Chapter 16 Sebastian
Jo looked up from her coffee and Bill looked up from his newspaper in response to the jingle of the bell above the door.
“What are you doing, Bill?” Sebastian asked as soon as he entered. He pulled off his jacket and hung it by the door before
walking up to their table, pulling out an empty chair, and swinging it around, slinging his leg over and sitting in it backward
right. Like invoking the power of youth and Bayside High would help him win the day. “What can you possibly hope to accomplish
with this little coup d’état?”
Bill returned his eyes to his paper. “As I see it, you and Doc are the ones staging the coup. You forced this whole thing
on us—”
“We voted!”
“—and come to that, I think we need to revisit the bylaws. Why should the mayor have the deciding vote?”
Jo sighed. “Then like I said, Bill, we can discuss that. Bring it up at a town meeting. Maybe we need to have a fifth person on council. Whatever. But the vote was fair—”
Old Man Kimball lowered his paper in a huff. “The vote , if you recall, Josephine, was supposed to be about Township Days. That’s what was on the agenda. I’m not even sure the vote
about the Cornell girl has any legal standing.”
Sebastian’s eyes grew wide as they locked with Jo’s, and she rolled hers and shook her head. Legal standing. Bill was one to be a stickler about legal standing, considering the number of times Jo had had to record into the minutes
things like, The quorum proceeded with the vote after Mr. Kimball dozed off.
“Where is she, anyway?” Jo asked. “Did she get scared away?”
No, she hadn’t gotten scared away. She’d probably had every right to refuse to go along with whatever this was, but she hadn’t
fought it.
“She’s out talking to Doc.”
The sight of her—tough, obstinate, often rude, usually infuriating Brynn Cornell—wrapped in Doc Atwater’s arms had taken him
off guard. Her face buried in his chest and her shoulders bouncing up and down. Heaving. With every heave resulting in Doc
holding her tighter.
He just hadn’t been prepared for that.
Bill harumphed under his breath. “Always the nice guy.”
“And what’s so wrong with being the nice guy, Bill?” Jo asked. She pushed up and adjusted in the wooden chair. “I’m as put
out with her as anyone. She made her choices, and she has to deal with the consequences of them. But I’m guessing she’s dealing
with a lot tougher stuff than you wanting to scold her and try to make her feel guilty, or whatever you’re doing. So if Doc’s
choice is to be nice to her, good for him. Someone needs to be.”
The bell over the door jingled again, and all three of them looked up.
Doc’s arm had guided Brynn in, but he stepped back slightly as they crossed over the threshold.
Orly trailed close behind, camera on his shoulder, but as soon as they all got inside, he crossed to the other side of the room and became nearly invisible in plain sight.
Sebastian met Brynn’s eyes, red and swollen from the tears and the wind, and offered her a smile.
Someone needed to.
She smiled back and then stepped toward them. Her focus wandered away from Sebastian, and he felt relieved as he let the grin
dissipate. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to smile at her, it was just that the expression didn’t match the way he was feeling
inside. For the first time, he realized he probably understood how she was feeling more than anyone else could.
She deserved to be yanked off the air. She absolutely deserved it. Just like he had deserved it. She deserved to be suspended.
Maybe even to be fired. They’d made the same mistake—each in their separate ways. They’d allowed the personal to encroach
the ground of the professional, and in doing so they’d broken one of the sacred rules of journalism. Even entertainment journalism. Sebastian had long ago accepted the consequences he’d had to face, and like Jo said, Brynn would have to come
to terms with hers too.
But she didn’t deserve to be bullied. She didn’t deserve to be sent on a wild-goose chase toward redemption that, if he knew
Bill Kimball, would always be out of reach. He’d keep dangling the carrot, just because he was a miserable old man who insisted
on company in his misery.
“Good morning, Mr. Kimball. It’s good to see you again.”
Brynn stepped up to the table and placed her hand on the top corner of Sebastian’s chairback, which his arms were crossed
on top of. He looked down at her slender, perfectly manicured fingers as they mindlessly traced the ornate etched pattern
of the wood, just an inch away from his arm.
“And, Mrs. Stoddard, I want to apologize again for how awkward I made things this morning. Thank you for your hospitality. It’s amazing what you’ve done with that house. It’s like it was always meant to be what you’ve made it.”
Sebastian was afraid to move. Afraid to breathe. Brynn had probably just grabbed on to the first tactile thing she could find.
