Chapter Sixteen
It turns out the only thing more unnerving than Rowan starting a Newsbag meeting declaring that we’re about to get axed is Rowan starting a Newsbag meeting by opening their mouth and saying nothing at all.
“Oh, god. They’re broken,” says Joey nervously on my left.
On my right there’s an empty desk where Seb should be. He must still be on the road. I’m nervous for Newsbag ’s sake, but I can’t help that despite everything I’ve still got one eye on the door.
“Is Newsbag getting shut down?” asks one of the freshmen.
Colby lets out a sharp laugh. “Love to see those assholes try.”
Amara nudges Rowan, and Rowan clears their throat, blinking themselves back into the room. “Sorry. I just, uh—discovered the power of the dean’s full lung capacity over the phone. It is safe to say he isn’t pleased by our latest stunt.”
There’s some murmuring throughout the room that’s hard to interpret—some of it confused, some indignant.
“Yeah,” Joey says carefully. “Was that—something we were going to discuss as a group, or…?”
That gets the attention of all the freshmen. I assumed that was something they discussed. Some kind of closed-door meeting with just the staff members. But the way the murmuring pitches in agreement after Joey asks, it’s clear we’re all surprised.
Amara winces. “It was. But the athletes we were working with got wind that they were finalizing the budgets for next semester by the end of the day. If we just let it happen they were going to pull our proposal for mental-health advocates for the athletes, and some of the student orgs would have been axed completely. So we thought about it all morning, and ultimately decided to just pull trig.”
Joey nods, frowning thoughtfully, and the murmurs kick up again. There’s a slight movement by the door, and in the slim window I see Seb’s face peering in, his eyes immediately meeting mine. We both go very still.
“We understand if people are surprised or frustrated,” says Rowan.
“How’d we even get our hands on those numbers?” Colby asks.
Rowan looks to Amara, who gives a bare nod.
“I don’t want to take credit for anyone else’s work here—so if anyone asks, make it clear that Amara and I were the ones who decided to post them,” says Rowan firmly. “That’s on us.”
Seb still hasn’t moved from the door, but he’s not looking at me anymore. He’s staring at Rowan and Amara, his face pale and his lips pressed tight.
“And to be clear, they haven’t shut us down. At least not yet,” says Amara. “But we wanted to get everyone together so we could get on the same page about this and decide how to move forward as a group. So for the next however long it takes, this is an open forum for questions, ideas, discussion, the whole nine yards.”
Amara might as well have opened a floodgate, the way every one starts talking over one another at once. Everyone but me, because I’m glancing back at the window, where I don’t see Seb’s face anymore.
I turn to Joey. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
“Bring snacks,” he says. “I have a feeling we’re going to be here awhile.”
Thankfully Seb hasn’t gone far. He’s leaning against the wall by the door, head down and staring at his shoes. He startles at the sight of me, blinks hard, and immediately says, “I’m sorry. I know I said it already, but I am. I just wanted to get that out there before I say the rest of it.”
My heart cinches because he looks about as shitty as I feel—eyes red-rimmed like he stayed up half the night overthinking everything we said, too.
“Do you want to go outside for a bit?” I ask.
Seb’s eyebrows lift in surprise, looking at the slightly open door and back at me. After a moment he nods and I lead the way out of the building, finding a bench for us to sit on just outside of it.
“I’m sorry, too,” I tell him. “I should’ve just—taken a beat.”
“You don’t have anything to apologize for,” Seb insists. “I’m the one who didn’t talk to you about it when I should have. I’m the one who’s sorry.”
It’s entirely the wrong time and place for it, but I find myself biting down a smile. Seb’s eyes widen warily, but I just shake my head.
“Seb. I’m going to stop you right there because knowing the two of us, we’re going to start an Apology Olympics that only ends when we’re suffocating on this bench.”
The relief that floods through Seb’s face is so palpable that I feel my own shoulders loosening. Some small amount of order has been restored, and even that much makes all the difference. My next breath feels like the first full one I’ve taken all day.
“Okay. I won’t apologize again.” The slight laugh in Seb’s voice tapers out when he turns to look at me, plain and sincere. “But I will promise I won’t ever involve you in anything like that again without asking first. Because I hope—I hope we’ll be involved in a lot of things together.” The tips of his ears redden, but he adds quickly, “So I want you to know that you can trust me, like you did when we first had that conversation. It should have occurred to me that writing about it would have been breaking that trust.”
I nod slowly, because I can’t help seizing on the words that have the least to do with the promise and the most to do with the hope still pressing against the inside of my chest. Involved in a lot of things together. He could mean writing-wise. But he could also mean just about anything else.
And this right here is the opportunity for me to tell him the whole truth: that I wasn’t just upset to be taken by surprise. That I was upset because it felt like he was counting me out. That I’m not sure where we stand even now.
But if I do decide to tell Seb how I feel about him, it won’t be on the heels of the worst conversation we’ve ever had. If there’s ever a right time to tell him, I want it to be a moment that stands on its own, separate from the lingering hurt from last night and the confusion of today.
