Page 20 of Born Chaos

“Can I take you out after our shift?” Sebastian asks. His eyes lift to mine, and I see the vulnerability in them. “I have a lot of making up and groveling to do. And you and I could desperately use some alone time.”

A small smile pulls in the corners of my mouth as I look up at him. I loop my arms behind his head, his hands wrapping around my waist. “I think that sounds perfect,” I say softly, as I touch my forehead to his.

It’seight in the morning, but that doesn’t stop Sebastian from finding a fancy restaurant for us to go out to for breakfast. It’s modern and sleek, and the prices of the food would have made me gasp a year ago. One meal costs what would have been a week’s worth of food back then.

It’s weird having your financial status change so quickly.

“Tell me about your kids,” I ask once our food has been brought to the table.

Sebastian stills instantly, his eyes slowly rising from his plate to meet my eyes. He studies me for a moment, as if trying to figure out my motivation for asking about his children who died so tragically in a fire.

I need to humanize my fiancé again. It’s easy to see people as monsters. In a way, we’re all monsters. But when we’ve just been through something so hard, I need to remind myself why we work together so well. We both come from shit circumstances.

“Um, Johnathan was so quiet when he was born, the doctors were worried,” Sebastian says. The words come out thick, tight. “But he was perfectly healthy and made up for it throughout the rest of his life. The boy never knew what it meant to stay quiet.”

I take a drink from my glass, listening intently.

“He liked to talk about the things he learned,” Sebastian continues. “If he learned something new at school, he’d explain nearly everything, word for word, how his teacher had. He had a curious mind.”

Had.

Shit.

The boy died when he was sixteen.

“And he was so girl crazy toward the end,” Sebastian says with a pained chuckle. “There was this one particular girl in his class he was obsessed with. He was always asking for pointers on how to get her attention.”

“I assume you had all the advice to give?” I tease. “I thought you were a player when I first met you.”

It’s nice when Sebastian chuckles and shakes his head. “Which is ironic since I’ve been celibate for nearly a century. I’ve dated exactly two women in the last century, and neither lasted more than two months.”

I smile as I rest my chin in my hand, elbow on the table.

Neither of us is good at relationships. We’ve both been damaged too much for most people to handle. I need to remember that.

“And June was a quiet little girl,” Sebastian continues. “She was always drawing. She didn’t always know what to say, and could rarely tell you how she was feeling, but it always came out in her art. She was exceptionally talented. And she was far too beautiful for her own good. Not that she realized it. All the boys at school lingered around her, but she barely noticed anyone in the real world. Unless she was using you as a model for a drawing, you didn’t really exist.”

“Did she look more like you or her mother?” I ask.

“She was a definite clone of her mother,” Sebastian chuckles. “Johnathan was more of a mix of the two of us.”

I smile, taking another bite of my food. Mason and I talked about it once, very briefly. If either of us wanted to have kids. For Mason, it was a definite yes. For me, it was a big huge ‘I don’t know’. This was back before I Resurrected, before it was an absolute impossibility.

“If we could, would you want to have more kids?” I ask before I give myself permission to. “I mean, I know I can’t, but if we could, would you want to?”

Sebastian places his elbows on the table, interlacing his fingers together. His brows furrow, falling into deep thought. He doesn’t answer immediately. And that makes me kind of relieved. Because I’m not totally sure I have an answer either.

“I don’t know that I can give a certain answer, since it’s not actually a possibility,” he begins. “But… I don’t think so. The more people you care about, the more opportunities for heartache. I don’t think I’d survive that kind of pain again.”

And there it is. One of the reasons why I fell in love with this man. His hurt. His pain. The agony that I understand, in my own way. I can’t stand to see his pain.

“You?” he asks simply as his eyes rise to meet mine.

I take in a deep breath. “I don’t know one-hundred percent for sure either. But when I really think about it, I don’t know that I’d be a very good mom. I never had one. Never had any good examples. I think I’d be too scared that I’d screw up.”

Sebastian reaches across the table, laying his hand over mine. “I mean it when I say it, Juliet. I will be happy with it being just the two of us, for the rest of our lives.”

My chest warms.

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