AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Amusement curled Sebastian’s lips and lit up his dark-blue gaze behind his glasses. “You don’t know, do you?” he said.
Will smiled brightly. Couldn’t get away with anything in front of a lawyer. At least he could say he’d tried. “I have a fifty-fifty chance of being right,” Will pointed out. “Was I?”
“No idea,” Sebastian said, sliding the red onto the counter and putting the white back into the fridge. “I don’t know either. Caleb buys them, and I open them at random until they get miraculously restocked, and then I start again.”
“Don’t you have to go to dinners and schmooze with clients?” Will asked teasingly.
“Most of my clients are sitting in jail cells. Wining and dining are the last things on their minds.”
Will hadn’t thought of it like that. “What about the firm you work for?” he asked. He poured each serving carefully into the bowls. Presentation was important.
Sebastian pulled five wine glasses from the buffet cabinet. He kissed Will’s cheek as he passed, and Will’s heart brightened, his stomach fluttering.
“Dinner parties are a thing I actively try to avoid, but occasionally Monica and Caleb bully me. Mostly just for special occasions.”
Will used a finger to wipe up the sauce that had dripped over the side of the saucepan as he was pouring. He sucked it off as he asked, “Who’s Monica?”
“My guardian angel, also known as my assistant,” Sebastian explained. “Between her and Caleb, I have every minute of my day accounted for.”
“And Caleb is your… paralegal but also your friend?”
“Yes,” Sebastian said slowly. He was staring so intently at the bottle as he poured the glasses of wine, a dark cloud hanging over him, that Will wondered if he’d said something wrong. “I met Quinn through Caleb, actually.”
“Oh.” That sounded… messy. “They were friends?”
“They were passing friends? More than acquaintances but not meet-the-family friends.”
Despite trying to rationalise the level of friendship, Sebastian sounded like those words hurt. Will’s heart ached for him. For them both. He didn’t think that Quinn and Caleb were friends anymore, in any capacity.
“What… happened?” Will asked tentatively, not sure if he was stepping on toes or wading into territory where he wasn’t welcome. “Does that have something to do with when you and Quinn broke up?”
“Yeah.” Sebastian shrugged and then took a drink that emptied half a glass before filling it again. “No one came out of that situation clean.”
Will wasn’t really sure what situation they were talking about. He knew it had ended badly, but no one had really explained why. He didn’t want to rush them. He knew they would talk about it when they were ready. Or they wouldn’t. That was okay too. Sometimes the past needed to stay buried. Their present, and future, were more important than getting stuck in things that couldn’t be changed.
“What he means…” Quinn said, appearing in the kitchen with Persephone at his feet. She looked damp, and Will bet she’d snuck off to jump into the sea when Quinn wasn’t looking during their quick toilet walk. He looked better today. For the last few days, they’d forced him to rest and do nothing. Will had most enjoyed when they’d spread out on the couch and watched movies. He’d played with Quinn’s hair while Quinn read through some of the books that they’d found in the nook upstairs in Sebastian’s house. “… is that when I accused Sebastian of cheating on me with Riley, Caleb tried to defend him, and I said things to them both that couldn’t be taken back.”
Wait, what? “Riley as in Riley Sinclair, Peyton’s brother Riley?” Will asked, his mouth dropping open. As far as he knew, Riley and Quinn had been detective partners once upon a time before Riley had risen in the ranks. What did he have to do with Quinn and Sebastian’s fallout?
“It wasn’t like that,” Sebastian said stiffly.
“It was exactly like that.” Quinn slid the back sliding door closed. “You don’t need to sugarcoat it for my sake.”
“There’s no point rehashing the past,” Sebastian argued. “We agreed to move on from it, to not let past mistakes cloud what we’re doing now.”
“They still deserve to know where we came from. To know that I made a mistake. More than one.”
“You weren’t the only one that made a mistake,” Sebastian said.
“Becoming friends with someone I was close to wasn’t making a mistake, Sebastian. We can keep the blame solely where it belongs.”
Sebastian looked away, a muscle in his jaw twitching.
Will looked between them, feeling like he was still missing a large, important piece. “You didn’t… it wasn’t… you weren’t…” He faltered, unsure how to come out and say, “Did you cheat?” without looking like an asshole. Was it a valid question? He didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine Sebastian doing anything like that, now or then. Not with the way he looked at Quinn.
“No,” Quinn said. “Insecurities got the best of me.”
There still had to be more to it than that, Will was sure of it. Anyone could see that what they had togethermeantmore than that. A simple cheating accusation couldn’t have been enough to have it fall apart so spectacularly.
