Chapter 5 #5
Something else for Sebastian to use to keep his distance.
He breathed a silent sigh of relief as Sebastian closed the door to his office and cut out all the background noise.
Sebastian didn’t sit, instead moving over to a cupboard.
He opened it, pulling out a shirt from a row of them.
Quinn knew what it meant that he had spares—it didn’t take a genius to know that Sebastian worked too many hours.
No one had the kind of success rate he did without putting in the hard work.
He'd come a long way from who he'd been at twenty-two.
Quinn had steadily watched him grow colder and colder every year as he leaned into a persona that Quinn knew wasn't him. He'd been helpless to do anything, relegated to the sidelines with no one but himself to blame.
Sebastian awkwardly tugged the shirt up and over his injured arm. Quinn strode across the room and tried to help button it.
Sebastian grabbed his hands, stilling them. “Don't.”
“Let me, please?”
A muscle in Sebastian's jaw twitched, but he put his arms down and let Quinn do up the rest of his buttons.
“Tie?”
Sebastian didn’t respond. He was staring down at where Quinn’s fingers were holding the last button, not quite slotted together yet.
“I hate it when you touch me,” Sebastian said.
Quinn flinched, the words cutting deep. He finished doing the button quickly, trying to hide the way his hands trembled.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. He wished that the pain in his voice wasn’t so obvious, but he couldn’t turn it off.
Couldn’t hide the way that Sebastian stripped him raw every time he pushed him away.
Quinn looked into the cupboard. A plain black tie was hanging on the empty coat hanger. He slid it off and clenched it in his palm, staring down at it as though it had some divine answer.
“Here,” he said, handing it over without looking at Sebastian. “I have some questions I need to ask. Do you want to sit?” He pulled out his phone and opened it up to a note-taking app. He didn’t know if he’d have anything to write down, but it gave him something to do.
“No.” Sebastian instead settled against the edge of his desk, facing Quinn. He tried to fold his arms over his chest and stopped midway with a hiss of pain. He grimaced like he’d forgotten he was injured.
“How many people knew you were going out on Wednesday night?” Quinn asked. He needed to remember that they were professional only. That Sebastian hadn't wanted anything to do with him for a long time.
“Just Caleb. I texted him when I was on my way to the club.” Sebastian held up his good arm. “I can stop you right there. Caleb has had plenty of opportunities to kill me over the years, and he would have been perfectly justified each and every time, so doing it this elaborately is just… weird.”
Weird didn’t even begin to account for this entire situation. Quinn sat on the edge of the couch, his knees wide as he rested his elbows on them and crossed his arms. “Wednesday is a bit of a weird night to be out clubbing.”
“I wanted to get laid,” Sebastian said bluntly. “Last I checked, that wasn't a crime.” He slid his tie around his neck with one hand and left it hanging on either side without doing it up. “Or is this because I picked up Will and Peyton?”
Quinn silently counted to five. “You're not a suspect; stop acting like I'm trying to trip you up.”
“You didn't answer my question.”
“It doesn't bother me that you slept with Will and Peyton.” He thought maybe he should be jealous.
But it wasn't what he felt about it at all.
Over the years he'd known Sebastian, he had been with other people—of course he had—and once he'd even seen it.
And it had almost killed him, a dark twisting in his stomach that had made him see red.
It had taken him years to move on, and his first attempt at a relationship after Sebastian had been an absolute disaster. It didn't help that by that point, his conflicted feelings for Peyton had been mixed up in that too. Eric hadn't deserved to deal with Quinn's mess.
But imagining Sebastian with Will, and with Peyton, gave him a different kind of feeling. One he wasn't sure he wanted to examine. Quinn cleared his throat. “Do you know any reason why someone would be trying to hurt you? A case you're working on that has a dangerous element to it?”
“I'm a criminal lawyer,” Sebastian said. “I don't have a case that doesn't.”
“Except this is the first time that you've had a drive-by shooting, so maybe answer the question, please.”
“No.”
“You didn't even think about it.”
“I know what cases I'm working.”
Quinn flicked over to a different set of notes he'd been working on. “The victim that was found in Peyton and Will's apartment, his name was Mason Delgrade. Does that sound familiar to you at all?”
“No.”
Quinn searched around for any other questions to ask, but he couldn't think of a single thing. They were hitting nothing but brick walls, with more questions than answers, and every answer they got gave them less than nothing to work with.
