Page 21 of I Would Stay Forever
“Shut up and eat your food,” Imogen said, and we all laughed again.
It was amazing how easy it was to fall back into this routine as if nothing had changed since the last time we’d had one of these parties. Maybe it was because this was something only the four of us shared, not something that Dad ever had any part in. Whatever the cause, I was happy to laugh with my siblings again.
Four hours later and the TV was still droning on in the background, though we’d turned the volume down until it was almost inaudible. I was stretched out on my back, watching the screen but not following the storyline of the thirdJurassic Parkfilm at all. Sebastian was on the other side of the black leather couch, his legs tangled up with mine, while Ainsley and Imogen sat together on the other couch, leaning on each other completely as they both slept. I grabbed a handful of Starbursts from the bag between Sebastian and me, though I only ate one before I felt too tired to keep chewing.
“Hey, Lovey?” Sebastian mumbled. I stilled, the simple word like a bullet to my heart.Lovey. That was my dad’s nickname for me. Sure, everyone had used it when I was a kid, but Dad was the only one who still regularly called me by it even thoughI was almost seventeen, and hearing it from Sebastian made me feel like I was being transported back in time. Thrown back to July 28, sitting in the car with Dad as he called me that after we pulled into the driveway—just moments away from him tearing our family apart.
I swallowed thickly and managed to croak out, “Yeah?”
“Where do you think Dad is now?”
For a moment, I thought I misheard him. I thought I’d been so caught up in my own thoughts of Dad that I just told myself Sebastian was thinking about him too. But when I asked him to repeat the question, he said the same thing again.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly, but my voice betrayed the hurt in me. I wish that we didn’t need to have this conversation. I wished I could go back to two months ago when divorce wasn’t even something on my radar. I wished I could undo the feeling that this was somehow my fault when it was Dad who had cheated.
“I hope he’s miserable,” Sebastian said. The words were said so matter-of-factly that they took me by surprise and I couldn’t even utter a response. Sebastian didn’t seem to notice as he kept talking. “I hope he regrets abandoning his family every damn day.”
They were the words I hadn’t let myself think over the past month. Mum had always taught us to hold love in our heart and to never wish ill upon anyone, but how was I supposed to forgive this? In a way, it made me feel better that Sebastian felt the same. It eased the guilt that had been holding my heart in a vice grip.
“Is this why you’re so sure you’ll never get back together with Tiffany?” I asked. They were words I would never say aloud normally, but there was something about his confession that made me feel like I could say it. That mixed with laying in the dark, facing the TV instead of him, made me feel brave enough tocontinue. “Now that you’ve seen how the affair ruined Mum and Dad’s marriage, you can’t forgive Tiffany again?”
Sebastian was silent for a long time. Long enough that I grew restless and propped myself up on my elbows to check if he was still awake. He was lying on his back, his open eyes trained on the ceiling. He didn’t seem to notice my movement, so I slowly lowered myself back down and just waited for his response. Maybe I’d completely misjudged the situation. Maybe this wouldn’t be the final breakup despite his insistence that it would be, or maybe his feelings on it were entirely unrelated to Dad. But his silence made me think that I’d hit close to home.
“Did you ever get the sense that they weren’t happy?” Sebastian asked. I’d been expecting him to say something about Tiffany, so it took me a second to understand that he was talking about Mum and Dad. I guess he’d made the same assumption that I had about Dad’s affair being ongoing. Or maybe Dad had confirmed it when he’d confessed what was happening, since I still didn’t know what happened during that conversation.
I’d wondered about it a few times—had he just walked in and announced that he was having an affair? Or had he started by telling my siblings to leave and they’d caught the context as they left? I knew I could ask since it seemed like all three of them had been in the room with how they walked out together, but it felt wrong to do so. It felt wrong to dig into their pain just to assuage my own curiosity. It wasn’t like any of them had asked me what happened that night in the alleyway. They didn’t ask what had caused Dad to suddenly decide to confess or why I’d been in the car with him.
