Chapter 16
Seb stretched out his long legs into my side of the swing, crossing his ankles. “Shoot, Malone. What do you want to know about
me? I’m an open book.”
“Okay,” I said. “Guess I just want to know . . . what you did. There are entire chunks of your life I don’t know about.”
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
I nodded. “Fair warning, life outside of boot camp was pretty dull.”
He snorted. “God, I would’ve taken dull any day. I don’t know . . . where to start? I already told you a little about what
it was like in that place.”
“Was there anything good about it?”
“After you understood what they wanted from you, it was just a matter of putting your head down and doing the work. Rebellion
wasn’t worth it, so I just went into survival mode and kept going until I’d graduated.”
I could definitely relate to that feeling. I’d done a lot of keep-calm-and-carry-on–ing since Nana died. “Did you have friends
there?”
“There was a girl, Kaylee, whose older sister was a musher—has done the Iditarod sledding race in Alaska? Anyway, when her sister picked her up from boot camp, I was trying to figure out how to get home because, you know, my father didn’t come.
So I guess she felt sorry for me and let me ride with them. ”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Hold on. You’re saying Captain Jansen left you up in the Yoop? He didn’t come get you after graduation?”
Seb shrugged. “We weren’t speaking at the time.”
“He must’ve paid a fortune to put you in there. You’d think he’d at least want to see a return on his investment, if nothing
else.”
“No, see. The investment for him was paying someone to take me off his hands. So he got what he wanted out of it.”
I truly hated his father. Maybe almost as much as I hated mine.
My father . . . Without consciously thinking about it, I tapped on my phone screen to pull up my email as I had thousands of times before
over the past couple of days, waiting for a response from the inquiry message I sent through his company website.
Nothing. As there never was.
“Everything okay?” Seb asked.
“Oh, um, no text from Jazmine yet,” I said, putting my phone down and refocusing on him. “So what happened after you got a
ride with the girl’s sled-dog sister? The musher?”
“The musher had a camp in the Yoop between Marquette and the Wisconsin border, bunch of little log cabins. She and some other
people had been practicing for the Iditarod there for the winter, like a dozen mushers. All the winter snow was melting, so
they were packing things up to disband for the summer. I’d never seen so many Huskies at once.”
I blinked at Seb. “That’s where you got Punkin.”
The lines on his face softened. “Yep. Punkin had hurt her leg, and she’d healed up but couldn’t race with the other sled dogs anymore.
They were going to send her to a rescue, but the two of us bonded instantly.
So they let me adopt her, and Punkin and I were able to catch a ride with one of the mushers who was headed back home across the peninsula to Milwaukee. So that’s where Punkin and I settled.”
“Milwaukee?”
He nodded. “When I got my lifeguard certification back when we were kids, I remembered the YMCA had some rooms for temporary
housing, you know? So it was the first place I went in Milwaukee. They were super cool, let me rent a room for cheap, and
the manager was a dog person, so she let me keep Punkin, even though it was against the rules. We spent the summer there while
I earned a little cash doing oil changes for a mom-and-pop garage.”
“Auto repair?”
“No, boat. The garage was right on Lake Michigan. Did a good-enough job that the man I was working for, Mr. Legaspi, let me
have the Speed Buggy for almost nothing—he buys lots of cars and boats damaged by storms on the side. He’s the one who got
me hooked on audiobooks. He immigrated here from the Philippines, and he used to listen to audiobooks to better understand
American culture. He told me to pick something I liked and lean into it, learn everything I could about one subject. I’ve
always wanted to travel, so I picked that.”
“No fault found,” I said, meaning it.
“Anyway, the deal I had with Mr. Legaspi was that I had to get the Bronco running myself, so I fixed it up in my spare time
and drove back to Michigan last fall. And that’s basically all there is to tell.”
“Huh.”
“Disappointed?”
I shook my head. If anything, it sounded like he used his postgraduation time to better himself. But somewhere inside, I was
trying to extinguish a flicker of jealousy over this girl he mentioned. “I dunno, guess I sort of imagined you doing wild
things up north, like meeting someone in boot camp and Bonny and Clyde–ing your way across the country. Not . . . adopting
dogs. Are you still in touch with this . . . what did you say her name was?”
“Kaylee? God no.”
“No Bonny and Clyde–ing with her, then, I guess.”
“Kaylee and I weren’t friends. Pretty sure she couldn’t stand me, and to be honest, the feeling was mutual. Our relationship
in boot camp only consisted of getting each other off to pass the time.”