Sebastian could hate him all he wanted, but Quinn would do everything in his power to catch whoever had him in their sights.
“You didn't ask me why,” Sebastian said into the silence.
“Why what?”
“Why I hate when you touch me.”
“I didn't ask because I don't want to know.” He had enough wounds that had never quite healed properly from Sebastian. Knowing that he hated Quinn's touch, that what had been the cornerstone of who they had once been was gone, was a step too far for him.
Sebastian leaned back a little and crossed his ankles, stretching out. “A couple of months after we broke up, I went out clubbing. I found this guy; he looked like you. A fucking spitting image, Quinn.”
Quinn couldn't breathe. Didn't want to hear this. He couldn't.
“His name was Trent.”
“You remember his name,” Quinn said, something dark twisting in his stomach.
“Seriously?” Sebastian said, raising a brow. “You're bothered by me remembering some random's name from eight years ago but not by me sleeping with Will and Peyton?”
“It's different.”
“How is it different?”
“I don't know,” Quinn said honestly. Everything with the three men felt different, in a way that Quinn couldn't even try to explain.
Sebastian licked his lips, and Quinn couldn't have stopped himself from tracking the movement if his life depended on it.
“I tried to use him to get your image out of my head.”
“If he looked like me, that sounds counterproductive,” Quinn said hoarsely. His fingers itched to hurt something. The very idea of Sebastian touching some random stranger because of him made his stomach hurt.
“I wanted to prove that the way you made me feel had nothing to do with you. Looking at him while he fucked me was the same as looking at you. They're just body parts. They all do the same thing.”
Quinn's heart felt like it was being crushed beneath Sebastian's heel. He didn't deserve this, no matter what he'd said or done in the past. “I don't want to hear this.”
“You need to hear it.”
Quinn stood and pocketed his phone. He opened his mouth, wanting to say something to hurt Sebastian the way Sebastian was hurting him. He closed it again because he couldn't. The man he'd been in love with so long ago was still in there somewhere, and he had never wanted to hurt him.
Quinn shook his head. “Grady will call you if we have any more questions.” He couldn't do this anymore.
He had his hand on the door handle when Sebastian spoke.
“It wasn't the same.”
Quinn froze, his heart leaping into his throat.
“It's never the same. I can't replicate what you made me feel.”
Quinn closed his eyes on a shuddered breath.
“Will and Peyton... being with them was the first time in eight fucking years that you didn't haunt me. Where I could close my eyes, and I didn't see you. Where I could feel them touching me and not think about how it didn't feel right because it wasn't you.”
Quinn's fingers slid from the door handle. He was afraid to turn around, but he couldn't stop himself from doing it anyway.
Sebastian hadn't moved from his spot. He stayed perfectly still even as Quinn crowded him, looking defiantly up at him.
The tiny spattering of freckles across his face, barely visible to the naked eye, were covered in a light pink, and he looked angrier than Quinn could remember having seen him for a long time.
“I hate you for making me feel like that,” Sebastian bit out. “I didn't do anything wrong. I gave you everything. I told you nothing happened with Riley, remember? I fucking swore it, and you didn't believe me. ”
“I know.” Quinn moved closer and raised a hand, hovering it over Sebastian's cheek. He searched Sebastian's beautiful dark-blue eyes, unsure what he was looking for. “I'm sorry.”
“What good is sorry? It didn't mean anything then, and it doesn't mean anything now.”
“It means something to me.”
“I think it only matters if it means something to the recipient.”
“You're right,” Quinn agreed. “I tried to say it before, and you wouldn't listen.”
“What makes you think I'm listening now?”
Quinn smoothed his thumb across Sebastian's soft skin. “I miss you.”
“Fuck you, Quinn,” Sebastian said, his voice wavering. “You don't get to say that.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Stop apologising.” He fisted a hand in Quinn's shirt, and Quinn shuddered under the touch. “Are you going to kiss me or not?”
Quinn wanted to, more than he wanted his next breath. But Sebastian had been keeping him at a distance for so long that it seemed too good to be true to be given the chance. Had Peyton been right? Were they not finished? Could he fix it? “Do you want me to?”
“You're fucking stupid if you think the answer to that question has ever been no.”
The first touch was a hard clash of lips as though Sebastian was trying to prove a point. Like he was trying to show Quinn that this was all they had left. Quinn refused to believe that.