Chapter 18 Sebastian
Sebastian
My stomach growled at the smell of greasy fried food as the server walked by with someone else’s order.
Luke, Wyatt, Reid, and Wes were all free tonight in a rare turn of fates.
We hadn’t gotten together, just us guys, in a while.
It took a weird amount of convincing to get everyone to agree.
Scarlett was seven months along and felt great, but Luke still acted like the baby could come at any minute, and he was hesitant to leave her side.
Wyatt had to wait until after the girls were asleep so that he didn’t saddle Maeve with all of the work getting them down to bed.
Reid and Claire were joined at the hip most of the time, and prying him away for a couple of hours was like pulling teeth.
Wes’s issue was never lady related—he didn’t date, so that was never a factor—but he’d managed to close two of his investigations this week and was able to take a night off.
I was the first to arrive at Harpoon’s and sidled up to the bar for a beer.
Allie Hitchcock gave me a sweet smile, her gaze lingering a little too long, from a few seats down.
Allie and I had had some fun in the past, a couple of times.
She was good people, and she understood the arrangement.
She wasn’t looking for anything from me other than to satisfy her needs, repeatedly.
“Seb, I haven’t seen you around much. How’s things been?” she asked as she slipped into the seat beside me.
“Allie.” I dipped my chin to her with a smirk. The tip of her finger circled the rim of her glass. Her blue nails were as long as talons, and I wondered how she got anything done with them. “Things have been good. What’s new with you?”
“Same old, same old. I was in a relationship for a bit, but that’s over now.” She shrugged. “It’s funny. I was actually just talking about you the other the day.”
“Oh yeah? All good things, right?” I winked.
“There isn’t a bad word I could say about you,” she laughed. “We had a lot of fun together.” She gave me a look that told me she wasn’t talking about hanging at Harpoon’s or at a bonfire by the beach. “I miss having fun.”
Where a surge of lust would usually roll through me, I felt nothing.
Allie was a great time, as a person and in the bedroom, but the idea of hooking up with her just wasn’t appealing to me tonight.
Not when I still had the taste of Lydia burned into my mind.
My dick perked up at that thought, clearly not broken despite his lack of interest in the sure thing on the side of me.
Lydia was gone from my room when I got out of the shower, and she didn’t come by the shop all day. That didn’t stop my mind from wandering in her direction time and time again, the memory of her moaning my name, my fingers buried in her sweet, wet pussy playing on repeat.
Just as my thoughts turned dirty, the door to Harpoon’s opened, and in walked Luke. Not that I wanted to be caught daydreaming about the Wilder sister in front of any of her brothers, but it felt worse when it was Luke. He knew my history with women, and he still trusted me with Lydia.
Maybe I was thinking about it all wrong, actually. Maybe Luke would be fine if Lydia and I got together. Happy for us, even. We were all adults.
“Allie, it’s been nice catching up. Go have some fun.
” I winked, grabbing my beer from Ronnie behind the bar.
She was back with one for Luke, and I asked her to start a tab and threw down my card.
It felt good to be able to do that for the first time in months.
Business had been good lately. I seemed to have found a niche in the female segment, and I was pretty sure it had something to do with the dumb-ass photoshoots that Lydia made me do.
Lydia’s taste on my tongue. Money in my bank account.
Things were looking good for me.
“Hey, Allie,” Luke said, getting to the bar before I had a chance to meet him halfway.
“Hey, Luke.” She smiled.
“Grab that table before we lose it,” I told him, handing him his beer. There was only one large table left in the bar area, otherwise we would need to move to the dining room. Luke raised his brow but didn’t comment on my quick getaway.
“Wyatt’s right behind me. I just got off the phone with him,” he said when we got to our table. “I wanted to check with you before he gets here. How’s Lydia doing?”
“You talk to her all the time,” I laughed.
“Yeah, and she tells me what I want to hear every single time. You live with her. You have better insight.”
Not as much insight as I’d like. “She’s good. She seems happy, but it’s not like we’re sitting down together to talk about our feelings every night. She’s been working on a project for SD Ink though, and I think she’s really into it.”
“She hasn’t mentioned going back to New York?”
My head snapped up. Panic clawed up my throat, and I had to cool my reaction before I gave anything away. “No. Not to me. Why, did she say something to you about it?”
