CHAPTER 26
Maya
“THIS IS YOUR FAULT.” I STORMED INTO THE HOTEL, MY wet shoes squeaking with every step. “I can’t believe you got me banned from my own cousin’s wedding.”
“The wedding is basically over, and we weren’t banned.” Sebastian kept pace with me. Of course, his shoes didn’t squeak, even though he was equally drenched. “We’re on a temporary timeout.”
Like we were children. Lovely.
The boat rides had ground to a halt after our group was unceremoniously dumped into the water. Radhika had been sympathetic, but my furious aunt had sent us back to the hotel so Sebastian and I could change and “sort our issues out with minimal disruption to the party.”
I’d never been so chastened or mortified. Neither had my parents. I was going to get an earful from them once we were alone, but I’d deal with that later.
For now, I had to shower, change out of my clothes, and, oh, kill Sebastian Laurent.
I slanted a sideways glare at him. His shirt was soaked to transparency. Water droplets dotted his tanned skin and dripped from his dark, disheveled hair, but unlike me—who looked like a drowned rat—he looked like he’d stepped out of a beach-themed GQ photoshoot.
The injustice continued.
I averted my eyes before he caught me staring, but that landed my gaze on the nearby stairwell entrance—the same one where we’d kissed last night.
And more, a sneaky voice whispered in my head.
Blood rose to my neck and chest. I jabbed at the elevator call button, doing my best to tamp down the memory of Sebastian’s lips on my skin.
The doors opened, and we stepped inside. Despite the chill from my damp clothes, his body heat enveloped the small space.
I almost wished my aunties would pop up again so they could serve as a buffer between us, but no such luck. The doors closed, the elevator rumbled into motion, and the heat thickened to unbearable levels.
I stared straight ahead. The stainless-steel doors warped our reflections, but I could see Sebastian looking at me.
“You forgot to press the button,” I said when he didn’t call for his floor.
“I didn’t. We need to talk.”
A sliver of dread curled in my chest. I’d known it was coming, but I’d hoped to avoid it somehow. Morning-after conversations were always awkward, but with Sebastian, it was guaranteed to be painful.
Last night hadn’t been a one-night stand with some random I’d met at a bar.
It’d been… transformative. And terrifying.
It’d stirred up feelings I wished I didn’t have, and I didn’t want to talk about them because that would make them real.
Real things could be broken; hypotheticals couldn’t.
If I had a choice, we’d return to our status quo and pretend what happened didn’t matter.
“You should change first,” I said in an attempt to delay the inevitable. I needed time to gather my thoughts or, ideally, hole up in my room until Sebastian got tired of waiting for me.
“Fuck changing,” he said. “I’m not letting you lock yourself in your room so you can try to wait me out.”
“I wasn’t going to do that,” I lied, but I didn’t protest again as we got off on my floor and entered my suite.
It was twenty times larger than the elevator, but Sebastian’s presence expanded to fill the space.
It followed me into the bathroom, where I quickly changed into dry clothes, and it doubled in potency when I rejoined him in the living area, sweatshirt in hand.
He was still standing by the door, but the weight of his gaze compressed the air into something thick and heavy.
I tossed the sweatshirt at him, making sure to keep a few feet of distance between us.
He caught it easily with one hand. He looked at it, then looked back at me. His expression was inscrutable.
“I forgot to give it back to you after Vermont. I only brought it with me because I knew I would see you,” I said.
I didn’t mention how I sometimes wore it at home because it was so comforting, and I could still smell him when I buried my nose in the thick material. It’d somehow become an emotional support item, but I couldn’t keep it. Not after last night.
“We live in the same city,” Sebastian said.
I didn’t have an answer to that.
He walked toward me, his stride unhurried but deliberate. An electric current sparked with every step, and when he came within touching distance, it took everything I had not to bury my face in his chest the way I had in his sweatshirt.
“Do you regret what happened last night?” His question was calm, even, but I detected an underlying hint of uncertainty that made my chest crack.
I wished the answer were a simple yes or no.
Our kiss had blown every other kiss I’d had out of the water; that was undeniable.
Sebastian’s touch set me on fire the way no one else’s could, and I’d never felt as alive or wanted as when I was with him.
The nagging doubts in my head had quieted, and I’d experienced what it was like to be with someone who desired me as much as I desired him.
In an ideal world, I’d let myself fall completely and see where we landed.
But that was my heart talking. My head insisted on spinning a thousand scenarios of what would happen if I gave in to my emotions, and only a handful of them were good.
If I took this further with Sebastian, our relationship would change forever.
Maybe it already had, but it was still potentially salvageable.
For better or for worse, he’d always been the one constant in my life.
I didn’t want to risk that certainty for something that might or might not pan out.
What if last night had simply been the conclusion to years of tension masquerading as something more? Would Sebastian still be interested later, once the lust cleared and he got me out of his system?
With the countdown to my engagement deadline ticking, I had to evaluate every choice I made. Even if we did give this a shot, was I willing to put a stake in the ground and say he was the one I wanted to marry someday?
A storm of conflicting emotions roiled inside me.
Sebastian’s expression wavered the longer my silence stretched on.
“I’ll answer first,” he said, his eyes never leaving mine. “I don’t. If I could rewind time and spend the night with anyone in the world, I’d still choose you. Every time.”
His words rattled in my veins. “Why?” I whispered.
“Why what?”
