70. Seb
SEB
He’d never felt like this before, simultaneously burning up and cold to his bones.
When she hadn’t answered the phone, he’d beaten a path back to Millay Tower, changed, pulled his contacts from their dry grip on his eyeballs, and grabbed his keys, only to find that his car was buried under a mountain of white and that nothing was plowed anyway. So he ran.
And here was Lily, blocking her doorway, not inviting him in, staring at him like he was an alien. Something was wrong. He’d done something wrong, and now he had to figure out what it was and atone appropriately.
It hadn’t seemed wrong. It had seemed perfect, as close as you could realistically get when faced with the unsexy reality of condoms. Nothing, really, compared to it.
Even the best with Conrad wasn’t anywhere near the same stratosphere.
Looking back, he could see now how young, how idiotic he was—how much he’d been in love with the idea of Conrad, of what he wanted Conrad to be.
But Lily…he’d marveled at her softness and warmth, the way their bodies fit together, as if ordained by Magic itself.
It had been so good—all of it—not just the sex, and it was made better by the fact that it would only get better as they learned how to turn each other into putty beneath the other’s hands.
“Okay?” she repeated after him, like she’d never heard the word before.
“Why’d you leave?” Desperately, he took a step forward; she took a step back. “Was it…bad? Did I do something wrong?”
His chest ached. His heart knew better than his brain to start cracking open.
He didn’t know what was happening, exactly, but heartbreak was clearly the inevitable outcome.
He was going to get dumped on her porch, right after the first time they had sex.
He was going to cry. He was going to break apart and blow away with the next strong breeze.
“Come on,” she said, stepping back, and for a moment he was relieved, until she slipped on her boots and led him down the hall and through the kitchen.
He tried not to stare as she led him down the oak-trimmed hallway, past the strangely grand staircase and the oddly long living room, into the shockingly small kitchen, where all three of them—him, Lily, Lily’s mom—pretended not to notice each other.
In the way of most Victorians, the floor plan made no sense for modern living.
It was all stuffy, empty grandeur and weird spots to hide the servants.
Seb followed Lily into a backyard bigger than he expected, covered in drifts of white.
She trudged to an old swing set, flipped the swing’s seat, then brushed away the remaining snow.
He stood in front of her, waiting. Hands fisted in her sweatshirt, she grabbed the chains and began to sway idly back and forth.
“Lily,” he said, trying to speak around the dam in his throat. “What’s happening? What happened?”
She looked up at him, her face pale.
“Are you breaking up with me?” he asked softly.
Better to just get it over with. He could spend the rest of break getting shit-faced in the city with Asher and Tori. Mrs. Vis wouldn’t mind having him. Or he could stay at the townhouse if Reg wasn’t using it, but he didn’t really want to be alone.
Lily looked kind of like she wanted to laugh. Instead, she tipped her face to the blank sky and bit her lip, collecting herself. She breathed in hard once, then faced him, gaze level, strong as ever, except for the tears swimming in her eyes.
She wiped her nose with one sweatshirt-mittened hand. “Do you still want to know my curse?” Her voice frogged.
He stared at her. Somehow he’d forgotten, assumed it wasn’t relevant, assumed it was…
assumed. His heart beat very fast. He opened his mouth.
Nothing came out. She nodded with pursed lips, and he wanted to throw himself at her, derail the train.
It was like the one car crash he’d ever been in—realizing everything was fucked just a split second too late to do anything about it.
“It’s not my curse, actually. Technically. It’s my mother’s. They were clever that way. Two birds, one stone.” She sounded manic.
He could tell, from the way she was stalling, spinning out in the details, that she’d never told anyone.
“Lily…” he pleaded.
“Right.” She did a strange little repetitive head bob, and he wondered, briefly—as awful as whatever this was for him, how much worse it was for her. “I’m going to die.”
He blinked at her.
“Sorry, I’m cursed to die. In June.”
“Which June?” he said stupidly, imagining one five, ten, fifty years down the line.
“This one.”
His mind went suddenly blank of emotion, ruthlessly rational in its effort to protect him. “How do you know?”
She recited, “You will lose that which you hold most precious in the year of the Chalice on the full Wanderer’s Moon.”
“That’s what they cast on your mom?”
“Yeah.”
“So, how do you…oh.” Of course.
Lily had a normal family—well, normal-ish—with at least one parent who loved her unconditionally. Wasn’t it writ in stone somewhere that there was no love greater than that between a mother and her child?
“And the full Wanderer’s Moon. That’s midsummer. Almanacs, you know.”
She stared at him.
He stared at her.
“I should have told you, I just…”
His face was wet. He brought his fingers to his cheek and realized he was crying.
His body, again, getting it before his brain.
His glasses fogged. His brain stopped protecting him then, all that armor of rationality stripping away and clattering to the ground.
Lily kept staring at him, and in that moment he hated her as much as he loved her.
He loved her.
“Fuck!” he screamed it into the sky, at the maples branching her backyard. The snow muffled his anguish. He shouted it again, his voice cracking. His spine curled in on itself, and he shuddered violently.
“Fuck, Lily. Fuck.”
When he gathered the nerve to look at her, she was crying silently, tears hovering on her chin.
“How could you do this?” he whispered, staring at her until she was forced to meet his gaze.
“I didn’t think…I never.” Her shoulders shook. She looked so small, in her sweatshirt, in the snow, on the swing. She was so young.
“All this time working on the fucking Elumnara and we could have been looking for a cure, for answers, for anything!”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“How…” He shook his head, staring. “How could it not matter? How could you possibly think that?”
“Why?”
“Because I love you!” he snarled, the words ripped out of him in exactly the opposite way he’d been planning to say them. Lily flinched.
He’d stopped himself from telling her a thousand times, five hundred of them last night alone.
He hadn’t wanted to overwhelm her, pressure her.
He’d been in love with her for months now.
Had known it concretely since the Halloween dance, but it had probably been true longer.
That night was just when he’d willingly jumped off a cliff with an anvil strapped around his stomach.
She was quiet for a long time, staring at the ground.
“I’m sorry, Sebastian. I’m so sorry.” She stood up. “I thought it would be better this way, and I was wrong, and—” She took a step forward, reaching for him.
He couldn’t.
“I have to go.”
He turned, just as her hand brushed his sleeve, and walked away.