Work Text:
Staring back at you was one of the last people that you wanted to see. Standing near the railroad was Sebastian, cigarette in one hand and phone in the other.
You contemplate turning back around, but the possibility of seeing Alex, muscular, tanned Alex, who had just dumped you, was enough to kill the thought all together. He waves, and you walk over, too defeated to do much else.
"Hey," he inhales.
"Hey," you almost don't recognize your own voice, small and tinny, but it's all you can muster. Sebastian turns towards you, getting a close-up of the tears that stain your face. It's embarrassing; Alex could have at least dumped you when it was raining.
You pull your hat down, needing desperately to hide. You usually hid behind humor or your farm animals, but nothing could help you under Sebastian's gaze. He was always in the background, but he always saw you.
"I was just heading up to the summit. Do you wanna go with?" You want to say no, to trudge back to your farmhouse and distract yourself with work, but the softness of his voice makes it hard to refuse. You weren't the closest to Sebastian, partially because Alex always had something awful to say about him, no matter how many times you tried to convince him that he was nice.
You agree, following him up the trail before Alex gets the chance to show his face.
"Sooo..." he starts, trailing off as he tries to think of anything to say.
"So," you retort.
"Do you wanna talk about anything?" The quiet ones are always the most perceptive, though with how you must look at the moment, it'd be hard to pretend like everything was all sunshine and rainbows.
"Have you ever been in second place, Sebastian?" Beating around the bush was a specialty of yours, one that you'd mastered when you moved here, whenever people would ask you why you'd leave your cushy office job for hard labor on the farm.
"Like in a race?" he lights another cigarette, holding it between his teeth as he answers you.
"Yeah, you could say that," you reply, because wasn't everything a race? Your eyes dart between the cigarette between his lips and the smoke it emits. "Can I have one of those?"
Sebastian's shocked, but he doesn't let it show on his face, because the day that his cool guy persona drops is the day that hell would freeze over. He hands over the pack, plus his lighter, plus a response. "It feels like I'm always in second place, if that makes you feel better."
You snort, a little harder than you'd like to admit, and hand him his things back before you can even light it. "I don't know why I asked, I don't even smoke."
"Oh."
"Yeah," silence clouds the air around you, and you try to stop yourself from inching closer to him, but you can't. Your body craves the warmth after being left out in the cold for so long.
"I should probably quit, too," he stares at his hands like the idea was brand new to him. You don't respond, not wanting to scare him off with a lecture on lung cancer.
"So, who did you come in second place to?"
"Haley," you squat, because being face-to-face with Sebastian is something you can't handle right now.
He meets you on the ground.
"She just decided she's done with Teren, so Alex decided he's done with me."
"I'm sorry."
"No, you're not."
"I really am, farmer. That sucks."
"Yeah, well, I'm sorry too. Feels like I just wasted the last year of my life on someone who just wanted a placeholder." When you'd first told everyone you were dating Alex, there weren't a whole lot of well-wishes going around. But you didn't care, you were just happy to be there. In the end, you found that trying to be the cool girl didn't get you anything but heartache and an appointment at Harvey's for a full STD panel.
"Do you wanna talk about him?" He hopes you say no.
"Not really..." Your words taper off, unsure of themselves.
Sebastian, on the other hand, was very sure of how he felt.
"You were too good for him, you know?"
"I know."
"And you said he never even listened to you."
"I know."
"He looked at Haley's ass every chance he got."
"I know."
"Then why are you so upset?"
"I loved him anyways"
"Oh."
"I still love him." Tears prick at the corner of your eyes, but you wipe them away almost as quickly as they appear.
"I know."
Sebastian fumbles with the pack in his pocket, lighting another cigarette, because he was never good at hard talks like this one, especially not when his heart was threatening to beat out of his chest if you got any closer.
"Alex would lecture you for an hour if he saw you smoking," you choke on your words, and of course he notices.
"Let's stop talking about him."
You pull out your phone, searching for anything, a text, a missed call, a status update, anything from him. You know it's pathetic, it hasn't even been an hour since he'd dumped you, but you already miss him and his sloppy, misspelled texts.
You get nothing. Not even an addition to his blocklist. Instead, he's posting images of himself in the gym and reposting hacks to get more protein in his daily diet.
Your stomach flips, and you think the last thing that you need is to literally spill your guts all over Sebastian.
"I think I need to go home. Get some rest or something," you stand up, preparing yourself for the descent, but he grabs your arm and pulls you to his chest. Your eyes meet, and steely gray penetrates your gaze.
He kisses you. Hard. You kiss him back, and it's messy, all tongue and teeth and tobacco. You pull away first, but you don't want to; you just think it's what you're supposed to do. Your duty. To whom you have no idea.
"Why'd you do that?" You ask, stepping back, putting enough distance between the two of you that you wouldn't be tempted to lean back in for another.
"I don't really know. I'm sorry." The look on his face tells you he means it, but you wish he didn't. You lean back in, pressing your lips against his, just trying to feel something. He's surprised, his shoulders tense up before relaxing as he grabs you by your waist. His hands trail up and down your back, running inside the thin fabric of your shirt and lightly running up and down your spine.
You lean into him more, and it may be the lack of oxygen since he hadn't let you up for air since the kiss started, but you slip your tongue in his mouth, earning a groan from him.
Sebastian pulls away first this time, looking you up and down. Was this wrong?
The same thoughts dance around in your mind as he watches you, but the tears that have been threatening you all night finally fall, and you can't wipe them away this time.
"Goodbye, Sebastian." You turn, rushing away before you can stop yourself.
"Goodbye, farmer." He doesn't stop you this time, just lights a cigarette and watches the valley from the top of the world.