Chapter Nine
Sebastian – “What do you want me to say?”
Sebastian’s alarm went off too loudly.
It cut across the room, bouncing against the walls and drilling into his ears. The noise was unnecessary as he was already awake, flat on his back with his eyes fixed on the ceiling and both hands resting over his chest, feeling the steady, useless beat beneath his palms.
He hadn’t slept at all.
For a while, he had tried. He had let the apartment settle after Marcos left. Let the silence spread through the room and let his body drag him down into the kind of tiredness that usually took over whether he wanted it to or not.
Last night, it hadn’t. Every time he closed his eyes, something from the night came back too clearly. Marcos standing in the living room, breathing hard. Marcos’ hands on his face. Marcos staring at him after, mouth parted, chest heaving, exposed beneath Sebastian.
He pushed all of it away. Almost.
The part that stayed was the look.
Once it was over.
The quick drop behind Marcos’ eyes. The way his body had closed around itself too late, as if something had caught him from behind and dragged everything good out through his spine. Sebastian had known what it was before Marcos had even turned away.
He had seen that look on his own face before, staring back at him from the mirror in the bathroom of a stranger’s apartment.
Sebastian exhaled slowly and rolled onto his side to shut the alarm off. The phone screen was bright under his thumb, and before he could drop it again, a text notification caught his eye.
It was his sister, Loren.
Coffee?
Sebastian’s lip went white under the pressure of his teeth.
Loren didn’t text him without a reason. She wasn’t casual with him. Not anymore. Their relationship had settled into something that sat between siblings and distant friends.
She was older by a few years and had always sat closer to their parents. She had chosen differently to Sebastian.
He had no real issues with his parents now, not in a way that made sense to explain to other people. His father wasn’t the same kind of angry he’d been when Sebastian was small, and his mother wasn’t absent in the same way, either.
That didn’t change what had already happened, though.
Sebastian had moved in with his grandparents when he was eight. Loren had stayed. That had split something between them before either of them could really name it, and nothing since had quite closed the gap.
He pressed his thumb into the side of his phone, then replied.
When and where?
The message sent. He dropped the phone onto the bed beside him and lay still for another moment, staring at the line where the wall met the ceiling.
Marcos’ face tried to come back again.
Sebastian sat up before it could settle.
The morning shifted around him as he passed through it. A quick shower before pulling on a pair of jeans and a button-up shirt. A light breakfast because he didn’t have the energy to eat anything more than some toast.
He was scrolling endlessly on his phone when another text from his sister came through.
Now? @ Stella’s
Sebastian stared at the message, then sent back a thumbs up.
He pulled his shoes on, grabbed his keys, and locked the apartment behind him.
Stella’s was a short walk from his building and had become neutral ground for them after he moved to the city.
They didn’t meet often. Loren lived a few hours away, and Sebastian rarely made the effort to travel back.
It wasn’t because he didn’t want to see her; it was that most of the time when they spoke, the conversation turned into a lecture on how he should talk to their parents more and come home to see them.
Which he did. Sometimes. It was okay in small doses. Sebastian and his parents had never seen eye to eye, and the longer they spent with each other, the more obvious that was.
The street outside was already moving when Sebastian stepped onto it.
Morning had settled into the footpaths, people crossing around each other with coffees in hand, work bags over shoulders, students huddled groups with too much noise and throwing half-hearted apologies at people they bumped into.
Traffic crawled and surged in the same breath, music thudding from one car window before disappearing at the lights.
Sebastian joined the flow with his head down.
His hands were stuffed into his pockets as his fingers worked at the stitching.
He couldn’t completely stop his mind from dancing around from one thought to another, or pulling a memory of Marcos’ face watching him from the couch, or standing in his doorway.
Each time he forced one thing out, another took its place. Each one clearer than the last.
The way Marcos’ chest rose and fell before he stepped to kiss Sebastian. The pressure of Marcos’ lips. The way it had felt to have Marcos’ hands on his face, in his hair, on his throat. How Marcos had smelled and how he tasted.
Sebastian’s fingers dug harder into his pocket’s stitching, enough that his fingernail bent back too far and he hissed in pain. The sound caught on the wind and melted away in the chaos of the morning.
