Chapter 26
Chapter
Twenty-Six
Alone with just my thoughts, I stood in the darkness surrounding the courtyard. Wind tormented the flowers lining the walkway as they fought to stay rooted in the ground. The night was crystal clear, allowing me a perfect view of the stars that I would soon call upon.
I needed to practice more—I knew that. But every time I prepared to wield this power, my entire body flooded with the panic that I would hurt someone. Kade was right with his claim that I couldn’t control this. How I did it the other day with Kohen was a mystery to me.
Settling into my usual wielding pose, I tilted my neck backwards, my face aimed towards the sky. I drew the galaxies into my blood, sucking the power into every pore of my body.
Starlight bled out of my open palms with my release. I held on tightly, using every ounce of focus I had to control it.
In my peripheral vision, I could see the light bouncing off of my skin and hair, and though it should have blinded me, the sight sent a sense of warmth through my veins.
Dropping one arm, I aimed the other at a lonely flower. It crumbled into a pile of ash, settling on the ground in a glittering dust before I pulled back on my power.
Serenity flowed through me as I sank to my knees in the grass. Though I no longer felt weak when I harnessed, it still took a lot from me mentally.
“Impressive.”
Sebastian’s compliment flowed through my ears. My head turned towards where he stood, his hands tucked into the pockets of his dark pants. The stars illuminated his features, taking my breath away as he had done since the first time I saw him.
He stepped towards me. “I see what Kohen is saying now about the glowing, though. Strange.”
I stretched my legs out so I could sit. “What are you doing out here?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“Oh.” I had no doubts as to why. The things he experienced in Draemor haunted me, and I wasn’t even the one who lived through them.
“Are you okay?” I questioned, knowing the answer he’d give would likely be false.
“Of course.” He plopped down in the grass beside me, lifting his gaze to the sky.
I saw right through him. “No you’re not.”
His lips pursed as he drew in a taste of fresh air.
“If you want to talk about what happened in Draemor, we can,” I whispered, not looking towards him.
“I’d rather not relive it, honestly. I see it every night when I sleep, anyway.” Changing the topic, he asked me, “Are you okay? With what happened today?”
“Um. Yeah. I think so. I mean, we would have had to kill her, anyway. I just wasn’t expecting it to happen like that.”
“None of us were expecting that,” he huffed out, attempting to add some humor to the conversation, though his following words broke the attempt. “Do you think she meant what she said? About the gods not letting my mother into the veil?”
My heart blew up like a balloon and then exploded everywhere, leaving pieces of bloody shrapnel in its place.
“Seb.” I reached out, placing a hand on his thigh. “No. Your mother was good. There is no doubt in my mind that she is beyond the veil watching over you right now.”
He scoffed, shuffling a bit from my unexpected touch. “Yeah. Watching me fuck up everything good in my life. She must be so proud.”
Before I could disagree, his voice dropped to a tone so hollow I feared I would never hear his normal tone again.
“What if I’m the reason that she died? By making the bond to protect me and upsetting the balance, the gods took her as collateral.” He gulped and turned his head from me, which I knew was to hide his watering eyes.
“Sebastian.” His name was a sympathetic breath of air as it passed through my lips.
My hand roamed to his shoulder, then up to his chin where I grasped and pulled his gaze back into mine.
“She made the bond to protect you. Not to save your life.
I think one could argue that it doesn't even upset the balance.”
Sucking his lips in, he nodded and raised his eyes so they were in line with the sky.
Bringing my hands back to myself, I blew out a bubbled breath and dropped my head back to join him in staring up at the stars. I wanted nothing more than to tell him how much I missed him, but I had something else I needed to tell him first.
Disturbing the silence, he sighed heavily. “Where did things go so wrong between us?”
I didn’t answer the question. He knew exactly where things went wrong. “Maybe we both just suck at communicating,” I suggested.
He let out a soft chuckle. “That is painfully obvious. We also both seem to jump to conclusions.”
Air shot out of my nose. “Yeah. We do.” I paused, softening my tone. “Maybe we were just wrong from the start.”
I swear I could almost feel the pain emanating off of him. “No. You don’t really think that. Do you?” His voice cracked.
My shoulders shrugged as I sat upright and met his attention, the hurt in his ocean eyes blinding me. “I don’t know. It seems like there has been more bad between us than good. We’ve spent more time arguing than not.”
His jaw tightened and his cheeks sunk. “But the good has been really fucking good, Maeve. Maybe we're just two hurt people who don’t know how to stop hurting each other.”
“Maybe.” Hurt people, hurt others. My mother always used to say that. Sebastian had been hurt his entire life by the hands of his father. I’d been hurt by my own mind. Different kinds of hurt, but hurt all the same.
“When two severely stubborn and opinionated people are in a relationship, they are bound to disagree. It doesn’t mean that I love you any less. It just means that we are two stubborn and opinionated people that also happen to enjoy makeup sex.”
“You still love me?” I squeaked out, the thought of what I was about to tell him breaking me even further.
“Of course I do. There is no part of me that doesn’t love you. And that is why I did what I did—because I love you so much that I would have rather risked losing you when you found out the truth, then hurt you by telling you the truth.”