My bouncing foot shook the floor beneath me. I put my hand on my knee to stop it from shaking. Was Lydia talking about packing it up again? She came home, regrouped, and now she’d be gone again. Just when things between us were finally good.
“No. I checked with my dad too. She hasn’t said anything. I just don’t want to be blindsided if she up and leaves again. I like having her home. I want her to be here to meet her nephew. Be the fun auntie to Jane and Veda.”
I let out a controlled breath slowly. I had to physically unclench my jaw, which I didn’t even realize I had tensed.
Wyatt walked up to the table just then, followed by Wes.
“Hey, man.” I greeted them each. Wes took a seat beside Luke, both of them opting to face the door like they usually did. Wyatt started for the bar, so I told him to add his and Wes’s drinks to my tab.
He grinned at me proudly and nodded his head. “Alright, brother. Thanks.”
Reid rolled in with his hair damp and messy, dirty jeans, and a hoodie thrown over his shoulder.
“Christ, kid. Did you just get off a jobsite?” It was after 8:00 p.m. on a Saturday night; I couldn’t imagine what job he would be working on that went that late.
“Yes,” he grumbled, stealing the last seat at the table. Wyatt came back and put down his drinks before going to a neighboring table, using his classic smirk and wink to flirt his way into stealing a chair. Reid downed Wyatt’s beer without stopping to breathe.
“What the fuck, brother? That was mine,” Wyatt complained.
“I earned it,” Reid shot back, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I just came from your house. Whit pulled out all the plumbing in your bathroom and replaced it with PVC. I reinforced some walls where he had to cut through to access things. Finished the drywall, mudded the walls. Don’t you know I hear water coming from somewhere when it should have been shut off. ”
“Where was it coming from?” Wyatt asked, his brow furrowed.
“The fucking basement. It was pouring down there. I found a secondary shutoff and had to call Whit back in to figure out what the hell was happening.”
“Why didn’t you go home and take a shower before coming out? You look like a mess,” Luke said.
Reid glared at Luke and reached for Wes’s beer.
Wes just chuckled and slid his beer over to Reid.
It wasn’t like he really wanted it anyway.
Wes would nurse that drink all night before switching over to something nonalcoholic.
“It was either change into whatever I had in my truck,” Reid said, gesturing to his current outfit, “or go home and shower. Ideally with my wife. And I wasn’t leaving that house again for the night. ”
“And you chose us.” I grinned, knowing it was going to annoy him even more. “How sweet.”
He rolled his eyes and took a large sip from his second beer, this time refraining from guzzling it down in one gulp.
“I’ll grab you both another round,” I said to Wyatt and Wes. “I’m going to throw in an order of chips too. Does anyone want anything else?” I asked.
“I’ve got the food tonight,” Luke said, pulling out his card.
It was common for us to split the tab that way, but it irked me that it was Luke who offered.
He was the most familiar with my financial troubles, even though he didn’t know the full extent of it.
All the other guys knew things weren’t great to some degree, but I wasn’t exactly flaunting my troubles around town.
Still, Luke offering to pay felt like a misguided form of pity to save me the embarrassment of getting my card declined… again.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got it. Whatever Lydia’s been doing lately seems to be working. Things have seriously picked up at the shop.”
“Nah, you already got the first round of drinks. Let me,” he insisted.
“Seriously, Luke. I’ve got it,” I said, just shy of snapping at him.
He opened his mouth again, but Wyatt cut him off.
“Let the man buy us food, brother. Drop it.”
I headed to the opposite side of the bar, away from where Allie was sitting. The bar was too crowded to squeeze my way through. Not without throwing a few elbows, at least. I caught Ronnie’s eye and gestured for three more beers and a basket of chips and salsa.
“Hi.” A pretty young blonde girl batted her lashes my way.
She was with a group of other young ladies who all looked like they were putting their drinks down like it was a race.
Mostly empty multicolored frozen drinks lined the bar in front of them.
“You probably get this all the time, but I love your tattoos.” She reached out as if to run her finger across them but stopped.
Her big doe eyes looked up at me from her stool. “Can I touch them?”
“Sure.” I smiled. I appreciated the fact that she asked first. Most women would have just gone for it. “I have to warn you though, they don’t feel like much. The ink is in the skin, so it feels exactly the same.”