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When Shane rushes into the clinic, three minutes late for his follow-up appointment, the last person he expects to see idling on the blue plastic chairs under the harsh fluorescent lighting is Sebastian. At first, Shane doesn’t notice him, flustered as he is by the receptionist’s chipper-yet-ruthlessly-efficient check-in method, leaving him feeling a bit like a whirlwind had hit him by the time she hands him a document-filled clipboard with a, “Sit anywhere you’d like while you wait.”
He turns, pauses, blinks at the sight of Sebastian with his head angled awkwardly while he rapidly types on his phone, the only other patient in the waiting room. The townsfolk living on the Mountain were too far from Shane’s usual haunts for him to strike up chatter on the regular as he did with the folks on Willow Lane or the oddly polite raccoons living in the big stump. They’d also never borrowed a cup of sugar nor exchanged maple for carrot seeds to keep Belinda well-supplied.
But in a town of 28-odd people, didn’t everyone count as a sort-of neighbor? Marnie has been nagging him to be friendlier to others and, “For the love of Yoba, relax your face before they think you hate them,” or whatever flavor of auntly advice she deems important enough to bestow on him lately. It’s better than the sad looks she gave him when she thought he didn’t notice, so he endures it without complaint.
Anyway, Sebastian is a sorta-neighbor. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any prior Marnie lectures on meeting one’s neighbor at Zuzu City’s foremost addiction clinic.
Shane sits a couple seats down from Sebastian, wincing at the plastic squeak. Sebastian looks up from his phone, his lips curling to the side in amusement, wine-dark with lipstick. In the past, Shane had often thought the man was doing his best to match the lightless basement he lived in, all dark shadows under his eyes and rumpled band t-shirts. They haven’t interacted much beyond an occasional manly nod at town festivals.
But this Sebastian looks good. His hair is artfully tousled, styled in layers too black and glossy to be natural. The industrial piercing on his eyebrow seems to be new, not that Shane usually catalogues townsfolk accessories, but it looks punk and it suits him, with his leather jacket and fingerless gloves. It tugs at a part of Shane that he’d thought was dormant, too withered by depression and booze to care anymore.
Abruptly, he realizes he’s been staring for a beat too long. He clears his throat. “So, uh. What are you in for?”
Sebastian’s smile widens, though his eyes look rueful in a way Shane recognizes all too well. He shrugs off his jacket, revealing a nicotine patch on the inside of his left arm. “Maru and Penny are expecting. I’m buying some years back so I can spoil their kids rotten for as long as possible. You?”
It’s still hard to make himself say it, but he hears the gentle encouragement of his therapy group murmuring in his head as he says, “I’ve been sober for four weeks. Trying to keep it permanent.” The time before that, he’d almost gone twelve weeks, each day that he wobbily checked off on his calendar crawling along slower than hiking uphill in his stupid green crocs, fighting the cravings whenever he opened the fridge or passed by the empty ruin of the JojaMart. He’d thought he had it this time, he was so sure of it, and then, well…
Guiltily, Shane glances at the clipboard in his hands, remembering the questionnaire he’s supposed to be filling out. He writes his name and half-asses his response on the first question, too jittery to focus on the words.
Sebastian gives a low whistle. “Four weeks is really good. That’s a whole damn season.”
“Yeah, I guess it is,” Shane says, working through more of the questions. “Hard to remember when you tend to fuck it up so badly. And then keep fucking up everything.” He frowns at the paper, thinking about the greasy temptation he’d felt on the bus that afternoon, the exact moment when he realized he’d be late and how it’d be so easy to skip this appointment and find a bar instead, drinking until he smothered the voice mocking him for yet another screw up in a very long and dedicated line of them. But he’d thought of Jas as he’d pushed the button for the correct stop, the way she smiled with gaps in her teeth as he pulled the handle to the office.
“Damn, do you always talk like that?”
“Like what?”
Sebastian rolls his fingers together, color rising on his cheekbones as though he wishes he hadn’t said anything. “Like… Everything is something for you to fail or disappoint. That you taint the good in the world simply by existing.”
It’s surprising to hear something so raw from someone Shane would have previously thought held a yobadamn trophy for giving no fucks whatsoever. He ponders the thought, its sting of familiarity. Every day. Okay, really on the worst days. There had been a lot of those in the past year. Shane raises his eyebrows. “Well, that’s dark.” And then: “Sometimes. Do you always think like that?”
Averting his gaze, Sebastian shrugs, nonchalant. “Sometimes.” He angles himself towards Shane on the cheap plastic, crossing an ankle over his lap and tapping a beat on his chunky boots. With a little sigh, he leans his head against the wall, as if listening to it. He squints at Shane, assessing him properly for the first time, and Shane resists the prickling reflex to duck his head, meeting those storm-gray eyes directly.
The half-smile returns. “Wow, did you walk all the way here from the valley, or something?”
“Is that your way of asking why I look like shit?” Shane can still feel the sweaty after-effects of running the three blocks from the bus stop to the clinic, and his hair probably looks like a birds’ nest. His favorite hoodie looks worse, with all its rumples and a glaringly orange marinara stain down the front from last night, like a visual warning to stay far away from Shane’s venom. Still, Sebastian apparently possesses the power of making helmet hair look sexy, which is an unfair advantage. Shane rattles off his latest series of unfortunate events: “An injured hen almost made me miss the bus, then the bus ran into traffic, so I ran the rest of the way but my sprinting skills are total shit so yeah, I probably look like a hot mess. What else is new?”