Silence fell between us. Painful, awkward silence.
“Do you think what has happened between us can be fixed?” he finally spoke, releasing the stars from his gaze.
I pulled my legs to my chest. “I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but we’ve strayed so far from where we were that I just don’t know how to get back there.”
He turned to me, and I’d be lying if I said that his sharp jawline and perfect lips didn’t make me want to forget everything that had happened. “Can you be honest with me about something?” Sebastian asked when I pulled my eyes back to the sky.
My heart pounded against my ribs. “Aren’t I usually honest with you?”
“Brutally, yes.”
I snorted a laugh, then nodded.
“Is there any piece of you that still loves me?”
My teeth sunk into my lips, so tightly that I tasted a little bit of blood. “By your choice of words at my birthday party, you certainly seem to think so,” I teased, trying to sweet talk my way out of the uncomfortable topic.
“I’m serious, Maeve. I need to know. It’s killing me.”
A ramped gust of wind raced by, blowing my hair every which way while I fought my answer from escaping my lips. But I agreed to be honest, so I was.
“Yes.” More than a part of me loved him. There was not a single doubt in my mind about that.
“Then we can be fixed, because I’m still very much in love with you. And also the fact that you're still thinking about what I said at your party is a good sign.”
A soft snort of laughter blew from my nose.
His fingers teased my hand, entangling themselves in mine.
“Maeve, I really fucking miss you.”
My hair dripped into my face as I turned to look at him, chewing my lip to release some of my anxiety. “I miss you, too.”
“There is nothing I want more than to take you upstairs and kiss every inch of your body,” he breathed as he leaned forward, closing the gap between us.
I couldn't speak.
His lips brushed against my neck. “I want to take my time with you. I want to make every inch of your body feel safe and loved before I spend hours doing everything I've thought about doing to you these past weeks.”
Gods.
This was going to fucking suck.
“Seb, while we're being honest—” I began, but the continuation of his words silenced my own.
“Gods, Maeve. I mean, this has been torture. I would get on my hands and knees, crawl to you and beg if that's what it took to have you forgive me.”
Shivers coated every inch of my skin when his words cradled me in a gravelly moan.
“Do you want that?”
“I—” I gasped when he began to slowly trail kisses up my neck, and I lost my ability to think straight. “I—Yes—No…I dunno. But—”
“But, I don’t want to pressure you. I want you to feel safe with me. And I understand if you don’t feel that way yet.”
“I’ve always felt safe with you,” I huffed out. Against my own free will, my neck tilted to the side as his teeth scraped over my flesh.
“Okay. Then I want you to trust me again.” His lips traveled upwards, trailing tiny kisses along my jawline.
I squeezed my legs together as tight as humanly possible.
“I do trust you. You just really, really hurt me, Seb. And it took me a while to figure out if I could forgive it,” I forced out amidst a cataclysmic rush of lust.
“Well?” He pulled back, pushing his forehead into my temple. “Did you?”
“Yes. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”
He nodded, his cerulean eyes level with mine. “I knew it the moment I woke up in the infirmary and you were there. I just don’t think you knew it until more recently.”
My lungs drew in a blast of air when his hands found my face, cupping my cheeks and making me dread what was about to come next even more.
“Seb—”
His voice was no more than a gravelly breath. “No pressure, but when you decide you're ready, I would love to show you just how sorry I am, and just how much I’ve missed you.”
With the expulsion of words, he released me, leaving my skin feeling incredibly bare.
“Wait.” As he stood up to leave, I held onto his wrist, pulling his attention back to me. “I need to tell you something.”
He tucked his hands in the pockets of his leathers, his full curiosity settled upon me.
When all I could do was fiddle with my thumbs, he asked, “What?”
Unease combined with blatant apprehension smacked me in the face, removing my ability to speak. “I—I…”
Sebastian stepped forward, his brows lowering. “Maeve?”
My eyes were already sobbing wet when they raised. “Sawyer and I—”
Sebastian's entire being went rigid. “Sawyer and you what?”
Frozen was the blood in my veins. Solid was the air in my lungs.
“Maeve…You're scaring me.”
“Kissed,” I blurted and dropped my head again, it being much too heavy to hold.
The utter silence made me wonder if Sebastian had left, but he was waiting for my eyes to meet him once more before opening his mouth.
“When?”
“The night of my party.”
“Where?”
“My room.”
“So when I asked you if something was going on with Sawyer—”
“It wasn’t.”
His eyes narrowed.
“It isn’t,” I clarified, shaking my head. “And it was never going to. He just kissed me and…and I think I just needed to…blow off some steam. Some emotion. I dunno. It was weird, and wrong, and it just made me realize how much I—”
Gods. I didn’t know if the words sounded worse in my head or out loud.
“How much I miss you,” I concluded, the pathetic desperation in my tone poorly evident.
The brokenness in his eyes granted me a taste of my own—the brokenness I’d felt ever since we’d broken up. The brokenness that could only be fixed by him. The brokenness that threatened to destroy me as I realized I’d ruined what I wanted all along.
Him.