He continued through the city, weaving around people and turning down streets until he walked under a green awning with a sign reading Stella’s. The front windows were open to the morning, and the smell of coffee rolled out with the sound of cups, machines, and people talking over one another.
He pushed through the door and scanned the crowded café. He couldn’t see Loren. He walked to the counter and ordered a cappuccino for himself and a latte for Loren, then found a table off to the side, sitting against the wall.
The conversation around him blurred into a distorted mess in his head as voices overlapped, plates and cutlery clattered, and chairs scraped. It did nothing to dull what was already happening in his mind, and he was soon picking at the edges of the wooden table.
His gaze shot up when the server came to place the drinks on the table. Her glasses perched high on her nose, and she flashed a quick smile at Sebastian before walking back behind the counter.
Sebastian’s eyes dropped both drinks, pushing the latte in front of the other seat and looking down at the froth of his own drink, watching the artwork swirl as the liquid settled.
“Hey.” Loren’s voice came low and controlled, cutting through everything else.
Sebastian lifted his eyes, meeting hers.
Her dark hair was pulled into a ponytail, and her round glasses framed her face as she stared back, sinking into the seat opposite him.
Loren and Sebastian looked too similar, and despite their age difference, they had been mistaken for twins before.
He always said it was because she looked more masculine.
She disagreed.
“Hey,” Sebastian said, adjusting himself on his seat, shuffling back and straightening.
“You still remember what I liked,” Loren pointed out, picking up the latte and taking a sip.
“I have my moments.”
Loren placed her mug back on the table. Her gaze ran over him, slow and careful, stopping exactly where he didn’t want it to stop. The bruises under his eye and along his jaw, which had almost completely faded, but were still visible. His knuckles when his hand shifted around the mug.
“What happened to your face?”
Sebastian’s hand went to his cheek before he could stop it. He touched the edge near his eye, pushed his glasses up, then rested both palms face down on the table.
“Training,” Sebastian lied. “Gets rough.”
Loren scoffed. “You lie like Dad.”
That hit harder than Marcos’ shoulder had.
Sebastian knew she hadn’t meant it in the worst way.
Loren could be careless when she was annoyed, but she wasn’t cruel for sport.
Still, the words landed in the exact place they needed to, and his jaw clenched before he could stop it.
He had spent most of his life trying not to become his father in the ways that mattered.
Being compared to him, even loosely, made something sharp press against Sebastian’s ribs.
He shook his head and wrapped one hand around his mug. “What’s up? Why did you wanna see me?”
“Can’t just want to see my brother?” Loren questioned, taking another sip of her drink.
Sebastian scanned the café. “Not usually.”
Loren inhaled deeply through her nose, and that was when he knew whatever she had come to say wasn’t small. Her fingers stayed around her mug, but she didn’t lift it again. She looked past him, toward the window and the people moving outside, then back at him.
“Dad’s sick. Not seriously, they don’t think. But he needs surgery.”
For a moment, the café noise thinned around him.
Sebastian kept his hand on the mug. The ceramic was too hot against his palm, but he didn’t move. He watched Loren’s mouth after she finished speaking, as if there might be something else coming to help the words settle more easily.
There wasn’t.
“Sick?” Sebastian clicked his tongue. “What kind?”
“Tumour. On his neck. They’re doing tests to see if it’s spread and all that.”
Sebastian dropped his gaze to the foam in his mug. The word ‘tumour’ seemed to take up too much space. It sat there between them, larger than the small table, larger than Loren’s careful tone.
His first thought was not clean enough to say.
His second wasn’t much better.
His father had always seemed too solid for illness. As though sickness would just bounce off him and fall to someone else.
His father was work boots left by the door, heavy footsteps, hands that could fix things and break them with the same blunt confidence. He was a voice from another room. A door shutting too hard. A man who had learned later than he should have that being tired didn’t excuse being angry.
Sebastian ran his finger around the rim of his mug and felt the heat creep into his skin.
“Okay,” he finally said, meeting his sister’s gaze again.
Loren’s eyebrow lifted. “That’s it?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. I just thought you’d have more to say.”
“I’ve got a lot of other shit going on at the moment.”