Page 7 of The One Decent Thing

I cleared my throat, and my hands tightened around the steering wheel. Ten and two. I hadn’t even touched my coffee yet. Driving long distances made me nervous under the best of circumstances. I thought longingly of the bottle of Xanax in my backpack behind me.

“We’re headed to Santa Rafaela, unless there’s somewhere else you want to go,” I told him. “I live there now. I’m at UCSR. I mean, of course I live there, since I go to school there. I moved there. For school.”

God. I needed to get a grip. And when I snuck a look at his stony profile, I realized what a dick I was being, on top of being a babbling moron.Nice, Seb. Remind him of how while he was in prison, you were off getting the college experience in a beach town full of cute girls who were totally wasted on you.

“Why are you taking me there?” he asked abruptly.

“Um. Because I live there? I mean, where else would I take you? Unless there’s somewhere else you want to go,” I repeated, wondering what part of this he just wasn’t getting.

“I don’t have anywhere to g—, I mean, anywhere’s fine with me,” Aidan said, sounding uncomfortable as hell.

I knew it was a bad idea to ask, I really did. I asked anyway. “Do you want to call someone? You can use my phone as much as you want.”

I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight if I leave you here. You can use my phone if you want?Panic welled up like bile in my chest. Everything about that night was as vivid as if I were still living it. The cold mist of drizzling rain painting my cheeks and settling in my hair. The sodium-orange glare of the streetlight. The moment that car slowed down by the bus stop — and unknown to us, my father’s receptionist peered out the window at me and wrote down Aidan’s license plate number, setting it all in motion.

Except that it had been me who started it all, when I slammed my way out of the house with a bag stuffed full of books — because I was an idiot — on my way to wait for the guy I’d been chatting with late at night. The guy I’d known even then wasn’t good news — and now, with a few years of growing up behind me, knew had probably been the worst news possible for a kid with nowhere to go.

The road wavered in front of me as my lungs compressed and my throat started to tighten. I couldn’t have the conversation we needed to have. I couldn’t. Aidan was saying something, maybe answering my question about the phone call, maybe freaking out because the driver of the fast-moving car he was in was about to swerve across traffic and into the median and kill us both, but all I could hear was awub wub wubsound, like the beating of my heart transmuted into the voices of the adults in Charlie Brown movies.

I was already in the right lane. I twisted the steering wheel without even hitting the turn signal and pulled off onto the side of the freeway, the rumble strip rattling my teeth. I hit the brakes too hard and the car jerked to a stop, the seatbelt yanking across my chest.

Harsh, rattling breaths echoed in my ears. They were mine. My vision blurred. I clawed at the seatbelt, tried to shove it off, tears running down my cheeks. I couldn’t do this.I couldn’t do this.

The seatbelt released suddenly, catching on my left arm with a stingingthwap. Somehow my arm pulled free and then I was moving, twisting, and then braced against something solid and warm. There was a heartbeat beneath my cheek, a steady motion up and down my spine. A deep, soothing rumble of a voice, and heat, and safety. I closed my eyes and focused on pressing some oxygen into my burning lungs. Breathe in. Breathe out. I drifted.

Aidan

I don’t know how long we sat like that, Sebastian leaning halfway into my lap, sprawled awkwardly across the center console. He felt small in my arms, even thinner than he looked. I could practically count his vertebrae and his ribs as I slid my hand up and down his back. Sebastian’s shoulders weren’t as narrow as the rest of him, and I guess the way his shirt hung down hid how fucking bony he was.

Nothing could hide what a fucking mess he was, though. He was shaking, gasping for breath, obviously having a panic attack. I’d seen enough of them on the inside to recognize it immediately.

I should’ve just kept my distance — the last thing he’d want would be comfort from me. This panic attack wasaboutme, no question, and on paper he was right to be afraid of me. In reality though — well, in reality, I was the last person on earth who’d hurt him. What would be the point, when I’d paid such a high price for making sure he didn’t get hurt in the first place? He thought I deserved revenge, or something, but fuck, the only thing that made prison bearable was knowing I hadn’t done anything wrong; more than that, I knew that I’d kept someone else safe, had actively done somethinggood. Sebastian was fucked up over it, that was getting clearer and clearer, but he was alive, and he hadn’t been for-real kidnapped or raped. When I wasn’t feeling dark enough to wish I hadn’t stopped to pick him up, that was what I held onto.

And now I was holding onto him, with one arm around his skinny waist and the other hand stroking rhythmically over his back and shoulders.

I didn’t want to let him go. I wanted to bury my face in his soft hair and breathe in the scent of someone real. The last time anyone had really hugged me was — I couldn’t even remember. Maybe the girl I’d been dating a few weeks before that night. She’d been a hugger. I’d always thought it was kind of a waste of time, just sitting around with your arms around someone, when you could be fucking or playing video games or going out and doing something.

Now I knew better. It didn’t even matter that Sebastian wasn’t hugging me back, only huddling against my chest with his arms folded up in between us. Holding him was enough to make every nerve in my body come flaring back to life, like pins and needles in the parts of my mind and heart I’d shut down while I was locked up.

Apparently I’d also turned into a twelve-year-old girl while I was locked up, but whatever.

Finally Sebastian stopped shaking and went limp, and I froze, my heart kicking into overdrive. Had he passed out? What the fuck was I supposed to do if he had? And was he going to freak out twice as bad once he dialed back into reality and figured out that I was holding him?

“Sebastian?” It was barely more than a whisper. “Hey, Sebastian. You with me?” I made sure to keep my arms loose, so that he didn’t feel trapped, but every instinct was screaming at me not to let him go.

He mumbled something indistinct, and I petted his hair, just once, because I couldn’t resist. The calluses on my fingers caught on the silky strands waving around his ear.

“What did you say? Are you all right?”

What came out sounded likebagand maybein the back, and I peered over the top of his head to see into the back seat. There was a backpack there, an old blue one with a frayed plush rainbow attached to the zipper. Of course. In high school I would’ve rolled my eyes at it, but now I was glad to see it — glad that whatever had happened to Sebastian in the last few years, however his parents and anyone else had tried to suppress him, he hadn’t given up on being himself.

It took some effort to reach past Sebastian and haul the backpack up and out from behind the driver’s seat, especially since he was surprisingly immovable for someone I outweighed by sixty pounds or so. I managed to yank it up and over, dropping it onto my feet. I winced and wiggled my bruised toes. How many goddamn books did he have in there?

Sebastian was breathing heavily again. I switched arms, steadying him with the one I’d detached from him to grab his bag, and tugging on the backpack’s zipper with the other hand.

“Pocket,” Sebastian gasped. That was good that he knew what he wanted me to find, but his breathlessness was worrying. I abandoned the backpack’s middle section and opened up the smaller part in the front.

The first thing I saw was an orange prescription bottle. I was glad he had something to help, but…that meant this wasn’t just a one-time thing brought on by seeing me again. I wasn’t sure if I should be selfishly glad about that — strike that, I knew I shouldn’t. Triggering an anxiety disorder he already had wasn’t much better than causing a new one to appear, anyway. I twisted the cap into position and started to pop it open and then stopped, frozen. Fuck. Sebastian couldn’t drive after taking these. He couldn’t drive without them, either, not in the state he was in, but he’d be impaired twice over with this in his system. And I didn’t have a valid driver’s license.

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