32. Seb
SEB
“If you’re bringing that, you have to sit in the back.” Asher narrowed his eyes at Tori’s hard-sided suitcase.
“We’ll switch off,” she demurred, flipping down the passenger seat and shoving her bag in with a grunt.
“Like hell.” Asher looked to Seb for backup, but he gazed through the car at the trees beyond.
“Blame Sebastian—he’s the one whose penile compensation purchased this exercise in impracticality.”
Seb smarted. “I did not. You know it was a gift. Besides, it has four seats and a trunk. Do you know how rare that is in this kind of car? I don’t see either of you offering to do seven hours of driving.”
“I might after sharing the backseat with Tori’s bag.”
Tori rolled her eyes. “You don’t even have your license.”
“We ready to go?” Asher diverted as Seb slung his weekender into the miniature trunk alongside Asher’s.
“Yeah…I guess.” Seb looked around. It felt wrong, leaving, or at least leaving like this. He hadn’t talked to Lily at all since Sunday—he’d texted once, something innocuous, gotten no response. Sunday. Every time he thought about it his jaw hurt.
He couldn’t stop replaying it, saw it etched into his ceiling instead of falling asleep.
Lily liked him. He’d had no idea, and now he’d probably ruined everything by bringing up the stupid dance.
Or maybe she didn’t like him, but thought he’d been asking—no, she wouldn’t have run away otherwise.
He’d beaten the possibilities to death in his head, stuck in the same ruts, overthinking, as usual.
What did it mean? Would she still work with him? Did she hate him now? He couldn’t bear the thought of losing everything they’d built over the last month because of the stupid dance, because of Gemma.
His mind ran in circles around every question except one, which it neatly avoided, moment after moment: would he have said “yes?”
“Seb?” He looked up. Asher leaned over the deep blue roof of the car, arms folded.
“Lily asked me to the dance,” Seb blurted, all the overthinking apparently having rendered him moronic.
Asher and Tori looked at each other. Tori raised an eyebrow. “And?”
“And I’m going with Gemma.”
“Too bad,” Tori said, pushing Asher toward the back seat. “Lily’s creepy. She would have made a great Mary Shelley.”
“She’s not creepy,” Seb said, a little too quickly, then, “Mary Shelley, either.”
“Not creepy,” Asher agreed, fussing as he folded his long limbs into the back seat. “Weird. Good weird.”
Seb slid behind the wheel, staring ahead, then started the car. He jolted to a stop several feet later.
“What the hell, Sebastian?”
“We need to make a detour.”
“Is this it?” Asher leaned forward to look at the Queen Anne on Fountain Avenue.
With its mix of brown shingle and mismatched burgundy siding, its weathered goldenrod trim and slate roof, it looked tired. It was probably drafty in the winter.
Tori, for reasons unknown, had been able to provide Lily’s address on this shaded street near the heart of downtown. Seb swallowed, his hands suddenly clammy. His roommates watched him silently as his indecision held them all in stasis.
“We’ve got to get going,” Tori said, not unkindly. “If you want to get in before rush hour.”
He wiped his hands on his pants and shoved open the door.
He’d thrown his coat in the back seat, and he wished he had another layer now, between her and his heartbeat.
As he walked up the cracked slate path, the way she’d looked in his arms when they’d danced—breathing hard, russet bangs stuck to her forehead, warm eyes wide and deep—superimposed itself over his vision.
He’d felt her heart thudding in his hands, through her ribs.
Sebastian scrubbed his face with his hand, adjusted his red-and-tan plaid scarf, and took the slightly tilted steps up to the porch two at a time.
This is a mistake.
Maybe she’s not home.
He rang the bell, watching for movement behind the lace-curtained window facing the porch.
Several long seconds dragged by, and then several more.
The door jerked open, and he looked down into Lily’s face, her shoulder-length hair pulled into a ponytail.
She sprang backward, slipping slightly in her sock feet at the sight of him.
“What are you doing here?” she said after finding her footing.
“You didn’t return my text.” Then, after a lack of acknowledgement, “I didn’t want to leave without talking to you, after—”
She stiffened. “We don’t need to talk about that.”
“No,” he agreed. “I just—I wanted to apologize, if I gave you the wrong idea.” It felt like the right thing to say, but he felt like an asshole as he said it.
“You didn’t.” He watched her swallow, his eyes moving to her collarbone, revealed by her sweatshirt, which she’d hacked into an off-the-shoulder thing. Even the way she slouched against the doorframe had a certain strange grace.
“I wanted to make sure you don’t hate me. That we’ll still be friends when I get back.”
“I don’t hate you,” she said quietly.
“Lily,” he said, surprising both of them. She met his gaze, finally. “Your friendship is too important to me to lose.”
She stood there, lips parted, mask nowhere to be seen, curse aura shadowing behind her. Even after so many hours spent together in such a short time, he had no idea what she was thinking most of the time.
“Say something,” he whispered, taken aback by the plea in his voice.
Her brow furrowed as she finally said, her voice impossibly soft, “You have to know I feel the same.”
Seb sighed then. He wanted to collapse against the doorframe, kiss her feet. Instead, he slid the ring off his finger and held it out to her.
“Will you hold onto this? There’s a non-zero chance I will lose it in a drunken stupor.”
“Sure.” She accepted it, then peered past him to the curb. “By the way, that car?” Lily raised an eyebrow. “It makes you look like an asshole.”
He grinned over his shoulder. “I know.”
They arrived in Québec City just as the angle of the sun made it impossible to see the car ahead of him in the glare.
After lunch, Asher had managed to muscle Tori into the backseat through a game of Rochambeau, and she had promptly fallen asleep, leaving Asher and Seb to talk in a way that they hadn’t had time for in forever.
Asher carefully sipped his flat white. Seb could tell from the shape of his silence that Asher was gearing up toward something.
“I like her,” he said quietly, so as not to wake Tori, though there was no risk of that. “Lily.” He glanced toward Seb.
“Me too.”
“She’s good for you.”
Seb risked looking over. The afternoon light poured gold through the tight coils of Asher’s high-top fade.
“She knows there’s more to life than Windermere.”
“I know there’s more to life than Windermere.”
“Not just Windermere—magic. Society.” Asher watched for his reaction. “She knows what the real world has to offer.”
“Our world is real.”
Asher gazed out the window. “Sometimes I wonder. We say the mundane world doesn’t matter, but we work so hard to blend in. We say it’s not a threat, but somehow her existence is a curse.”
Everything he loved most about the world was Magic. He tried to imagine a version of himself that wasn’t a Magician, that only studied English. Could he ever be satisfied with that?
“Would you have said ‘yes?’”
“What?” Seb’s palms were suddenly slick against the leather-wrapped wheel.
“If you weren’t going with Gemma, would you have gone to the dance with Lily?”
He was silent, his heart racing ahead past endless dotted yellow lines.
“Seb.” He looked at Asher, found him solid and real. He remembered that no one knew him the way Asher did—he knew nearly every one of Seb’s horrifying secrets. “I would have gone to NYU if my parents wouldn’t have disinherited me. You can be honest.”
He had to work to stop his voice from trembling. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I probably would.”