If Only You (Bergman Brothers, #6)(55)

“Wait.” I lock my arms around his neck, holding him there. “Just…slow down.”

He sighs against me and gradually tightens his hold again. But he doesn’t say anything.

“I don’t want you to go unless you want to go,” I tell him. “Do you want to go?”

He hesitates, then after a few seconds, shakes his head.

“So stay. Talk to me.”

He pulls back a little, his hand lingering on my hip, the sweep of his thumb across my waist sending heat waving beneath my skin.

Clearing his throat, Sebastian takes an awkward step back, nervously raking a hand through his hair.

“Come on,” I tell him. This time he lets me thread my fingers through his and tug him into the living room area of my studio. “Sit.” Gently, I push his shoulders until he drops into my reading chair.

I firmly push past the memories that evokes, of him falling onto a different kind of chair—the chaise on his deck—of me straddling his lap.

We’re definitely making the right choice, sitting in two different places.

Sinking to the floor, I sit, too, and settle my legs into a wide straddle. “You sit and talk. I’ll stretch and listen.”

Sebastian stares at me as I lean forward in between my legs, reaching both my toes and pulling on them until I feel a nice tug in my hamstrings. He brings his knuckles to his mouth and sighs. “I’ve been feeling like shit.”

I freeze, holding his eyes, keeping quiet, listening like I promised him I would.

“So,” he sighs out, “I talked with Dr. Amy”—she’s the team’s lead physician—“had some tests run. That’s part of why I’ve been quiet this week—I had all these appointments and diagnostics to get through.”

Horrible, horrible fears streak through my brain. He’s sick. There’s something wrong with him. My heart does a terrible, constricting twist and starts to crumple in my chest.

“Since I was a kid,” he says, still rubbing his knuckles across his mouth, “my stomach, it’s always… I’ve always had these episodes where it just hurt like hell. Sharp, stabbing pain. Sometimes they were frequent. Then they’d go away for days, weeks. I’d get these aches all over, this dull, persistent headache. It was like a fog settled into my brain, and everything hurt. I’d just wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep. My stepdad, he’d tell me to toughen up, stop whining and lying around, said I was faking it to get attention, which was not fucking true… But I learned to push through it, ignore it, accept it.

“When I was in high school, I figured out weed helped the pain. Alcohol was a nice addition, just…numbed me right up.” He sniffs, dropping his hand, playing with his rings. “But lately, it’s just been so bad, I knew I couldn’t ignore it, so I told Dr. Amy all this, and she had a bunch of bloodwork done, some other tests, and turns out I have, of all the fucking things, celiac disease.”

Air whooshes out of me. I drop my forehead to the floor.

“Ziggy?”

I suck in a breath and sit up, blinking away evidence that I was on the verge of tears. “I thought you were about to tell me you were dying.”

He frowns at me. “Well, I mean, I might die of disappointment that I’ll never be able to eat another Milky Way again, which is one of about a million fucking things I can’t eat anymore. I won’t lie, I’m a little devastated. I fucking love Milky Ways. But no, I’m not dying.”

“Okay,” I breathe out, swallowing past the lump in my throat. “Excellent. Good. Great. I mean, it’s not great that you have celiac disease—that really is crap—but it’s, you know, good, that you’re not…dying.”

Sebastian leans in, elbows on his knees, his mouth tipped up at the corner. “Are you…crying?”

“No,” I tell him, reaching for my right leg and bending over it, which conveniently hides the fact that I might have a few tears about to leak out.

His foot nudges mine. I narrow my eyes up at him. That jerk’s smiling. For the first time, he’s really, truly smiling, all bright white teeth and long, deep dimples. It transforms him. Tiny crinkles at the corners of those lovely gray eyes, a slight dimple in his chin.

Of course, now is when he unleashes that devastating smile on me, when I’m having a crisis.

A crisis that I’ve only known this guy for two weeks, half of which we’ve spent mostly bickering while agreed we weren’t even real friend material, and yet I was about to lose my mind that something was seriously wrong with him.

“Sigrid,” he says, nudging my toe with his again. “You really catastrophized there, didn’t you?”

I clear my throat, shifting my stretch to the other leg, refusing to look at him. “Maybe.”

“Well, you don’t get to eulogize me quite yet.”

I glare up at him. “That’s not funny.”

Sebastian stares at me, his smile fading. “You’ve known me for two weeks. What would you have to miss?”

“Plenty of annoying things,” I tell him, nudging his foot back. “Your vain obsession with your hair. Your habit of deflecting authentic, honest communication with self-deprecating humor and sarcasm. Your…irritating tendency to surprise me with kindness when I had you all figured out as a self-absorbed jerk.”