“He implied I drank too much.”
“What? Why?”
I laughed mirthlessly. “I think, because I offered him a glass of wine. I was trying to be… civil.”
Sebastian muttered an oath under his breath.
Well, now that he’d started this line of questioning… here was my starter for ten.
“How did you get home last night? I understood from Shirley that everyone was sleeping in the van.”
“Hitched,” he said shortly.
And now for the six million dollar question.
“What did Brenda say to you, when you went off with her?”
He sucked some air in through his teeth. Yeah, should have seen that one coming.
“She wanted us to start dating again.”
I’d guessed as much. Hell, she couldn’t have been more obvious if she’d sky-written it with scarlet letters, then ripped his clothes off and mounted him on the sand in front of everyone.
“And what did you say?”
“I said I didn’t feel the same… I told her I’d met someone else.”
I inhaled sharply. “Was that wise?”
He shrugged. “I thought that would make her back off.”
“But it didn’t?”
He shook his head. “Not at first. She kept on and on asking me who it was.”
“And?”
“She kept naming all these girls we knew in school…” he sighed. “Then she said the thing with Jack was a mistake… and she started crying.”
All those girls…
I couldn’t help feeling he wasn’t telling me the whole story. Did I want to know? If he didn’t tell me, I’d probably just imagine something worse.
“How did you leave it with her?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when she started crying, what did you do?”
“You saw what I did,” he said, sounding annoyed.
“Yes, but after that: Shirley and Donna said you’d been gone ages.”
He didn’t answer straight away.
“We went for a walk,” he said at last. “Brenda was… embarrassed. She didn’t want to go back to her friends looking like she’d been crying.”
“She’s very pretty.”
He looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, I guess.”
“What happened next?”
“That’s it. I walked her back to her friends. She seemed fine. I went back to the fire pit, but you’d already packed up and gone. I texted you,” he said accusingly.
“I didn’t look at my phone.”
I could see he wasn’t fully convinced but he didn’t press me either. I was grateful for that.
“Why were you downtown so late?”
“I was dropping off the films I took of the fun day.”
“On a Sunday?”
“Yes, the editor wanted them early. I don’t know why.” Although I had a pretty good suspicion what the reason was.
He paused. I was glad he’d decided to let it go.
“Bill’s an asshole.”
Ugh. He wasn’t letting everything go. Now I was the one who should have seen that coming.
“You shouldn’t let him wind you up so easily.”
“I hated the way he spoke to you!”
“I know how that feels,” I said calmly.
We lay quietly for a few minutes, letting the twin specters of our jealousy spiral further away.
I think Sebastian must have finally decided to try and put yesterday behind us, because he suddenly asked me, “I never asked: have you ever been to New York before?”
“Yes, a couple of times. You?”
“No. Mom and dad went sometimes but they always left me with a neighbor.”
His voice was bitter. I wondered again if Shirley’s speculation about his parentage was accurate.
“What made you want us to go there then?”
He shrugged.
“Same reason you want to go back East: to get as far away from here as possible.”
“What shall we do when we get there?” I said, happy to try and imagine our future. “I mean, is there anything special you’d like to do?”
“Have sex. A lot.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s a given. Anything else? Perhaps of an outdoor nature?”
“Have sex outdoors.”
I laughed.