Sebastian bites his lip, muttering something that sounds an awful lot like, hot is accurate, but Shane is too bewildered by the man’s next statement to call him out on it: “I have a spare helmet. Want a ride after, maybe skip the bus and all that cardio?”
It’s absurd. Even with a helmet, Shane isn’t wearing the proper clothes for it, nor has he owned anything like it for the better part of a decade, ever since he swapped leather for jeans and soft hoodies, clothing he could hide in. And yet he’s sorely tempted, thinking of the snail’s pace bus that’s sure to smell like Summer armpit from all the bodies packed in at rush hour, versus the much more alluring memory of pure road freedom. He misses that incredible adrenaline rush from bending into a curve and feeling the roar of the engine in his lungs, asphalt rolling under his heels.
Stupidly, he blinks and says, “Yeah. I mean, sure. Thanks, man.”
When he glances back on his way to the exam room, he sees Sebastian turn red as a brick, attention resolutely glued to his phone. If Shane allows his imagination to wander, he might even call it a blush.
After his visit, new prescriptions tucked into his hoodie and that odd, clinical sensation of feeling physically and mentally lighter, Shane loiters in front of the building, allowing the final rays of the sunset to hit his face from where they shine between the high-rises. The concrete beneath his sneakers has trapped the residual heat from the day like sand on the beach and he wonders if Jas will have a collection of colorful treasures to show him from her latest adventures with Vincent, clambering over tide pools and shrieking at the gulls’ cacophony. It’s a nice thought.
“You’re smiling,” Sebastian says near his shoulder, startling him. He looks at him curiously, head tilted to the side. “Care to let me in on the joke?”
Shrugging, Shane says, “Just thinking of Jas, going to the beach today with Vincent. Must be nice to be seven, when everything seems so simple.”
“Speak for yourself. I like owning a bike.” Sebastian’s smirk softens. “The beach is chill. I love sitting on the dock when it rains, watching the clouds roll in from the Gem Sea.”
“Add a soup thermos and I’d be down,” Shane says, not sure if he’s inviting himself into more of Sebastian’s space than he usually allows. Where Shane is concerned, he usually assumes his presence isn’t welcome by default.
Sebastian raises an eyebrow, his piercing glowing pink in the fading light. “Make it pumpkin soup, yeah?”
While Shane doesn’t have the first clue about making something that didn’t follow his fail-safe method of finding a box from the freezer section and sticking it in the microwave, he nods. Marnie probably knows, and she’s always nagging him lately about eating something healthier than pepper poppers and pizza. Based on his latest blood work, she’s probably right. “Sounds like a plan.”
It sounds a lot like a date, the hopeful part of him whispers. And you sound like a delusional idiot, he retorts.
About two minutes after Sebastian hands him the spare helmet and looks at Shane expectantly from the seat, Shane knows he’s definitely the idiot, because he hadn’t even thought about the implication of holding another man for the better part of an hour. But we aren’t dating, and besides, he has Sam, Shane admonishes himself, ears heating beneath the helmet as he wraps himself around Sebastian with the same stiff formality he imagines many men in perfectly heterosexual bike sharing situations have employed.
He called you hot, his brain suggests helpfully about halfway through the drive, after Sebastian skillfully drifts curve after curve through the winding foothills. Shane instinctively wraps his arms tighter around Sebastian, close enough to feel body heat radiating through the leather. So what if he thinks I’m hot? I’m still a yobadamned mess.
Sebastian drops him off at Marnie’s Ranch before Shane has a chance to fully wrestle with all of the arguments going on in his head, so he runs a hand through his tangles and says lamely, “Thanks for the lift. See you next uh…” He trails off, not knowing if it’s rude to acknowledge that they’re both addicts visiting the same city clinic because their tiny-ass town doesn’t have anything close to it.
“Rainy day,” Sebastian finishes for him, the half-smile back on his lips.
The helmet has smeared some of the lipstick on his mouth, Shane notices blankly, because that’s a completely normal thing to observe about one’s devastatingly hot neighbor. He must have reapplied it in the clinic bathroom before Shane saw him, full lower lip in a pout as he angled the tube just right. The visual makes Shane’s goodbye catch in his throat. Manly nodding will have to do.
Sebastian’s smile widens, amused. He hands his phone to Shane, shaking it a little when Shane’s brain stubbornly remains offline and vaguely horny.
“So you can text me when you’ll be there. I don’t always go to the dock when it rains, and you’ve been avoiding the Saloon lately.”
“You noticed?” Shane says, flattered. He taps his number in, idly wondering what else Sebastian has noticed about him with that quiet intensity of his. Shane’s own brain is definitely stuck in Stupidville, population: 1, because his heart flutters like a yobadamn teenager’s. Are your options in this town really that exhausted? he doesn’t add.
“I have, because…” Sebastian flushes red again. “Well, I admire you. There aren’t very many people in town who get how fucking hard it is to change something when you’ve made it into a pattern, something that always gets you through one shitty day and the next, even shittier day. But I think you do, and you’re still trying anyway, and it took me forever to do the same thing and realize just how ballsy you are to keep going on top of being stuck in this judgy-ass town that thinks the worst of people like us.”
It’s more than Shane has ever heard out of Sebastian’s mouth at once during their entire three years of awkward festival nodding, and the patent absurdity of calling Shane of all people “ballsy” almost makes him laugh. “I’m no saint. You might regret admiring me, you know.”
Cold fingertips brush against Shane’s hands when he returns the phone. He shivers despite the valley’s thick cloak of humidity. Sebastian’s eyes linger a breath too long on Shane’s mouth and he says, “I don’t think I will.”