So I nod. “I appreciate that,” I say. “And for what it’s worth—I do trust you. I always have. I don’t think we could have sustained our whole frenemy thing for so long if we didn’t, you know?”
The push and pull of it couldn’t have worked if we weren’t always pushing just hard enough not to let the other fall, pulling just enough to keep the other one in. An inherent balance, even when we were using it to make each other miserable. I’m prepared to cite my evidence, but after a moment, Seb nods, too.
“In a weird way—yeah,” he says.
Satisfied, I add, “And if I ever get righteously pissed at you for something again—”
“When,” says Seb quietly, with a wry look in his eyes.
“ When I get pissed at you again,” I say with a slight smirk, “we’ll talk it out. And I won’t say things I don’t mean.”
“Like that we’re not anything to each other.”
The words hang in the balance between us with a weight that neither of us quite knows how to hold. Like the shape of it isn’t finished yet, even after all this time.
“You know, I don’t know what we are,” I say candidly. “I don’t know anyone like us. But what I do know is that you’re important to me. You always will be. And for better or worse, we’re stuck with each other.”
It’s not a love confession—not the entire truth—but the one that rests under all the others. The one that matters most.
“You make it sound so terminal,” Seb says, half teasing and half not.
I knock my knee into his. “Yeah, well. I’m hoping.”
Seb finally smiles then. It’s exhausted and slow and nothing like the ones he aims at our classmates to set them at ease or the ones he aims at me to put me on my toes. It’s soft, with no intent behind it. A smile just for us.
He leans farther back into the bench and for a stretch we just watch the lazy Sunday afternoon of campus roll by—the students shuffling around with textbooks in their sweatpants, holding to-go boxes from the sandwich shop on Main Street, laughing over pictures from whatever they got up to over the weekend. The quiet is so easy and so ours that I forget about the rest of the world for a few moments, feeling the same kind of relief I felt when the car pulled up to our parents’ house two days ago; the relief of being home.
A burst of commotion from the open window where the Newsbag meeting is still underway stirs us back, but neither of us moves.
“Have you gotten Hadley to talk to you yet?”
The guilt comes seeping back before Seb even finishes asking. “No. But don’t worry,” I assure him. “Taking care of that is on me.”
But Seb just blows out an exasperated breath. “You know I’m not worried about—‘taking care of it.’ I’m worried because I care about Hadley, too.”
The guilt is no longer a seep but threatening to become a stream again.
“You guys have always been close,” I say, an apology in my voice.
Seb’s shoulders sink, and he ducks his head for a moment in thought. “This is going to sound so ridiculous, but—I miss your whole family,” he admits. “I was reading your draft before we got home and just thinking—shit. I miss them as much as my parents.”
“You miss my family?” I ask, laughing. “What about them, the drama or the noise or the complete and unabashed chaos?”
I’m joking, but Seb isn’t. “All of it,” he says, looking me right in the eye. “I miss—having people around. The kind I can just be myself with.”
It clicks for me then in a way it should have a long time ago. The way my parents check in on Seb just like they check in on me. The way I found Seb at Pancake It or Leave It every Sunday, filling up the same ache. The way I’ve always been dismissive of Seb’s friendships and relationships in a way that couldn’t just be explained by our rivalry but by the simple fact that I knew him best, because I knew the Seb who was running around the backyard with Hadley’s water balloons and helping my dad bake cookies for my mom’s Dungeons how easily and enthusiastically my parents digested my Newsbag piece. How Marley recognized a difference in me but immediately swung into the new groove of it. How Hadley didn’t even miss a beat in helping plan our prank, which she’s never seen me do in her entire existence.
How Seb is right—my family is a lot of things. And that’s probably why they have no problem accepting people just as they are.
I offer Seb a grateful smile. “Yeah, well. Some dead botanist with a grudge against sea dragons convinced me to open up to my parents.”
Seb’s eyes light up with their usual mischief. “Huh. Do I know him?” he asks. “Is his hair beachy? His charm insufferable?”
I push against him with my shoulder, then ask a question I’ve had in the back of my mind since I left this morning. “Did you get a chance to tell your dad about the piece at all?”
I almost regret asking when his eyes dim again. “No. I, uh—was distracted.”
“Right,” I say ruefully.
“No, not by—I mean, yes, by our conversation.” Seb glances back at the building. “But also because of this whole— Newsbag thing.”
“You mean the numbers?” I say. “I’m not worried. They can’t shut us down without looking like cartoon villains. Besides, they don’t even know who did it.”
Seb’s lip twists to the side just as the logical part of my brain wakes back up and makes a connection it should have made a full hour ago, when the numbers first dropped.
“But you do,” I say quietly.
Seb goes very still, which is all the confirmation I need.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Seb,” I say, exasperated. “I’m implicated. Just tell me.”
Seb is so tightly wound that he can’t even seem to shake his head properly. “I don’t want anyone else to get in trouble. Rowan and Amara are covering for me already—”
“They’re covering their own asses. They made the call to hit Publish, not you.” My brow furrows. “If anything, they should be the ones worried about putting you in a weird spot for that.”
