He’d clicked.
Now, mind awash in memories and grief and regret and rage—and booze . . . mustn’t forget the booze—he sat there staring at an oversized image of Monica’s face.
The memory of her, the last clear memory, kept playing in his mind over and over.
The wind teasing her hair.
Her lips curved in a sad smile.
That pretty sunset dress.
His hand tightened around the bottle of scotch and he lifted it to his lips. It was a quarter empty now. In some dim, still-functioning part of his brain, he realized that it would have been wise to just dump all the booze out, like he’d originally planned.
The video ended.
The link to another came up and he clicked play.
This one showed in detail—in slow motion, guys!!!!—how Sebastien Barnes smoked that fucker’s ass.
That was the title of the video.
The whiskey in his gut sloshed around and he thought he might be sick.
It would have been Hanson Smith’s fiftieth birthday today. Sebastien hadn’t known. If he had, he would have stayed the hell away from the internet. The headline that had caught his eye had infuriated him. He shouldn’t have clicked.
He knew that. He shouldn’t have done it.
But he clicked.
The Tortured Life of an Artist Gone Too Soon
It had been splashed under three pictures—Hanson, Monica Dupré, and the last publicity still of Sebastien.
He’d been a dumb-ass and read it.
Just why in the fuck did people want to mourn and celebrate and wonder about abusive assholes? The world was full of them and they asked questions and wondered and brooded. The person they needed to mourn, the artist needed to grieve over, was Monica.
Not Hanson, the asswipe.
So he’d looked back at what had been done for Monica’s birthday.
There’d been hardly anything on the internet.
Sebastien had gone for the bottle and started reading all the bullshit articles written about him, Hanson, Monica . . . for his birthday. They’d done write-ups about Monica, speculating if she’d driven Hanson to do what he’d done.
Was she unfaithful . . .
Rumors that she was leaving him abounded . . .
His obsessive love pushed him over the edge . . .
It was all insane.
She’d been in trouble and people hadn’t seen it then, and they couldn’t see it now. He hadn’t seen it. He hadn’t saved her. Guilt soured the whiskey in his gut, but he still took another drink.
“Sebastien?”
Chapter Six
At the sound of Marin’s voice, he closed his eyes and let his head fall back.
“Go away,” he said under his breath. He didn’t want her seeing him like this.
It didn’t dawn on him until a few minutes later that it would have been wise to at least close the browser.
By then, it was too late.
“You stupid son of a bitch . . . what are you doing?” Her voice was hard and angry.
Opening his good eye to a slit, he studied her. Or at least he tried. He found himself staring at the curve of her breast as she leaned over and shut down the browser, ending the video replay.
She whirled on him, jabbing him in the chest with her index finger. “Is this what you do all the time? Sit around and torture yourself?”
Nudging her back, he stood up. “No.”
After grabbing the bottle—and swigging back a healthy gulp, he started forward. He needed to be . . . elsewhere. He wasn’t sure where, but elsewhere. Because if he sat around Marin too long, he might go back to looking at her pretty breasts.
For a few seconds, he’d stopped seeing the blood that had filled his vision—his everything—for the past couple of hours. And his nightmares for the past year.
“Give me that bottle.”
He took another drink as he walked into the kitchen. Since his head was spinning a little too merrily, he thumped it down on the island. One thing he’d already figured out was that it was useless to argue with her. She’d just win anyway. He had the hardest damn time saying no to her.
He heard liquid splashing against metal and closed his eyes. “That’s eighteen-year-old scotch, Marin. You could just drink it yourself instead of . . .” He paused, trying to remember what he was saying. “Instead of waishing—wasting it.”
“No, thank you. I prefer to do my drinking after one o’clock in the afternoon, Seb.”
At the soft sound of her voice, he looked over at her. The room spun around him but he didn’t stagger. Sebastien prided himself on being a rather excellent drunk. He didn’t stagger or get stupid—friends always remarked on it. What he did was get sleepy. Soon, he’d end up passing out and he’d probably forget a hell of a lot.
Which was why he drank a lot. He got tired, he slept, and he forgot.
Marin came closer.
When she reached up to touch his cheek, he found himself wishing that maybe he hadn’t been so drunk because her touch felt good. It felt right.