Chapter 31
SEBSATIAN
The special election was just days away, and the team had finished our daily debrief thirty minutes ago.
After darting across the street to my apartment and showering off the stress of the day, I’d settled on the sofa with a murder mystery book and a glass of wine when two sharp knocks on the door yanked me out of the story.
I checked my phone. Taylor wasn’t set to land for another hour, and I wasn’t expecting anyone else. I slid my bookmark between the pages, tossed it onto the coffee table, and strode to the door to find Wyatt’s glowering face visible through the peephole.
“What the hell?” I muttered, taking in his rumpled state.
His tie hung askew, and his usually perfect hair jutted out wildly as if he’d run his hands through it repeatedly.
I considered pretending I wasn’t here, but curiosity was stronger than annoyance.
I twisted the deadbolt and opened the door a crack. “What the fuck are you doing here?” I demanded, eyeing the half-empty bottle of Scotch dangling from his fingers.
“You won’t return my calls,” he said, sounding like a sulking child as his glassy eyes wandered my face.
“You’re right. I won’t. For reasons I’ve already explained.”
He rocked back on his heels, his attention darting between my face and the living room visible behind me.
His eyebrows lifted expectantly, clearly waiting for an invitation.
When none came, he clenched his jaw and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing beneath his loosened tie.
Then came the slow exhale, his features relaxing deliberately.
I knew that look; he was recalibrating.
“Sebastian,” he murmured, his voice dropping to that low, velvet tone he reserved for when he wanted something from me. “Please. I need to talk to you.”
“How did you get up here?”
His eyes bounced away. “A very nice neighbor let me in.”
Typical. Wyatt Hastings had never been denied entrance anywhere. Doors seemed to just magically open for him. It was what made him such an effective politician.
“Invite me in,” he said, attempting to lean against the doorframe. His hand slipped, nearly sending him sprawling instead.
“No.”
He tilted his head, one eyebrow lifting in a look that said, “You and I both know you don’t want the neighbors hearing this.”
Shit. I really didn’t.
I backed away, and he sauntered in, his eyes scanning the space in one unhurried sweep, lingering on my abandoned book and wineglass. “Cozy.”
“What do you want, Wyatt?”
For a long moment, he didn’t say anything, but then his face fell, and there was the man I’d met on a sticky summer night at a mutual friend’s wedding.
The Wyatt who’d walked me back to my hotel room that night in the pouring rain, telling me he’d never met anyone like me, that he didn’t want us to end when the sun came up.
The man who used to tell me that I was special, that no one understood him the way I did.
I felt a sharp, twisting pain just under my ribs. I acknowledged it—acknowledged the loss of what we once had—and then let it go.
“I need you, Sebastian. How could you just—” His voice broke, his hand lifting to press his knuckles against his lips. “How could you leave me like that?”
I had waited years for Wyatt Hastings to admit that he needed me.
And yet I felt nothing now except the quiet sadness for the man I’d once been. For the hopes I’d placed in him.
“You don’t miss me, Wyatt. You miss having me at your beck and call,” I said, waiting for the familiar pull of guilt, the reflexive urge to soften the blow. It never came. “You miss my insight and how it made you better. And you definitely miss my cock. But you don’t miss me.”
His hand dropped from his mouth, and he squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. “That’s not fair.”
I slid past him to the opposite wall and crossed my arms. “Nothing’s fair about any of this, Wyatt.”
“Please. Don’t be like this, Bas.”
The old nickname spoken in that voice slithered over me like a snake over a grave. I swallowed past my revulsion.
“Like what?”
“You’re being contrary just to spite me. This isn’t like you.”
“It’s exactly like me, though I understand why you might not get that.”
He took a step toward me, his face screwed up in anger. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you stopped seeing me. Stopped caring about me as anything other than someone who could do something for you. Stopped looking at me as anything other than a hole to fuck. The only time you even bothered to pretend I mattered was when I had something you wanted.”
“That’s bullshit,” he spat, spittle flying from his mouth.
