Page 51 of The One Decent Thing

He shook against me, tremors running through his limbs like he had a high fever. And he wasn’t saying anything. I flashed back to the drive to Santa Rafaela from the prison, how he’d been catatonic in the passenger seat. Oh, this was bad.

Since he’d gone mostly limp, except for the shaking, I got one arm around his waist and the other around his thighs and half-carried, half-dragged him to the couch. Last time I’d kept my distance.

Fuck it, not this time. He was mine, and I was going to take care of him the best way I knew how.

It took a while, with him curled up in my lap with his head on my shoulder, for the shaking to stop. I stroked his back and whispered nonsense to him the whole time, mostly how much I liked him, and all the reasons why. I’d gotten through a long list, starting with his beautiful eyes and ending up somewhere around the manic expression he got on his face when he was talking about lasers, when he finally stirred and looked up at me.

“You make it sound like I have a fetish,” he whispered. His eyes were dry, and so was my shirt, but the whites were shot with red and he was still way too pale. “For lasers. I mean, rule thirty-four, and everything, so someone does. But, like, no. That would hurt.”

“If you can argue about it, you must be feeling a little better.” I silently vowed I’d do anything in my power to prevent him from feeling that awful ever again, even if that meant murdering his parents and hiding the bodies. “What do you need?”

His tongue flicked out to wet his lips. “Water.” When I started to pull away, he fisted his hands in the front of my shirt. “In a minute. I have to tell you. Oh, God, I did something.”

Sebastian buried his face in my chest again, his breath coming in heaves. Did something? Cheated on me, knocked over a liquor store, joined the circus, broke the laws of physics by getting a top quark and a bottom quark to fuck, and now we were all going to die when the universe exploded?

I waited as long as I could for him to go on, but the suspense was taking years off my life — what was left of it after watching him come apart. “Could you be slightly more specific?”

He mumbled something that sounded like, “I viewed a porter.” What the fuck? At least that couldn’t possibly translate as, “I ended the universe as we know it.”

“Baby, come on. Whatever it is, it’s not that bad, but you’ve got to take your face out of my shirt to tell me.”

“Why are you calling me that?” He’d turned his head to the side enough that I could understand him, at least, but — Jesus fucking Christ, the point. I needed him to get to the point.

“Because I’m comforting you? Because you’re my boyfriend? Do you hate it?”

“No, I don’t hate it.” Long pause. I started counting to sixty, slowly. One minute, and then I was going to shake it out of him, panic attack or no panic attack. I’d gotten to thirty-six when he said, “I gave an interview to a reporter.”

My first reaction was simple confusion, as in, it didn’t compute. Then it sank in: Sebastian had talked to a reporter, who was presumably writing something for a blog or a newspaper. Which meant he’d been talking about us, about me and my trial, because why else would the media want to talk to him? Only it’d happened years ago. Who the hell would care at this point?

Sebastian was a lot smarter than me. I knew it, he knew it, hell, anyone who saw us in the grocery store knew it. But after I’d sat there for a minute with the idea spinning around in my brain, I got it.

The voters of Carterville would care. The ones who hadn’t voted for Sebastian’s mom would be thrilled, and they’d I-told-you-so all over town. The ones who had voted for her would be even more pissed. Either way, finding out that she’d played the victim, fucked with the justice system, and sent a teenager to prison to hide the fact that her gay teenage son was running away from her shitty parenting? Yeah, her political career was over, just like it would’ve been at the time if Sebastian had told his story then.

She’d stopped him four years ago. But Sebastian was now a legal adult, several years out from being under the quote-unquote care of that psycho bitch of a psychiatrist, and perfectly capable of telling the truth coherently, so that people would finally pay attention. And it seemed like that was exactly what he’d done that morning.

“Jesus, that was brave.” I knew how much telling the whole story to a stranger would terrify him. Shit, the breakdown he’d had when he got home was more than enough proof of how hard it had been. “I’m really fucking proud of you.”

His grip on my shirt tightened. “You’re — not mad.”

“No, I’m not mad. It’s your story to tell.” Although it really should’ve been my story to agree to be told, too, which was probably why he was so afraid I’d flip out on him. Biting my tongue on that was the easiest way to go. He was already fragile enough. On the other hand…how’d I gotten in trouble in the first place? I didn’t expect him to go easy on me. Wasn’t he worthy of the same respect? “Actually, I am a little mad. Not mad. Irritated.”

Sebastian burrowed further into my chest with a little miserable moan. “I knew I should’ve...I’m so sorry. It wasn’t right, but if I’d asked you I wouldn’t have done it, and I needed to do it. I needed to. I’m so sorry, I’m so —”

“Don’t, okay? Unless you’re angling for a blow job.” I gave him a squeeze. “Seriously, it’s okay. You should have asked me. But I would’ve thought about it and said to do it, anyway. She doesn’t deserve to be the mayor, even of Crapville, and she doesn’t deserve to be your mom, and sending the cops to harass us was the last straw.”

Sebastian sighed and sat up. “You shouldn’t be so nice to me.”

He was still too downcast, and I hated it. Also? Fuck that. “Fuck that, Sebastian. I should always be nice to you. Besides, that was me not being nice. I said I was mad, right?”

A slow smile spread across his face. “Was that you not protecting me, for once?”

“Yeah?”

“Good. I love it that you take care of me. But you can’t lie to me to make me feel better. If you do, I can’t trust you. Like the thing with Brody calling my parents. You have to be honest with me. Please?”

My throat was almost too tight to speak. I’d fucked up, but I wouldn’t make the same mistake a second time. “Yeah. I promise.”

“Sometimes that means I’ll get a panic attack.” He fidgeted with the hem of my t-shirt, wriggling his hand underneath and stroking my abs with his fingertips. “That won’t be your fault. I mean, I don’t know if I’ll ever stop having them.” The fingers stilled. “If you can’t deal with that, I get it.”

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