35
GWEN
By the time Sebastian filled the hole and got me back to my car, it was 5 a.m.. The goodbye was awkward. He stammered over his words. I didn’t say much of anything. Honey and I loaded in, and I watched him watch us head off down the driveway through my rearview mirror.
I couldn’t grasp it all. On a rational level, I understood everything that had happened in the last few hours. But it hadn’t settled in.
The only thing about killing David that made my stomach hurt was the fact that I didn’t feel anything. How could I be so cold? Why did I care so little about another human life? Shouldn’t I have had some empathy for him as well?
But Sebastian had the words for it. Words I’d said and thought but never seemed valid until they came from his lips.
I hated it. I didn’t do any of it because I liked it. I did it because it needed done. And I hated that it needed done.
There were few people alive who could understand, but he did. Sebastian understood it because he felt it. We had stood in the same shoes.
But they weren’t the same. Not really.
Sebastian was someone I’d chosen, someone I loved, because I saw normalcy in him. I saw stability and consistency. There was good, so much good, in him.
Until now, I couldn’t imagine Sebastian being a violent man. Until he had hit me, I couldn’t have imagined Troy a violent man either. But he was. Clearly, Sebastian could be as well.
To top it all off, he had aided in David’s murder at the start of our relationship. We’d gone on our first date only a day after, and he’d disguised it. Not only had he disguised his involvement, but he’d disguised a huge part of himself from me.
Of course, I had done the same thing.
But holy shit, Sebastian wasgoodat it.
Then again, was he? When he’d told me I looked like shit in the café that day, he was referencing the fact that I’d been up all night after killing a man. Had he been giving me an opportunity to open up? Had he debated telling me about his involvement?
No, he couldn’t have. He’d already had the burner in his pocket. He’d texted me just after we’d exchanged that longing smile as he left the building.
Sebastian had premeditated tormenting me with those texts. He said he was just trying to help, he hadn’t intended to terrify me the way those texts had, but intent and impact were separate things.
Then again, he’d done this before. He’d refused to tell me details because that’s what had kept him safe after he’d killed Jason.
Holyshit, he’d killed Jason.
Not the way I had killed David. Not to defend himself. Sebastian had planned it for the right reasons, but he’d lost control. In a red doused rage, he’d beaten the man to death with his bare hands.
Then he’d chopped off half his face and hands. The hands and face of a man he’d once called a friend.
Was I supposed to pretend that didn’t terrify me?
Sebastian was a surgeon. If blood and guts disgusted him, he couldn’t do his job.
But he’d done that before becoming a surgeon, when he was just a college student.
I’d seen the man tear up at roadkill. He was not some lunatic who enjoyed the gory suffering of others.
It needed done. I hated that it needed done.
Did it change who he was? No. He was still exactly who he told me he was. He warned me about that damn pedestal, and I still held him up on it. That was my bad.
Knowing this fractured the sculpture I had molded of him in my mind. This was just a new lens to view him through.
Was I seeing him through a lens at all? Or was I looking in a mirror?
It was almost poetic that he’d lain David in the same grave as Jason. Like a way to say, “If you go down, I’m going with you.”
