Page 28 of Late Nights & Love Lines
“Then wh?—”
Ping.
Did he? That asshole hung up on me.
“Rowan?” A little voice breaks through the torrent of words and memories swirling in my mind. I spin to find Miles standing in front of me holding an umbrella. He’s on his tiptoes trying to share his shelter.
“Miles? What are you doing out here?” My surroundings come rushing back as if time had forgotten to move and now it’s speeding up to fit in all that it’s missed. How long have I beenstanding outside of the house in the rain? Nothing’s penetrated my armor since I first put it on. Nothing but Sebastian, and that’s a huge problem.
“I saw you standing in the rain. I don’t want you to get sick. Come inside before you get sick, please.” The worry in his voice makes my body tremble.
“Oh, right. Let’s go.” I usher him toward the porch. “Sorry, buddy. I was on the phone and then got lost in a daydream.”
He smiles shyly. “I like to daydream.”
“Oh yeah?” I ask while shaking out his umbrella under the cover of the front porch.
“Yeah, in daydreams things can be however you want them to be. You don’t have to feel any sort of way but happy.”
Suddenly I hear a ticking in my soul—a time bomb waiting to go off. I haven’t learned what the triggers are yet so I have no idea when it will explode—but I know with certainty that it will.
7
LIQUID LAXATIVES ARE NOT ALLOWED
SEBASTIAN
“You’re pretty anxious to get back to Sailport Bay,” Alexei says with a teasing lilt that grates as we head from the airport back to the beach house.
“I’m excited to see my kids.” I ignore his prodding by keeping my face pointed toward the passenger side window. “I haven’t been away from them since their world imploded.”
“Of course. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the nanny I heard you verbally sparring with last night.”
My glare cuts to him, and the temperature in the SUV rises to scorching levels. At least he has the good sense to keep his eyes on the road, though that doesn’t stop his lips from twitching and curling into a smirk I want to wipe away with the back of my hand.
“That’s not how it is. Rowan and I, we have a weird history. I knew her when I was a twelve-year-old kid, for fuck’s sake.”
“And as a fifteen-year-old lovesick puppy,” he reminds me.
I’d forgotten he was working at camp with me that summer. He witnessed the same things I did.
“I remember how distraught you were when she was taken away from camp,” he presses.
“She was thirteen, Alexei. I’d known her for five summers, and there was something about her as a little girl that made me protective of her, but it was never anything more than that. She was my friend.”
I won’t tell him how I panicked when she didn’t return the next summer, or the one after that. I don’t tell him that I worked that camp every summer until my father put a stop to it because I’d hoped she’d return. And I definitely don’t tell him that the only thing that kept me from finding out where she lived to make sure she was safe was that Pappy told me she was writing to him, so I let it go. At that point, I was eighteen years old. I had no business worrying about some kid I knew for a few summers, no matter how intense our connection had always seemed.
“Jesus, Seb. I didn’t say you were inappropriate with her, but you can’t deny that she’s always had an effect on you.”
I fiddle with the AC because the air in here is stifling. “I never saw her again, Alex. I think it’s safe to say I wasn’t the only one concerned for her safety after witnessing how that asshole manhandled her, shouting about repenting for her sins.”
It was the first time I’d seen an adult actively destroying innocence just because he could.
Alexei tilts his head in silent agreement. “And what’s it like seeing her again now?”
My pulse accelerates as I roll his question around in my mind. The truth is, I haven’t had time to process my reactions to her—my old friend. That pull, the string that kept me checking on her day after day is still there, but now it’s edged with heartache, trauma, and enough sexual tension to light up the entire sky—it has claws and barbed wire and strikes to kill.
“Different,” is the word I settle on to answer his question. It is different. I’d always worried about the little girl from summer camp. In my mind, she never aged, she stayed that sad little girl.But now, she’s a sad, beautiful woman who chooses to live her life in temporary situations.
