If Only You (Bergman Brothers, #6)(73)

“I mean, I might have offered them very nice complimentary tickets to our first regular-season home game to incentivize them, but…yeah.”

I peer around as Sebastian walks off and flips a switch, then another, brightening the store from the faint nightlights that greeted us. He doesn’t turn the lights all the way up, leaving the space gently illuminated, the lanterns over each aisle dimmed to a soft glow.

“Sebastian, this is wild.”

He turns my way and sets the chokladbiskvier container on the checkout desk. “I know you love books.”

Sometimes, if I’m up at the A-frame at just the right time in spring, I catch that day when the wind knocks the blossoms off the first big old tree on the hiking path from the house. It feels like magic, like a moment from another world—so perfectly lovely, my heart can’t hold it all in. That’s how I feel right now—like those delicate, perfumed petals are drifting not around but inside me, filling me with something too lovely, too wonderful to be possible.

“After your game,” he says, raking a hand through his hair, tugging at it, “I was going to see if you wanted to come here, but then—”

“My brother blew in like an intrusive, albeit sweet and smiling, semitruck and invited you to family dinner. Then you bolted.”

Sebastian drops his hand, nodding. “Then I bolted.” He blows out a slow breath and peers up, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I didn’t want to be an inconvenience with my new diet and—”

“Sebastian! We’ve got years of practice, cooking gluten-free for Rooney; we could have fed you easily. And even if it took a stop at the grocery store for a few items, it would never be an inconvenience, to make sure you could eat with us.”

“This is new for me, Sigrid. I don’t know how to ask for that without feeling like an asshole.”

“But it’s my family,” I tell him. “We’d never see it like that.”

“That’s just it. Ziggy, what you have—with your family—it’s so far beyond me. I have…” He glances off, shaking his head. “No fucking frame of reference for closeness like that, kindness like that…love like that.”

My heart trips on that word. Love.

“But,” he says, crossing the space between us, brushing knuckles with mine, tangling our fingers. “I’d like to try. Because, Ziggy, at your game, with your family, that was the best thing I’ve ever been around, except maybe you in your dragon-towel turban.”

I poke his side, but he catches it before I can get a tickle in. He links that hand with his, too, staring down at our fingers as he tangles them together. “I know they aren’t perfect,” he says. “Your family. I know there are ways they’ve fallen short of what you needed, but you have a rare good thing in your life.”

I nod. “My family’s incredible.”

“They are,” he says quietly, his thumbs drifting across my hands. “And I…am so far from that. I didn’t just bolt because of the fucking celiac. I bolted because all I could think as I stood there after your game, all of you looking at me expectantly…” He sighs. “Expectantly. That’s the problem. I haven’t done well, historically, with expectations. And if I want to, I have a lot of work ahead of me before I can meet them and not be a disappointment.”

Tears well in my eyes. “Sebastian, you wouldn’t disappoint us.”

“Oh, I would. If I kept doing what I have been. And I’ve been doing that for a long time; it is deep in my makeup.” He peers up at me. “I’ve got a lot of issues. Dad issues. Stepdad issues. Mom issues. And I’m not saying that to deflect responsibility; I’m saying that to own it. My dad walked out when I was six and never looked back. My mom married a fucking sociopath who messed me up right under her nose, and she either didn’t see it or wouldn’t, and I thought the difference mattered, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it really doesn’t. What matters is that I was an angry, hurt child who only felt in control of his life when he used that anger and hurt to make other people angry and hurt. I acted out and struggled, and I couldn’t get a rise out of anybody—couldn’t earn my mom’s attention, couldn’t provoke an outburst in my stepdad’s anger until it became something Mom would notice and care about. My teachers were bribed and cajoled to go easy on me. My coaches put up with my bullshit because I was too good at hockey to kick off the team.

“I didn’t get in trouble or get my ass handed to me like I should have. I just got told”—he hesitates, before he swallows roughly—“over and over again, what a disappointment I was. So I let it become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I have been doing that for a long time. To punish my asshole dad and hopefully tarnish his professional hockey legacy with my sordid one. To humiliate my stepdad and show him I don’t give a fuck about his approval, his adamant insistence that he’d break me, control me, that he’d have the final say. To maybe, just maybe, finally, get my mom to see how fucked up all of this has been.”

He shakes his head, then finally peers up, sighing as he meets my eyes. “That’s what I come from. That’s how I’ve operated. I learned a long time ago to live with knowing I disappointed people who mattered to me. Then controlling how and when I disappointed them became taking back the power I never felt I had.