“Why do you want to be with me?” I gestured between us. “We’re always fighting. Always competing. We can’t even enjoy a boat ride without it ending in disaster.”
“I don’t mind a little disaster. It keeps things interesting,” he said with a faint smile, but his face sobered when he spoke again.
“I know you’re scared, but we owe each other the truth.
The real truth. So this is me laying all my cards on the table.
I want to be with you. Through every season, every iteration of our relationship…
it’s always been you. I’m tired of pretending it’s not.
And you’re right—we’re always fighting and competing, but that’s why I like you.
You challenge me in a way no one else does, and you see me in a way no one else has.
Sometimes you drive me up the wall, but you’re never boring.
You are… my match in every way. You make me feel alive, none more so than last night.
It meant something to me, and I think it might’ve meant something to you too.
So the question now is…” His Adam’s apple bobbed with a hard swallow. “Whether you feel the same.”
My heart thundered in my ears. The room seemed to tilt as my brain struggled to process his words.
This was Sebastian as vulnerable as I’d ever seen him. The mystery cloaking him had been stripped away, leaving him raw and unguarded and waiting—for me.
Different responses clawed at my throat, but fear held them hostage.
If I said no, I’d lose him now.
If I said yes, I might lose him in the long run, when it would be infinitely more painful.
“I…” Panic washed over me. Darkness dotted the edges of my vision; my lungs strained for air. “I don’t… I can’t…”
I felt it before I saw it—the moment he shut down.
The glimmer of hope vanished from Sebastian’s eyes. His expression shuttered, and it was like an eclipse had blotted out the sun. I was so used to basking in his warmth that the sudden plunge in temperature sent me reeling.
“Right,” he said. “I guess I have my answer.” A bitter laugh leaked out. “I should’ve known. I thought that after the past few months… It’s been so long since the letter… I thought that things might’ve changed. But of course they haven’t. It was my fault for thinking otherwise.”
My stomach lurched. “What letter?”
Sebastian stared at me, his jaw tight.
“Seb.” I was tipping into free fall, my pulse roaring in my ears. “What letter?”
His face grew cold. “You know, Maya, you’re entitled to your feelings,” he said quietly. “But I was honest with you, and I thought you’d at least have the decency to not pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.” He dropped his sweatshirt on the floor. “Keep it. I don’t want it.”
He walked out.
Hot tears blurred my vision, and I stood there trembling, stunned by how quickly everything had fallen apart.
I wanted to reach for Sebastian’s sweater in his absence, but it would’ve been cold comfort.
No matter what I did, I’d lost him anyway.
When I ventured out of my room again, it was nighttime. I’d missed the rest of the day’s activities after the boat ride, but if I didn’t make it to the last dinner, my parents really would kill me.
I walked into the restaurant, my chest numb. I’d managed to gather my composure in the hours after Sebastian left, but he still plagued my thoughts—the rawness of his confession, the hurt in his eyes when I didn’t reciprocate, the cold finality in his voice before he walked away.
Despite his parting words, I truly didn’t know what he meant by “the letter.” I’d never received a letter from him; I’d remember if I had. Right?
“What’s wrong with you?” Neha asked when I arrived at our table. My parents were sitting with my aunties and uncles, but my sisters and I were sequestered to the side with a few of our cousins. “You look like hell.”
“Thanks a lot.” I took the seat next to her and scanned the dining room.
Less than two hundred of the original two thousand guests had been invited to stay for the last day of activities.
Most were relatives, but I spotted Sebastian’s parents at a table with some other close family friends.
Sebastian himself was nowhere to be seen.
My heart sank. I kept an eye on the door, but he was still missing in action after appetizers were served.
“Do you know where Sebastian is?” I asked.
Neha wasn’t close with him, but she had a way of knowing everyone’s business.
Her eyebrows rose. “Didn’t he tell you? He left earlier this afternoon. Went back to New York for some emergency.”
A sharp ache knifed through my lungs. “Oh,” I said, my voice small.
He was gone. He’d left, and he hadn’t so much as said goodbye.
What did you expect? He was hardly going to shower me in farewell hugs after the way we left things. But in the past, even in the fiercest depths of our rivalry, he would’ve never left without telling me first.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and forced myself to take another bite of food. It tasted like cardboard.
It wasn’t like Sebastian had set off on a year-long trip to the wilderness. He’d gone back to New York, where we both lived. I was due to fly back tomorrow myself, and we still had to see each other at work.
But his abrupt departure was a clear statement: he was done with me.
I didn’t blame him. He’d laid it all out on the table, and I couldn’t even give him a straight answer.
I used to say I hated him, but I hated myself more.
I blinked back another onslaught of tears as I shoveled more food into my mouth. Some of it went down the wrong pipe, and I broke into a fit of coughs.
Neha’s eyebrows pinched together. “Are you okay?” Her usual sharpness softened somewhat. “Did you two get into a fight again?”
I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak.
“If you did, you’ll get over it,” she said. “You two fight all the time.”
Not like this. A fight would have been easier. It was one and done.
This… this was something else, and I wasn’t sure we could come back from it.
But I had to try.
My despondency hardened into resolve.
I was the one who kept running away, and honestly, I still didn’t know how to deal with his confession. It hadn’t fully sunk in yet. But I refused to believe this was the end. Sebastian and I had been through too much and known each other for too long for this to be it.
I’d find a way to fix things. I always did.
But first, I had to figure out what letter he was talking about.