She was probably trying to avoid fidgeting. She just needed something to do with her hands. She probably didn’t even realize
his arm was so close. And he didn’t want to move and unnecessarily jar her into awareness.
Then again, what if—in an absurd, messed-up turn of events—she felt like he , of all people, was the closest thing she had to an ally at the table. What if there was nothing mindless about the proximity
between their skin at all? Was it insane to believe that maybe he was providing her some small amount of comfort?
The small likelihood of that made him simultaneously hesitant and desperate to put some space between them.
“You might want to take a seat,” Bill ordered her under a thin veil of suggestion.
There were only the three chairs at the table, and Sebastian literally jumped at his opportunity to gracefully step away from
the possibility her finger would accidentally brush against his forearm.
“Here, take this one,” he whispered to her as he stood and with his right hand whipped his chair around to face the table
properly. It was a deft, smooth, seamless escape under the guise of chivalry and politeness. He nailed it. Or, rather, he
would have nailed it if, as his left hand offered her the chair, his right hand hadn’t landed on her lower back to guide her
to the seat.
She was wearing a big puffy coat. Maybe she hadn’t noticed.
Yeah . . . maybe she hadn’t noticed his hand, which was still lingering weightlessly, his fingertips barely brushing against the slick outer shell of her coat. But their sudden proximity to each other was pretty difficult to miss.
“Thank you,” she said softly as she tilted her chin up and met his eyes. It was all so quick, just a matter of seconds, and
he really would have had to be paying attention to notice the way the tip of her tongue darted out and wet her lips before
a subdued smile overtook them. The way her right canine tooth held on to the tiniest pinch of mauve lips just long enough
to then cause her to carefully maneuver her tongue to that tooth, just in case some lipstick had rubbed off. The pink flush
that rose from the bottom of her jaw to just under her eyes when she realized he was still looking down at her, not saying
a word.
He would have had to be paying an absurd amount of attention to catch any of that, and he hadn’t missed a thing.
“And thank you for not making me sit like I was A.C. Slater trying to avoid detention with Mr. Belding,” she added.
Her left eye fluttered closed in a nearly imperceptible wink, and then she sat down and scooted her chair forward to the table.
“No, it’s fine.” Doc nudged Sebastian aside good-naturedly as he came between him and Brynn with a chair from the two-top
across the way. “I’ll get my own chair.”
Sebastian was so startled by the sound of Doc’s voice—and a million other tiny things—that he stumbled backward a couple steps.
Only Doc seemed to notice, and he quirked his eyebrow.
“Um... sorry.” Sebastian cleared his throat. “I’ll be right back. Feel free to start without me.” He rounded the table
and headed toward the kitchen. Or the walk-in freezer behind the building. Maybe Montana.
He swung around the dividing wall and spotted Andi in the back corner, stirring a big pot of soup on her industrial oven.
She turned and faced him, and their eyes met just before Sebastian’s flew open in alarm.
He spun on his heel and hurried back around the dividing wall, and his gaze locked with Brynn’s instantly.
“Not that I know what is starting. And not that I even want to be part of it. I don’t. For the record. Whatever this is.”
She tilted her head and nodded. “Okay.” She was looking at him like he’d lost his mind. She was probably right. She raised
two thumbs-up into the air toward him. “Got it.”
Sebastian nodded his head once and tried to determine how to make a graceful exit, but of course that ship had long ago sailed.
“Cool. Cool, cool, cool.” He mirrored her thumbs-up. “Be right back.”
***
“What was that?” Andi was barely containing her laughter when he finally made his way back into the kitchen.
Sebastian shook his head and leaned against the far wall, then slid down until he was sitting on the cold black-and-white-checkered
linoleum. He couldn’t sink any farther, but he would have liked it very much if the Bean Franklin’s floor could have mystically
opened up, revealed a portal to, oh... just anywhere else, and swallowed him whole.
“I have no idea,” he muttered as he crossed his arms over his propped-up knees and lowered his forehead onto them. “One minute
I was completely annoyed by her, and the next we were bonding over our common interest in Saved by the Bell .”
Andi slid down and sat in the space between Sebastian and the upright glass-door refrigerator she mostly filled with homemade
pies.
“You bonded with Brynn Cornell?” She adjusted slightly so she was partially facing him. “Over Saved by the Bell ?”
Sebastian nodded into his arms. “She’s not aware of the fact, thank goodness.”