I turned up my nose. “Gee, romantic.”
“Hey, she felt the same way about me.”
And that was supposed to make me feel better? “You frequently have hate-sex with people you can’t stand?”
“Only when the people I like are busy.”
He was joking, but knowing this did nothing to assuage the petty jealousy that continued to prick at my heart. I frowned.
“Why do you say stuff like that?”
“Like what? The truth?”
“Ugh, whatever.” A little worry joined my jealousy. What if he wasn’t being crass for “the likes?” Maybe this was just his
overall attitude toward sex. Jokes, put-downs, casual apathy. I couldn’t reconcile this with the memory of how he’d made me
feel on the roof when his arms were wrapped around me.
“Still waiting for your witty retort, Malone.”
“Don’t have one. Too busy kicking myself for letting you kiss me.”
The air between us changed immediately. Seb’s head swiveled in my direction, and his sharp gaze fixed on mine, a defensive
electricity crackling behind his eyes.
“You kissed me back!” he argued.
“And, what? You were just bored, like you were with this Kaylee girl?”
“I was not bored, and neither were you.”
I felt my cheeks heat but couldn’t do anything about it. I just knew that I’d made a huge faux pas, bringing up the kiss.
I wasn’t ready to talk about it with Seb. Best to try to steer the conversation into other pastures. “I guess our high school
experiences were a little different, that’s all.”
“Right, sure. While I was up north, trying to make it out of boot camp without losing my mind, you were bumping uglies with
Little Lord Fauntleroy at prom.”
My stomach tightened. “How the hell do you know about me and Henry?”
It took him a moment to admit, “Benny. Guess your prom date kissed and told. I mean, you and Henry were the only two in the
class to end up at Ivy Leagues, so you were both meant to be, I suppose.”
I didn’t know where to place my anger. At Benny, for talking about my love life behind my back? Or at Henry for telling everyone?
“It was not ‘meant to be.’ It was a one-time thing—I haven’t even seen Henry since graduation.”
“You’re in the hot seat, too, you know,” he sat, patting the swing’s cushion. “I told you my shame. You next.”
“There’s nothing to tell. I went to prom with Henry; it seemed like a good-enough time to lose my virginity, so I did.
It wasn’t great, wasn’t a nightmare. It just .
. . was.” I shrugged as casually as I could.
Though, now that I was thinking about it, Henry and I didn’t really speak after that, so maybe the experience was worse than I remembered.
He snorted softly. “Leave it to you to calculate the right time to lose your virginity.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to wait until college . . .” What did he want me to say? “I literally could not think of Henry less.
And why are you judging my decisions?”
“You judged mine.”
“I . . .”
He was right, I had.
“The porch swing is a judgment-free space,” I said, loosely quoting my nana. “Sorry.”
“Apology accepted. Less judging, more hugging. We’re all broken people.”
Maybe we were.
My phone buzzed. I snatched it off the swing’s cushion to find a photo of Jaz inside the front hall of the Neely house, looking
exhausted. Her accompanying text was brief: Home safe. Everything okay. Will tell you the whole story tomorrow if you still want to hear. I’m sorry. Please don’t hate
me.
I blew out a hard breath and typed a quick response to thank her for letting me know. “She’s okay. Guess you knew what you
were talking about,” I said, showing Seb the photo.
Seb breathed a sigh of relief, and then a silence stretched between us.
I was thinking about Jazmine, wondering what she’d talked about with Paul, and whether they were .
. . a concern. But I soon became increasingly aware of Seb’s leg shaking next to mine.
He was anxious. He could never sit still when something was bothering him.
I slowly reached out and put a gentle hand on his leg to settle the nervous shaking.
Big eyes blinked at me. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be, it’s fine.”
“No—” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Listen, Paige. I’m sorry for everything. For being a total prick when we were younger, and for ditching my friends for the likes of Pretty fucking Paul.” His face
was long and anguished as he struggled for words. “I’m . . . I’m sorry I couldn’t fix things with my dad, because if I hadn’t
been a dick to him after the Ferrari incident, maybe he wouldn’t have sent me away. And if I hadn’t been sent away, then I
would’ve been here when Nana Malone died.”
He was upset. More than he should be.
“It’s okay, really.”
“It’s not, but I want it to be. When I got back home after Milwaukee, I knew the first thing I had to do was own up to my
mistakes, okay? I knew I’d fucked up with the Wags . . . like, years of fuckery. I was just so lost . . .” He shook his head.