“Is it?” I crossed my arms over my chest to hide the fact that my hands were shaking.
“You know damn well it is.” He shoved his hands into his pockets, widening his stance. “You’re my ... you’ve always been ... Goddamnit, Bas. You have to know that’s not true.”
“What I know,” I said, my voice brittle, “is that you showed up drunk on my doorstep just like this three years ago with a ring in your pocket for a woman you’d previously told me meant nothing to you.”
My laugh sounded bitter, but I didn’t have it in me to care. I’d kept all of this bottled up for far too long.
“What I know,” I went on, “is that when I pointed out the problems with Celine’s additions to your telecommunications bill, you said I was being petty and jealous. And then, when it blew up exactly as I predicted, you couldn’t even acknowledge how right I’d been.”
My heart was beating too fast, my hands shaking. I jammed them into my pockets, hoping he hadn’t noticed. I drew air in through my nose and counted to four before blowing it slowly back out. When I spoke again, I made sure my voice was steady.
“What I know is not once since you two set a wedding date have you asked me how I’m doing. What this whole fucking arrangement has cost me. Everything is always about you and what you need. At no point have you ever stopped and asked yourself what I might need.”
“You make it sound like I’m some kind of monster. That’s not who I am.”
“I know exactly who you are, Wyatt.”
And that was the problem.
Wyatt Hastings had been good once. Had believed in things with a ferocity that made you want to believe in them, too. He’d fought battles nobody had asked him to fight simply because it was the right thing to do. I’d invested seven years of my life in that version of the man.
But power had corrupted him, the way it did for so many, and he hadn’t been that person in a really long time.
He let out a short, humorless laugh and strode to the counter, grabbing his Scotch and yanking the cork out of the bottle with his teeth.
He tilted his head back, the amber liquid disappearing down his throat in three long pulls.
He winced as he swallowed, then dragged his hand across his wet mouth.
“I’ll concede that I let things get complicated—the constant campaigning, the pressure to do more, be more. You know better than anyone what that kind of scrutiny does to a person. I leaned on you because I trusted you. Because you were the only person I could lean on.”
“No. You leaned on me because I was convenient. Because I never pushed back.”
“Sebastian, please,” he pleaded, his voice softening. “I know things changed when Celine and I got together. But you have to understand—”
I shook my head. “No, even before Celine was in the picture, we’d stopped being partners. For years, I was nothing more than—”
I stopped. I didn’t know if I dared to say the word out loud. Because I was complicit in turning myself into that just as much as he was.
“Than what?” he pressed, his hushed tone matching my own.
“You know what.”
“Tell me.”
I blew out a breath and forced myself not to look away. “Your whore.”
I would have said the look that swept over his face just then was shame if I thought he was even capable of that emotion.
“I never meant for it to be like that.” His shoulders dropped.
“That almost makes it worse,” I said quietly.
Abruptly, Wyatt turned and set the bottle back on the counter, then straightened to his full height. “I’ll divorce Celine. If that’s what this is about, I’ll end it, and we can go back to how things were before.”
Six months ago, I might have taken him up on the offer, but now I knew my worth.
And I knew it without question because Taylor had shown me every day in a thousand different ways that I didn’t have to accept small scraps of affection. That I deserved to be loved wholly and unreservedly.
But knowing your worth didn’t suddenly turn you into someone else. Didn't make you want to be kind and forgiving when what you really wanted was ... not revenge exactly. More like comeuppance.
And now I was finally in a position to get it. To see what Senator Wyatt Hastings looked like when he was at the end of his rope. When he was desperate and grasping at straws.
So I did what any petty asshole with an axe to grind would do.
I relaxed my jaw, dropped my shoulders, and let my eyes go soft. Whatever Wyatt needed to see in order to think I believed his bullshit, I gave it to him.
“You’d actually leave her?” I asked, my voice filled with what I hoped sounded like longing. Like desperation.
“Yes, god. I want you back, Bas,” he breathed out, his eyes taking on the appearance of a man who was about to do something reckless. Something stupid. “I love you.”