“They didn’t fight much,” I said in response to Sebastian’s question. I tried to dig back in my memory, looking over all my memories of our parents, now colored by the knowledge that Dad was having an affair. Nothing stuck out to me, but that made me strangely more confused. There should have been asign, right? I wondered if there was something Sebastian had noticed and that was why he was asking, or if it was because he’d been as blindsided by it as I’d been. “Why? Do you think they weren’t happy?”
“I’m sure they weren’t,” he said flatly. “You don’t cheat on someone if you’re happy with them.”
Like his words about Dad earlier, he spoke about it so casually that it took me by surprise. Maybe that was a side effect of being cheated on so much that it becomes just a part of your life, as mundane as the weather. The idea of Sebastian being so hurt and jaded at only seventeen years old broke my heart. I’d never liked Tiffany or how she treated my brother, but I’d always held back on my criticisms of her because I knew the two of them would come back together. Now, I had to wonder if I was hurting him by not telling him my real thoughts. Was it possible that he didn’t see how bad she was for him? That he just needed somebody else to say it and we’d all been holding back out of a misplaced sense of respect for his relationship?
“Hey,” I said softly. I nudged my foot into the back of his leg and he grunted like he was indicating that he heard me. I swallowed, feeling a little nervous for what I was about to say, but knowing that it was now or never. I would likely never get an opportunity like this again and even if I did, I wasn’t sure that I’d ever have the guts to say it if I didn’t now. I took a deep breath. “Don’t get back together with Tiffany.”
He was silent for a long time again. Finally, he said, “I told you I wasn’t going to.”
“You say that every time but you always go back to her. But going back to her now would be like Mum going back to Dad.” He inhaled sharply and I wondered if the words had been too callous. But I was too far in now, so I just kept going. “She’s not good for you, Seb, and we all know it. I thought I was being a good sister by staying quiet because I thought you lovedeach other, but… Well, if you really think you don’t cheat on somebody you love, then you know she doesn’t love you. And do you really want to be with a girl like that?”
My voice became choked up at the end and I was embarrassed to feel the pinprick of tears behind my eyes. Before Dad, I wouldn’t have gotten so emotional over this. I’d seen Tiffany and Sebastian get together and break up so many times that it made my head spin. I’d always wanted better for him, but I’d never cried over it.
Not until I realized how deep a betrayal like that could cut.
I saw it in Mum and the way she cried when she thought we weren’t looking. I saw it in Ainsley and Imogen, who tried to act like they didn’t care but could only hold up their brave faces for so long. And now that I knew what it looked like, I saw it in Sebastian. In the defeated look in his eyes and the slump in his shoulders and the way that he never seemed happier when Tiffany was around.
I couldn’t save Mum from getting hurt, but maybe I could save Sebastian. Maybe that was the good that could come out of this horrifically unfair situation.
Sebastian didn’t respond verbally but he moved. At first, I thought he was just pulling away from me, maybe getting up to leave. But then I realized he wasn’t walking away, he was moving so he could lay down next to me instead of being on the opposite side of the couch. There’d been a time that we watched every film this way, squished up together on one pillow. The last time we’d done that, I must have only been six or seven years old, years before we’d even moved to Canada. The couches seemed bigger then, but I guess it was just us that had been smaller. It was a tight fit now, with him needing to lay on his side, pressed up against the back of the couch while half my body was hanging off the side. But after five weeks of wondering if he and I would ever go back to normal, it was everything to me.
“Thank you for watching out for me, Lovey,” he said. I expected the pang of hurt that accompanied the nickname, but this time, it didn’t hit quite as hard.
“Does that mean you won’t go back to her?” I asked. My voice sounded small and timid. Like a little kid, still full of hope and innocence. Sebastian kissed me lightly on top of my head, like he used to do every night before bed.
“Yes,” he whispered. “I’ll never go back to her.”
There had been a million times before that he’d said they were over for good, but it was the first time I’d ever believed him.
thirteen