Seb doesn’t disagree, looking uneasily at the building again. We can still hear voices carrying out from the open window. I’m suddenly as indignant as they are, but for Seb’s sake over anyone else’s.
“I don’t know.” Seb runs a hand through his hair and then leaves it on top of his head, stuck on a thought. “I was the one who gave it to them and said to do what they wanted with it. I didn’t ask them to protect me or anything, but I also didn’t think they’d just—full-blast it like that.”
“Yeah. Shit.” I still feel like I haven’t fully caught up to this enough to say much more than that, but one thought occurs to me. “How did you even swing it, mister ‘not exactly a tech guy’?”
That wrestles a small laugh out of him. “I have friends in dweeby places. They didn’t hack the files, but they talked me through how to do it. Less people involved the better.”
“Sebastian Adams, Instagram influencer by day, international superspy by night.”
Seb shifts on the bench to face me, a sincerity in his expression that catches me off guard. “I know we said no more apologies, but—I’m sorry about this, too,” he says.
I wave my hand at him. “It’s fine. If I thought it’d get you in trouble, I wouldn’t have told you, either.” I pause. “Well, at least not now that we’re out of our Blatant Sabotage Era.”
But the worried crease in Seb’s brow only deepens. “No, I mean about— Newsbag being under fire like this.” He shifts his head to level his eyes with mine. “I know how much it means to you. And I know if this shuts us down, I’ll have messed up your chances of writing for them forever.”
My hand is on Seb’s shoulder before I’ve even made a conscious decision to touch him. He ducks his head like he wants to accept the comfort of it but can’t. I lower my voice, the words coming so easily to me that I have no doubt in them and leave no room for him to doubt them either.
“First of all—let me assure you,” I say. “The reason I love Newsbag is because it pulls shit like this. Neither of us would be here if we didn’t want to be a part of that.”
He gives a minute nod but still won’t look at me. I give his shoulder a bare squeeze, sliding my hand farther down his arm, the warmth of his skin at odds with the slight goose bumps against my palm.
“And Seb, when you’re a journalist, there are going to be a lot of moments like this. The truth always comes with consequences. It’s up to you to weigh them out.”
Seb relaxes his shoulder into my touch almost as if he can feel the weight of decisions that haven’t even happened yet. My throat is so tight I have to pause for a moment, because this —this is the real reason why it’s impossible to stay out of Seb’s orbit. He cares. He cares so much that you can sense it on him like gravity before you even see him. He cares so much it makes him easy to trust and easier to love.
For the first time I feel painfully protective of it. Just like the truth, it comes with consequences, too.
“But you’ve got a good head and a better heart,” I go on. “You wouldn’t have done it if you didn’t know that it’s ultimately going to help more people than it hurts.”
Seb lifts his head slowly to meet my eyes again. I know the words aren’t a magic wand that’s going to fix him up right now, but I can tell from the resignation in his expression that he’s taking every one of them to heart.
“I don’t know if I’m ready to weigh it out just yet,” says Seb. “I don’t know what to do.”
I sit up straighter, because if there’s one thing I’m an expert at, it’s bossing Seb Adams around.
“Well, fortunately for you, I’m still your self-appointed editor. So I’ll tell you what to do. Trust Rowan and Amara. Stay the course and don’t tell anyone you were involved.” He starts to waffle, but I don’t let him. “If the administration is trying to shut Newsbag down, it’s only because they’re scared of what we’re capable of doing. It’s only because we’re doing our job right.”
Seb’s lips press into a grim but grateful smile.
“If that’s true then I learned from watching you,” says Seb. “You were the one who put this whole thing in motion.”
I’ve officially given up on trying to stop my cheeks from burning. I’m just going to be a pot left on low simmer for the rest of the damn semester, at this rate.
“Careful, Seb, or I’m going to start thinking you enjoy implicating me.”
“Hard not to enjoy most things with you,” says Seb, so easily that it takes a beat for the words to register, for the cheek burn to escalate to a flame. “But I mean it. You supercharged this whole thing. I know you’ve spent a long time trying not to rock the boat. But you’re funny and clever and it’s about time you started letting yourself make waves.”
I pull in a shaky breath. I know he can tell the words hit home, the same way mine did for him. And I also know that if we keep this up, we’re going to be entirely useless to a group of bickering Newsbag writers and hopefuls who need as many wave-making, data-hacking minds in there as they can get.
“Stop that right now before my ego gets as inflated as yours, huh?” I ask.
Seb grins, then, and grabs my hand, squeezing it. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep you tethered to the earth.”
I look at our hands, which slot together so easily that it feels like they’ve done it countless times before. The only thing reminding me they haven’t is the way my heart kicks up, happy and light in my chest.
“Is that a threat?” I ask.
“A promise,” says Seb, who doesn’t let go of my hand when he moves off the bench, using the momentum to pull me up in turn. “Like you said. For better or worse, we’re stuck with each other.”
I follow his lead, hoping with every step that it isn’t for the worse.