exit. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

I swallowed. “I wasn’t,” I admitted, running a hand through my hair. My cheek and eye throbbed, my knuckles sore, my head spinning — but fuck, it didn’t matter. None of this mattered. But I’d gotten a hint of my anger about the Nelly situation out, and I’d made it clear that his actions had fucking consequences.

Maybe it was a white-knight move. Maybe it was stupid. But I didn’t care.

————

I’d stared at myself for five straight minutes in the rearview mirror of my Audi before finally getting the nerve to walk into the house. A jagged cut that I hadn’t even felt had opened up beneath my eye, and dried blood and dirt were stuck to the side of my cheek. The area around my eye socket had deepened in color drastically, and by the end of the evening, I was positive I’d have a full-on black eye.

I didn’t want Nelly to see it. But more importantly, I didn’t want Matty to see it and question me about it.

But I couldn’t avoid that forever. I had to deal with this, and it was better to get it out of the way now.

I opened the front door, the sound of cartoons filtering into the half-lit foyer. The sun was moments away from setting, so if I could just avoid Matty seeing the left side of my face for an hour, I could get away with it for tonight.

Nelly, though, was unavoidable.

She clocked me as she stepped out of the living room.

“Seb?” she said, her eyes narrowing on the left side of my face as I set my bag down. “Oh my God.”

Her footsteps echoed as she rushed toward me. She’d been distant again the last couple of days, and the change of pace was almost a relief — a part of me wanted to thank Bryan for giving her a reason to want to speak to me. “Please don’t freak out,” I muttered.

Wide eyes darted between mine and the damage. She stood there, one foot from me, in her tight shorts and oversized shirt, her hair up in a messy bun. Her mouth parted, her brow furrowing in worry, and I just wanted to kiss her, just wanted to hold her, just wanted to tell her what had happened and tell her I was sorry and that I just needed us to go back to normal — I couldn’t take this distance from her. Not again.

“I don’t want Matty to see,” I rasped. “At least not like this. Can you distract him while I clean up?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she sighed. She took a few steps to the opening of the living room, poking her head around the corner. “Matty, your dad and I need to talk upstairs for a few. Are you okay to watch cartoons on your own?”

“Daddy’s home?” Matty’s voice carried excitedly through the foyer, and my heart lurched, wanting to go to him, wanting to scoop him up in my arms and hug him. But I didn’t want to upset him, either.

“He is , but we just need to take care of something real quick and then you can say hi, okay?” Nelly said, glancing back at me with worry deepening in her expression.

“Okay,” Matty bleated.

She walked back to me, one hand extended, and wrapped her fingertips around my wrist. “Come on,” she said.

I walked up the stairs with her in almost shameful silence. She didn’t look back at me as she led me to my bedroom, deposited me on the bed without a word, and stepped into the bathroom.

Drawers opened and closed, the faucet turned on and off, paper ripped, caps unturned .

By the time she’d come back through, the pain in my knee and my face was gnawing at me far more uncomfortably than it had before. “Take these,” she said softly, passing me a couple of the pills I took for my knee pain and a small cup of water.

I downed them.

“What the fuck happened, Seb?” she asked, her gaze meeting mine briefly as she lifted a warm, damp washcloth to my cheek.

I hissed from the pain the moment she started to flake away the dried blood. “I, uh, got into a fight with Bryan,” I muttered, swallowing down the discomfort the moment the washcloth touched the wound.

“Fuck’s sake,” she sighed. “Please don’t tell me his skate did this.”

“No,” I said. “His fist. We were in the parking lot.”

Her mouth formed into a straight line. “That explains why you didn’t go see Zoe for this.”

No. Please. Not again. I caught her by the wrist, stopping her before she could touch the wound again with the white and bloodied cloth. “Nell,” I rasped. “Please. I told you, there is nothing going on there.”

Her gaze flicked away from me, but she didn’t say a word.

“I need you to believe me,” I said, tightening my grip on her wrist to try to get her attention back. “Tell me what I can do to prove that to you. I don’t want you hurting over this.”

Her eyes went glassy, fogging over with tears as she lifted her gaze to the ceiling to try to stop them. “Seb…”

“Please,” I breathed. I reached out to her with my other hand, grasping her gently by the waist and pulling her just a little bit closer. “I’ll do whatever you need me to do. What can I do to show you that it was nothing?”

She swallowed. “I don’t know.”

“If I was sleeping with her behind your back, baby, I wouldn’t have spent that time chatting with her in front of you,” I said, pulling her a little closer, dragging her knees to the edge of the bed. “I wouldn’t have made up something so easily refutable by saying she’s employed by the team. I wouldn’t have gotten into a fucking fight with Bryan over what he did to you.”

“That’s what this was about?” she asked, her voice full power, her head snapping back into place to look at me. There was something there, something unreadable behind her eyes.

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“I don’t want you to get into fights over me,” she said, dropping the damp down into my lap and slipping from my grasp.

“Wait. Nell?—”

“You don’t understand,” she snapped, passing me the band-aid she’d procured from somewhere in my bathroom, along with a couple of damp cotton balls that smelled heavily of peroxide. “You don’t fucking get it, and that’s fine. Do this yourself.”

