Page 22 of The One Decent Thing

“These dudes are Brody’s friends?” Aidan asked me. His voice could’ve re-frozen a melting glacier, and his unblinking gaze was fixed on Chris and Lucas. Keeping a close eye on the threat, I realized. I almost burst out laughing. What, did he think one of them was secretly a kung-fu master, or something? Or maybe he was just so used to being paranoid that it didn’t matter who they were or what they looked like.

That sobered me up. “Actually, they’re my friends more than Brody’s, but right now I’m kind of considering pretending I don’t know them,” I said, glaring at Chris. “What the hell? Why would you listen to anything Brody had to say?”

Of course, I knew the answer to that. They’d listened to him because I’d never told Chris about Aidan, even though I thought of Chris as my best friend. We were close in a lot of ways, but I’d met him in Santa Rafaela, a few months after I started college. He wasn’t there for the part of my life before. I could have a clean slate with him, without the ‘oh, that’s that gay guy who got kidnapped, I wonder if he was raped’ whispers that’d followed me everywhere I went through my last year of high school. By the time I got to know Chris well enough to want to spill, it felt weird. I never found the right time.

And now Aidan and I had to deal with the fallout.

“Yeah,” Aidan put in grimly. “Sebastian, if they’re tight with Brody, they’re not your friends. I think you should leave. Now.”

Chris bristled at that, like a little terrier facing down a wolf and standing his hopeless ground. It was kind of touching, but Jesus Christ. Lucas turned pale green and pushed his glasses up his nose, the phone clenched in a death grip in his other hand. I glanced up at Aidan. Maybe to someone who hadn’t spent as much time watching him over the past week as I had, he might’ve looked totally composed and relaxed. But he hadn’t moved the arm he had stretched in front of me across the doorway, and he was balanced on the balls of his feet like a boxer.

“I don’t know whoyouare, butwe areSebastian’s friends,” Chris retorted, his emphasis blatant. His jaw set, and I recognized that expression and quailed a little. Chris could beso stubborn. “And we’ll — we’ll call the cops if you don’t get out of the way and let Sebastian talk to us!”

Aidan finally turned his head, though he didn’t move at all otherwise. “Sebastian? You’re okay being alone with them?”

“Oh. My. God!” Chris threw his hands in the air. “Okay being alone with us? That’s so fucking ironic, I just can’t even. Sebastian! You need to —”

“I didn’t ask you,” Aidan growled, still looking at me, his gaze steady. Like I was the only thing that mattered, right then. What I thought. What I wanted. Not what someone else thought they knew better on my behalf. It warmed me all the way through, and the panic receded — ready to come back any second, but still.

“They’re harmless, and they really are my friends,” I said. “Yeah. Of course it’s okay. Even though they’re being idiots. They know Brody, but they’re seriously my friends first.”

Our eyes held for a long moment. Chris was complaining, but it faded into the background, meaningless white noise. Aidan still had that neutral expression, but now it looked like something more — something only I could interpret, that was meant just for me.

That warmth spread, down from my chest all the way to my toes. And it stopped in the middle. Just a long look shouldn’t have roused quite that much interest below the belt. But Jesus, it’d been so long since someone protected me without making my decisions for me. I wanted to huddle closer and feel his arms around me.

“I’m okay,” I said softly. “Everything’s fine.” And in that moment, it was actually true, even though Chris was still yammering and Lucas had his phone out and there could still be a fistfight, if one of them decided to get really, really stupid.

Aidan nodded and moved his arm from where it was blocking the doorway. “I’ll head out back,” he said. “Shout if you need me for something.” A little half-smile quirked up one corner of his wide mouth, making his lips look like something out of a wet dream, or one of those sexy photos guys posted on Instagram when they were trying to look mysterious. “Shout if you need me for anything at all.”

He left without even sparing Chris and Lucas another glance, turning his back and striding through the living room and out through the kitchen.

Leaving me with my pissed-off best friend, who looked like he was about to blow a gasket. He could’ve been one of those cartoon characters with the puffs of steam coming out of his ears; his face had gone so red I was afraid he might burst a blood vessel.

“Sebastian! Have you been listening to one fucking word out of my mouth? Why didn’t you tell me about any of this? Brody read all about it online and said this guy kidnapped you and tried to rape you and went to prison and now he’s living in your house and —”

My brain nearly boiling out of my skull, I stepped forward right into his space and leaned down so that our noses almost touched. “Shut. Up!” What if one of the neighbors heard him? What the hell would happen to Aidan then?

Chris’s mouth opened and closed for a second as his eyes went ridiculously wide. Now he was actually purple. “What — I don’t — are youinsane? Brody was really worried!”

“Yeah, I’ll tell you what I think of Brody being worried about me,” I hissed, and grabbed Chris by the arm and hauled him inside, practically shoving Lucas after him.

Shutting the door on possible nosy neighbors and dog walkers and other existential threats was the biggest relief. I turned the deadbolt for good measure, and then I took a second to close my eyes, draw in as much breath as I could hold, and get ready to give Chris the verbal reaming of a lifetime.

Aidan

Listening to Sebastian rip his friends a new one, then rip it again, and then rip another up the other side was pretty satisfying. He gave them hell for listening to Brody in the first place, for believing what they’d found on the Internet about my conviction without any other information, for being dumb, for being nosy, and for making a scene. I shouldn’t have enjoyed it. Enjoying it made me a very, very bad person, and I owned it, but — it was like the way my trial should have been, with Sebastian standing there in front of the judge and the jury and telling them straight-up that I hadn’t done anything wrong.

I had a dream like that once, a few months after I went to prison. In it, Sebastian took the stand, and he looked right at me, blue eyes blazing, with everyone else in the room fading into the background. He explained to the court how I’d helped him, not hurt him. How I’d saved him, and how grateful he was.

Waking up from that dream sucked ass. It stuck with me, in the way some very vivid dreams do sometimes. Occasionally, when I couldn’t deal with reality, I’d hide out in that fantasy, lying back on my thin mattress with the scratchy blanket pulled up over my head.

The way he laid into Chris made me think that fantasy could’ve been real, if Sebastian had been a little older and more able to fight back against his parents. “I might be dead if it weren’t for Aidan,” he was shouting as I lit my second smoke and leaned back into the chair, shamelessly eavesdropping through the door I’d left ajar behind me. “Brody’s the one who tried to rape me!”

I popped bolt upright again. What the ever-loving fuck? Chris’s voice carried through the kitchen in a shocked-sounding squawk, and I wished the little fucker would enunciate so I could follow the conversation. Sebastian had made it sound like he and Brody had been making out and he’d regretted it after. Attempted fuckingrape? I understood why Sebastian hadn’t told me, logically I did. For one, a lot of victims were too ashamed to admit what had happened, and for another, I would’ve jumped out of the moving car and run back to Target, found that son of a bitch, and turned him into a smear in the parking lot.

Not that Sebastian probably knew that second thing would happen, but it would have.

It still might. Rage burned hotter in my lungs than the smoke I’d just inhaled.

---