Dear Mister Summers

twenty six

After finishing his whiskey, Sebastian placed the empty crystal glass on the counter and walked towards the balcony. He spent a few hours sitting on the balcony, watching the lights of the houses below and the moving waves far ahead. It was around midnight when he finally got back inside. He prompted himself as he passed the bathroom door. He wondered if she had fallen asleep and furthermore, he wondered if she was okay. Walking through the joint bathroom, he slowly opened her door and went inside her room. It seemed that for the first time, she'd forgotten to lock the bathroom door.

Everything looked exactly like how he had left it a few hours earlier. Carefully, without making any sound, he walked in further into the room. He found her on the bed, curling on its side with one hand beneath her cheek. She looked angelic but he knew she was tired. Today had been a long day with the flights and then a busy schedule until dinner. And it did not help that he had complicated things by urging her to admit her attraction towards him, he chastised himself and cursed inside. It must have been the worst marriage proposal ever in the history of the world.

She was stubborn as hell but so was he. He did not want to say those three words because they were not true. He did not want to lie. Love was just a word people used to name other things, to make them look prettier than it actually was. His brother Thornton had suffered from it and so had Sebastian before. Back in college, he had been convinced that he was in love with this girl, Aimee, but it was just a mirage. The second Aimee met Piers, she jumped right into his bed, leaving Sebastian devastated and brokenhearted. He did not wish to experience that anymore.

He knelt by her bed and touched her cheek ever so lightly, scared that he might awake her. "I'm sorry," he mouthed as he leaned forward and planted a soft kiss on her forehead.

Sebastian watched her sleep for another hour before his knees started to feel numb. He stood up and walked back towards the bathroom. Right before he closed the door, he threw another look at her and then sighed.

With only no more than two hours of sleep, he woke up before the alarm even rang and turned it off. Putting on the bathrobe, he walked to the bathroom and took a bath, thinking that it would make less noise than if he went in the shower. In his mind, he could only think of Andin and how weary and vulnerable she had looked last night. Twenty minutes later, he went downstairs to the dining room. There were not many people there considering it was just five minutes past seven and most people went there for holiday and relax thus they usually started crowding the dining room at around eight or nine. As soon as he was done with his breakfast meal, he called a waiter and asked for a pen and a piece of paper. While enjoying a cup of black coffee, he wrote on the note application on his phone what he wished to say to her. He spent the next fifteen minutes deleting and rewriting the note, trying to find the correct words to say to her.

Once he was satisfied and had reread it at least three times, he picked up the pen and began to write.

He called out the hotel staff and ordered some breakfast sets from the menu. Before the waiter left, he handed him the note. "Do send the breakfast yourself. At around nine-thirty, as I suspect she would be up by then. And please make sure she gets this note." With that, he handed a one hundred dollar bill to the hotel staff and left.

Since he had everything he needed with him, he went straight to the parking lot and soon was on his way to his brother's place. Sebastian stared at the white sun-dazzled road, his hands tightly on the wheel. The car surged forward, taking a corner at incredible speed. He was passing upwards through rough mountain countryside, the road steep and busy with traffic.

The countryside flattened. Cypress trees made a dark shade at the side of the road. Fields ran on either side. He had been driving for half an hour when the sky began to cloud over and rain began to fall, gently at first, and then in a heavy downpour that forced him to slow his car to a crawl, his wipers clicking to and fro rapidly to clear the rush of the rain from his view. He could see far ahead that the sky was black. Inky clouds hovered low over the horizon, although behind him he could still see the halcyon blue skies of the coast in the distance.