The building’s heat clicked on, the vents exhaling a quiet rush of warm air into the silence. For years, I’d wanted this moment. But now that it was here, I simply stood there, wondering why it didn’t make me feel something more than pity.
Well, pity wasn’t the only thing I felt—I also felt anger.
Anger because he was lying. Because he was using that thing I’d longed for to try and manipulate me. Because he thought he could.
“No, you don’t.”
“What?” he sputtered. “Of course I—”
I snorted and crossed my arms over my chest. “You don’t know what love is, and you probably never will.”
I watched Wyatt Hastings, a man who always got what he wanted, realize that his act no longer worked on me. That whatever he’d come here tonight expecting, he wasn’t going to get it.
And that meant he was dangerous. Because a denied Wyatt was a dangerous Wyatt.
His hands slid into his pockets as he strolled toward me. It was the casual way he moved, the easy, unbothered approach that told me he was gearing up to strike. To draw blood.
“Sebastian, Sebastian, Sebastian,” he murmured, shaking his head in disappointment.
“Without me, you’d still be that sad, gay boy who desperately craved his daddy’s approval.
If it wasn’t for me, you’d be nothing. I made you what you are, and now what?
You’re going to stand there and complain that I didn’t give you exactly what you wanted?
” He made a tsking sound. “You loved being my whore.”
I forced myself not to flinch, not to give him the reaction he so desperately wanted.
“In the beginning, maybe,” I conceded flatly, moving away as he continued advancing steadily toward me.
My phone chose that moment to buzz loudly three times in my pocket, the sound identifying it as an incoming text from Taylor. His plane must have landed. I slid a hand into my pocket and palmed my phone, using it as an anchor of sorts.
“But that’s not who I am. Not anymore.”
I watched Wyatt’s expression shift from arrogance to confusion, then anger, and eventually understanding. His eyes flicked to my pocket, then back to my face. “The hockey player.”
I lifted my chin. “Taylor.”
He exhaled hard through his nose and glanced away for a moment, running his hand over his jaw, seemingly deep in thought. When he turned back to me, it was clear that he was about to attempt yet another tactic to bend me to his will.
It was baffling to me that he didn’t realize that I could see right through him, that I recognized what he was doing at every turn.
“Are you really willing to sacrifice everything we have together—the things we could achieve together—for someone like that?”
If he thought for even a second that the promise of power was going to work on me after everything, he was even more delusional than I thought.
And making this about Taylor?
I refused to take the bait.
He cast his line again.
“You can’t be serious.” He snorted. “The guy’s a fucking joke, Seb.
A third-rate player on a terrible team. A dumb jock with no prospects.
” He shook his head like he was sad for me.
Like he pitied me. Like I was stupid for not seeing it.
“A thousand dollars says you’re tired of him inside of six months. ”
What Wyatt didn’t understand was that I would never get tired of Taylor.
Not of him arguing with me with complete conviction about whether a hot dog was a sandwich, or our midnight conversations where he’d ask me something completely unhinged, like who the first person was who’d decided to try to eat a lobster.
I’d never stop wanting to laugh with him until my eyes watered and my sides ached.
I’d never want to walk into a room he was in and not immediately feel a sense of rightness wash over me.
I never wanted to say “I love you” to anyone who wasn’t him for the rest of my life.
“Shut the fuck up.”
He scoffed. “Holy shit. You’re actually in love with him.” He laughed. “You poor fucking idiot.”
“Yes, I’m in love with him.” My phone buzzed again. “And it’s time for you to leave.”
He stared at me for a long time before his mouth flattened into a hard line, and he moved toward the door. Pausing with his hand on the knob, he said, his voice low and menacing, “You’re going to regret this.” Then he yanked it open and stormed out.
My hand found my pocket, and I pulled my phone out, seeing the emoji of a plane touching down.
Not a fucking chance, I thought, grabbing my keys and jogging down the back stairs.
If I drove fast enough, I could meet Taylor just as he was pulling into his driveway.