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I freeze, holding his eyes, keeping quiet, listening like I promised him I would.
“So,” he sighs out, “I talked with Dr. Amy”—she’s the team’s lead physician—“had some tests run. That’s part of why I’ve been quiet this week—I had all these appointments and diagnostics to get through.”
Horrible, horrible fears streak through my brain. He’s sick. There’s something wrong with him. My heart does a terrible, constricting twist and starts to crumple in my chest.
“Since I was a kid,” he says, still rubbing his knuckles across his mouth, “my stomach, it’s always… I’ve always had these episodes where it just hurt like hell. Sharp, stabbing pain. Sometimes they were frequent. Then they’d go away for days, weeks. I’d get these aches all over, this dull, persistent headache. It was like a fog settled into my brain, and everything hurt. I’d just wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep. My stepdad, he’d tell me to toughen up, stop whining and lying around, said I was faking it to get attention, which was not fucking true… But I learned to push through it, ignore it, accept it.
“When I was in high school, I figured out weed helped the pain. Alcohol was a nice addition, just…numbed me right up.” He sniffs, dropping his hand, playing with his rings. “But lately, it’s just been so bad, I knew I couldn’t ignore it, so I told Dr. Amy all this, and she had a bunch of bloodwork done, some other tests, and turns out I have, of all the fucking things, celiac disease.”
Air whooshes out of me. I drop my forehead to the floor.
“Ziggy?”
I suck in a breath and sit up, blinking away evidence that I was on the verge of tears. “I thought you were about to tell me you were dying.”
He frowns at me. “Well, I mean, I might die of disappointment that I’ll never be able to eat another Milky Way again, which is one of about a million fucking things I can’t eat anymore. I won’t lie, I’m a little devastated. I fucking love Milky Ways. But no, I’m not dying.”
“Okay,” I breathe out, swallowing past the lump in my throat. “Excellent. Good. Great. I mean, it’s not great that you have celiac disease—that really is crap—but it’s, you know, good, that you’re not…dying.”
Sebastian leans in, elbows on his knees, his mouth tipped up at the corner. “Are you…crying?”
“No,” I tell him, reaching for my right leg and bending over it, which conveniently hides the fact that I might have a few tears about to leak out.
His foot nudges mine. I narrow my eyes up at him. That jerk’s smiling. For the first time, he’s really, truly smiling, all bright white teeth and long, deep dimples. It transforms him. Tiny crinkles at the corners of those lovely gray eyes, a slight dimple in his chin.
Of course, now is when he unleashes that devastating smile on me, when I’m having a crisis.
A crisis that I’ve only known this guy for two weeks, half of which we’ve spent mostly bickering while agreed we weren’t even real friend material, and yet I was about to lose my mind that something was seriously wrong with him.
“Sigrid,” he says, nudging my toe with his again. “You really catastrophized there, didn’t you?”
I clear my throat, shifting my stretch to the other leg, refusing to look at him. “Maybe.”
“Well, you don’t get to eulogize me quite yet.”
I glare up at him. “That’s not funny.”
Sebastian stares at me, his smile fading. “You’ve known me for two weeks. What would you have to miss?”
“Plenty of annoying things,” I tell him, nudging his foot back. “Your vain obsession with your hair. Your habit of deflecting authentic, honest communication with self-deprecating humor and sarcasm. Your…irritating tendency to surprise me with kindness when I had you all figured out as a self-absorbed jerk.”
His eyebrows lift. He stares at me. “I’m still a self-absorbed jerk,” he finally says. “Now I’m just a self-absorbed jerk with an autoimmune disease that fucks up my stomach.”
I sit back on the palms of my hands, staring right back at him. I’m learning Sebastian. Learning that words are his sword and shield. That he wields them fiercely to hold healing at bay. I see in him what I’ve seen in myself plenty over the past few years—a desperate desire to change, to heal and grow, and an even more desperate fear of what that takes, what it will look like…all the ways I might get hurt while I try.
So I don’t say anything in response to that familiar self-condemning comment. I can’t win this battle of words with Sebastian Gauthier. But maybe I can one day win the war through showing him I don’t believe what he says about himself, by showing him the good I see in him, through the simple act of time and presence, until I can only hope, one day Sebastian sees in himself what I see, too.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “Celiac disease, it sucks. I mean it’s good that you know now, so you can hopefully feel a lot better. But just because there’s a clear path for dealing with it going forward doesn’t mean it’s easy or fun or you can’t feel sad about not eating Milky Ways.”
“Or decent pizza,” he mutters, flopping back in the chair, picking up the novel I’d left there and fanning through the pages. “Or donuts. Or baguette. Or chocolate silk pie. Or a brioche bun.” He sets aside the book and rakes his hands through his hair. “It’s ridiculous that I’m this miserable about all the foods I can’t eat anymore. It’s just food.”
I nudge his toe with mine. “Food isn’t just food, though. It’s comfort and memory. It’s family recipes and meals shared with friends. Food is a fulcrum of socializing and relationships, and now you don’t get to just show up to that. You have to think ahead and tell people your dietary needs and explain them again when they’re lunkheads about it or, worse, well-meaning, but very poor at understanding it. You’ll probably end up accidentally eating something that hurts you every once in a while, and going to a restaurant will sort of suck until you find places that have nice gluten-free options. It’s a big deal. It’s a disease that’s interrupted and fundamentally altered your lifestyle, impacted your relationships. It’s very valid to be upset about that.”
He glances down at me and sighs. “Well, at least the ‘impacted relationships’ part isn’t at play, seeing as I don’t have any.”
“The hell you don’t,” I tell him, standing up, putting my hands on my hips. Sebastian stares up at me, eyes searching mine. “What am I, then? And Ren?”
Slowly, he sits up, too, and clasps the tips of my fingers. “Anyone ever told you that you’ve got the whole badass Valkyrie thing going, when you get fired up?”
