Page 40 of Contested

Then her mouth tightened.

“Trời ơi, em khó chịu quá,” Loren muttered. “You always do this.”

“Do what?”

“‘I got everything I wanted, but I’m still sad.’” Loren mimicked Sebastian’s voice terribly, pulling faces as she did, then went back to normal. “What is so wrong in your life that you can’t even feign some human decency for your family?”

“Fuck you,” Sebastian spat, leaning back in his chair as his hands dropped beside him. He forced them down against the seat instead of letting them curl on the table where she could see. “You don’t know shit about my life.”

A few people at the next table glanced over.

“Because you’re self-absorbed.” Loren threw her hands up, leaning back in her chair. “Like, fuck, man. You try to act all stoic, but the minute something doesn’t go your way or gets under your skin, you run away.”

“That’s not true.”

“Leaving home.” Loren counted on her fingers. “Changing schools when you got bullied once. Barely talking to me because of our parents. Leaving the Rams because of Felicity.”

“I left the Rams because I got offered a better opportunity,” Sebastian defended, forcing his voice to stay low.

“You left the Rams because your only friend didn’t want to be around you anymore.”

Sebastian bit the inside of his cheek hard enough that he tasted blood.

Felicity.

The name cut through him.

For a second, he wasn’t at Stella’s. He was in a different café, years earlier, sitting across from Felicity while she laughed into her cup because he had said something too dry to be funny to anyone else. She had been the first person outside his family who seemed to understand the shape of him without demanding anything. High school first, then the Rams. Messages before games. Calls after bad ones. Her in the stands when she could manage it.

She had been the first person he told when he got signed.

The only person he had ever really let close.

Then she had wanted more.

Sebastian had told her the truth one night because he was drunk and stupid and couldn’t keep lying.

Felicity had only gone quiet in pieces after that. Shorter messages. Longer spaces between replies. Plans cancelled because something had come up. Less eye contact when they did see each other. She didn’t know how to be friends with someone she wanted more from, and Sebastian didn’t know how to ask her to stay without making both of them feel worse.

The offer from the Mustangs had come a week after they stopped talking entirely.

Money had still mattered. More than Loren understood. The better contract had been real, the security real, the chance to build something bigger than the version of life his grandparents had patched together for him from what little they had.

He hadn’t left Geelong only because of Felicity. But she had made it easier.

Sebastian’s palms pressed harder against the chair. He closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath.

Marcos flashed behind his eyelids. Not the way he had looked during what happened, but after. Eyes wide, mouth gone uncertain, gaze refusing to stay on Sebastian’s. The version that had seen too much and left anyway.

He opened his eyes.

Loren was still watching him, but her face had softened. Not by much. Enough for him to see she knew she had pushed too hard and wasn’t sure whether to take it back.

She didn’t.

“What do you want me to do?” Sebastian asked.

Loren pushed her mug to the side and leaned forward onto the table. “I don’t know.”