Page 66 of A Totally Platonic Thing
But underneath his signature, he’d added, “Please text me when you’re up and around so I know you’re okay.”
Sometime in the middle of the night, when I’d been so blacked out I couldn’t even form memories, Lucas had left his lab. He’d lost however many hours of work to drive downtown, pick me up, put me in bed, write this note, and get Sebastian to come over here and babysit my worthless ass.
And he’d still taken the time to ask me to check in—to make sureIwas okay. When had he slept last, if at all? Had he lost any chance of getting the job he wanted after he graduated? Or of even graduating? And he wanted to know if I was okay.
My knees went all wobbly, and my vision blurred…probably because my eyes were overflowing. A horrible keening sound came from somewhere. Me. I turned, desperate to get away from a reality without Lucas, and collapsed face-down on his bed, sobbing so hard my ribs ached and my face swelled up and every limb shook.
I didn’t know how long that phase of despair lasted. Maybe an hour. Who knows, because it didn’t matter. Lucas had left me, and it was my own fault, and I loved him, and he hated me.
Sebastian rubbed my shoulder and drank his coffee without saying a word.
I turned my face out of the blanket a little after a while. It was soaking wet. It still smelled like Lucas, though, and that thought brought on another spasm, ending with me choking and gasping and finally having to stop crying because I couldn’t breathe.
“What happened last night?”
Sebastian leaned down a little and gave my shoulder a rub. “What?”
I sniffled, wiped my nose on the blanket—Sebastian made a horrified face—and managed to ask the question again, more clearly.
Sebastian sighed, and then he told me. I’d gotten drunk at Aeon. Aidan had had to call Lucas. Lucas had come, and I’d flung myself on him and tried to make out with him. And then Lucas had called Aidan and told him more or less everything, including that we’d been together. Lucas had gone back to school to pull another all-nighter, and Sebastian had come over here, let himself in with his spare key, and checked on me throughout the night to make sure I was breathing and not choking on my own vomit or something.
Every word hit me like another slap to the face.
“So that’s what happened last night,” Sebastian said at last. “And now I’m going to tell you what happens now.”
“What happens now?” A horrible, miserable little laugh bubbled up, and I choked on it, hyperventilating into the bedding again. “Now nothing happens. Now I die alone because I couldn’t keep the one decent thing I ever managed to hang on to for five minutes. Because I’m too much of a fuck-up and I ruined Lucas’s life—”
“Shut up, Chris!”
I looked up at that, startled out of my misery for a second. Sebastian almost never raised his voice. In fact, the last time he’d yelled at me I’d been at his house accusing Aidan of being a creepy kidnapper who needed to be arrested again for victimizing Sebastian.
That’d gone really, really poorly, and he’d ripped me seven kinds of new ones.
And by the furious glitter in his blue eyes, it looked like he was about to do it again.
“Pity party, table of one. Knock it off. What you do now is you get up, and you take a shower, and you go to your afternoon class. And then after that, you drag your sorry self to Student Health and make an appointment with a counselor. Oh, I forgot the part where we’re going to pack up all the stuff you need for right now first and take it to my place on our way to school. You can stay with us for a while. Lucas shouldn’t have to sleep on someone’s couch because of this.”
I swallowed hard, sniffled, and choked again, staring wide-eyed at this stern bastard who’d somehow taken the place of my best friend.
“I so can’t go to class today.”
Sebastian stood up, took his cup to the island, and slammed it down. “Yes, you so can, and you’re going to. Now get up. Seriously. You don’t even want to know what I’m going to do to you if you don’t.”
I really didn’t want to know, he was right about that. Although what could he possibly do to me that would be worse than what I’d already done to myself?
“Lucas isn’t going to forgive me. He’ll never want to see me again. I don’t know if I—it’s not worth it. I don’t even care if I graduate if Lucas isn’t there.”
And in that moment, I truly didn’t. What did any of it matter without the one person who made it all worthwhile?
Sebastian set his fists on his hips and glared at me. I quailed back into the blankets a little bit. Aidan called this look “Sebastian on the warpath,” and he ducked for cover when he saw Sebastian coming in this mood, even though Aidan was twice his size.
“Lucas isn’t going to forgive you. Uh-huh. Okay, let’s start with that bullshit. First of all, I’m getting married to someone who spentfour yearsin prison because he rescued me from an internet predator and let me sleep on his floor. He forgave me for that, okay? Even though I didn’t think I deserved it.”
“But—”
“Next,” he said, more loudly. “Lucas forgiving you has nothing to do with you graduating. That’s about you! And if you think Lucas is leaving you because he’s upset about himself, then maybe you don’t know him that well. He’s upset because you’re fucking up your own life and he can’t stop you or help you. He’s putting on his own lifejacket first, Chris.”
Sebastian shot me one more deadly glare and whirled away, taking his coffee cup back to the machine and pouring himself seconds with unnecessary force and vigor.
