The next day she and Erica had run into Erica’s Tim and Seb together, and Mae had given him her best smile and asked, “How are you? Still useless?”
Seb had flushed slightly. “Pretty much.”
“Keep it up,” said Mae, and left with Erica starting to grin beside her. Since then Seb had been hanging around a little, and everyone, Mae included, had assumed it was just a matter of when Annabel would let Mae out of the house.
She’d been happy about it, but she didn’t need anyone who was going to hassle her little brother.
Mae squared her shoulders, pushed open the door to the arts building, and heard Seb’s voice begging.
“Please. Please don’t send me away.”
Mae reached behind her to pull the door closed as softly as she could. Seb’s back was to her, the phone to his ear. He was holding it with white knuckles, so tightly she thought it might break.
“Yes,” he said after a moment, breathless and desperate. He sounded much younger than he was. “Of course. I promise. I won’t ever do it again.”
He let out a deep breath that tore raggedly in the air.
Too soon for the person on the other end of the line to have said much, he added, “I’ll do anything you want!”
Time passed in the space of two more husky breaths, and then he said, hushed, “Yes. Yes, thank you.”
He snapped the phone shut, and then let his forehead rest against it.
“Hey,” Mae said behind him. “I’d say I couldn’t help hearing, but—I really could have. I was just shamelessly invading your privacy. Are you okay?”
Seb spun around, going white beneath his summer tan.
“Yeah,” he said shakily. “Yeah. I was just talking to my foster parents.”
Mae had known vaguely there was something going on with Seb’s home life, that he moved around a lot, but she hadn’t known there were foster parents.
“They all right to you?”
“Yeah,” Seb said again, a little less shaky this time. “Better than all right. The last few sets, not so much, but this lot have the works. Great people. Good food. The right address even: They live on Lennox Street.”
He had given her one brief, appalled look when he turned around and then looked down. For a moment he could occupy himself putting his phone in his pocket, but that left him staring at his empty palms. He kept his head down, tugging at a long sleeve. The cuff was a little frayed.
He always wore long sleeves, Mae realized with a jolt. He could be hiding bruises or even scars.
“They heard about me hassling Crawford,” Seb said, low. “They weren’t pleased. I was—I was scared they were going to send me away. And you saw me do it, I know that. You’re here to tell me to get lost.”
Mae forced herself to stop thinking about all the possible horrors in Seb’s past and concentrate on what she knew for sure. She knew whose side she was on.
“Yeah,” she said, in a much softer voice than she’d planned.
“I won’t do it again,” Seb burst out. “I’m not saying that to make you change your mind. I mean it. I’ve never hit him. I swear. I keep telling myself I have to stop, but he just gets right up my nose.”
“You’re not winning me over with this line of argument, I’ve got to tell you.”
Seb pulled on his sleeve again, threads coming away between his fingers. “It’s just—I remember things like learning to fight with a broken arm, learning to keep my head down, and I see Crawford walking around as if life is easy, running his mouth off at every opportunity, and I get furious. And I always—I get the feeling that he acts like that because he has some secret he’s able to hide from everyone; that when he makes all his jokes and acts helpless, he’s laughing up his sleeve at us.”
Mae took a moment to be extremely alarmed by Seb’s powers of observation.
“Jamie doesn’t have any secrets from me,” she said carefully.
Seb’s shoulders hunched inward a bit. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s no excuse. I know that. I always know, as soon as I calm down. And now I’ve let the people I live with down, and I let you down too. I—I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. And I understand if you don’t want to be around me anymore.”
He finally looked up from his sleeves, giving her just one apologetic glance before he turned and started packing his pencils and his large green sketchbook into his bag. Mae took a step closer to him, and then another.
Seb looked very startled when he turned around and found her beside him.
She gave him a small smile. “Look,” she said. “If you bother my brother again, well … maybe they’ll find your body one day. When exploring deep space. Bits of it, anyway.”
Seb laughed a little nervously and took a step backward and away from her.
“And I’m not going to date anyone who behaved the way you did,” Mae went on. “But—you were nice to me when I was having a tough time, and you’ve had a much worse time of it than I have. I’ll still be your friend. And I’ll see. Sound fair?”
Seb gave her that smile, beaming like a child. He looked happy and young and terribly handsome. On an impulse Mae reached out and took his hand. He started but let her keep it.
“I’d like that,” he said. “To be friends.”
“Wise decision,” Mae told him. “My beat-down would not have been at all sexy. I was just going to pulverize you and leave you a broken, sobbing wreck of a man.”