“Help me understand, then,” I insisted, pushing myself up off the bed and abandoning the first-aid tools she’d given me. I reached for her retreating frame again, desperate to deal with this, desperate to put it to bed. “ Please , I need you to fucking talk to me about this. I need you to not shut down. I know that’s easier, but you’re just hurting us both.”

“I don’t know how!” She spun on her heel, the tears breaking free and splitting down her cheeks. “It’s not that it’s easier , Sebastian, it’s just the only thing I know how to fucking do. Shit gets hard, I shut down. I can’t control that. I learned that from five years of shit being hard. That’s not something I can turn off overnight for someone I apparently can’t even trust.”

My chest tightened as if she was Bryan, an hour ago, shoving his shoulder into my sternum. Her words stung, but it was the way her voice cracked, it was the way her tears fell, that hurt even more. “Nelly,” I said softly, stepping a little closer, my hands raised in surrender. “You can trust me. I don’t know how to convince you of that, but I swear on Matty’s goddamn life, I didn’t do anything with Zoe. I would never?—”

Her hand rose between us like a fucking brick wall was being erected. “Don’t say that. Don’t tell me you’d never hurt me, or that I should just believe you, or that this is different. It’s exactly what he did. And you know what? It was all lies. All of it.”

“I’m not him,” I pleaded, my voice cracking from the frustration I couldn’t hold back. “I’ve never been him. It breaks my goddamn heart that he did that to you, that anyone could do that to you, and I’m so sorry that you had to go through that, but that’s not who I am.”

“I don’t know that,” she croaked. “How am I supposed to know that? How am I supposed to blindly believe that?”

“I can’t—” I cut myself off, dragging a hand down my face, exasperation boiling in my gut and under my skin. “I can’t fix any of this if you won’t let me. You’re putting roadblocks down again. You’re making me fight a ghost, baby, making me fight someone else’s mistakes, someone else’s lies. I’m not the one who did that to you.”

“You think I don’t know that?” she choked, pressing her palms into her eyes and smearing away the tears. “Even if you didn’t do it, it doesn’t mean that you won’t, that you can’t . It doesn’t mean I can just… I don’t know, shut off the fucking voice in my head telling me I’ll never be enough for you, for anyone, because of him . I feel like I’m going crazy, Seb, I don’t know what happened and what didn’t anymore. How am I supposed to believe you when I don’t even know how to believe myself?”

How am I supposed to love you when I don’t even know how to love myself?

The words hit me like a fucking freight train. I struggled for a moment to get my bearings, to remember that I was here, in my room, a five-year-old downstairs instead of a one-year-old, Nelly in front of me instead of Taryn. I knew she didn’t mean to say something so close to what Taryn had thrown at me before she left, but it still felt like whiplash, still felt like I was thrown back into the fucking River Styx and left to claw my way out again.

I swallowed down the weight of it, forcing myself to breathe, to push through it. I took another step toward her, shaky but steady-footed, and reached for her — but she flinched back.

“Don’t,” she said, her voice trembling, her fire and frustration burning out like embers. “I can’t do this right now. I… I need to go back to the guesthouse. Can you handle bedtime?”

“ Nelly ,” I begged, my voice barely above a whisper. “Please don’t walk away from this.”

But she was already turning, already stepping toward the door, already leaving me behind. “I saw what I did to you. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize until after I said it.”

“It’s okay, just stay?—”

She slipped from the room, the door clicking shut behind her, leaving me standing there with nothing but the fucking Band-Aid and peroxide-soaked cotton balls and the silence .

————

“What the fuck do I do?”

“I really don’t know why you’re asking me for advice after the shit you pulled today,” Luke huffed, his voice barely cutting through the background noise filtering in through the phone. He was at Smokey’s, and it was loud — our main rivals were playing tonight, and the bar was filled with Atlanta Fire fans hoping they’d lose and drop out of the playoffs. “Isn’t your sister a therapist? Why don’t you ask her?”

“I did,” I grunted, readjusting the icepack on my face as I stood in the kitchen, staring out the little window above the sink to the guesthouse that Carl the House Goalie guarded as if his non-existent life depended on it. “She just told me I needed to tell her exactly how I was feeling and it would somehow magically solve all my problems.”

“What kind of feelings? Anger? Irritation? Frustration?” Luke laughed.

“No, the nicer ones,” I sighed, a little chuckle breaking free. “I don’t know, man. I don’t want to say it, but you know what I mean.”

“Oooh, that one,” he teased. “I mean, you could do something big. Literally every woman I’ve been with loves some kind of big, heartfelt confession, you know? Maybe that would be enough to get her to calm down.”

“Something big ?” I grunted, flinching as the bag of ice moved and poked me in the most bruised spot on my face. “Like what?”

“That’s for you to figure out, not me,” he laughed. “You know her better than I do. One girl I dated really liked flash mobs, like, to a weird degree, so I orchestrated one of those and she went wild for it. But Nelly doesn’t seem like a flash mob kind of person.”

“Nelly is absolutely not a flash mob person.”

“Then you’re on your own with this, Bluesy.”