The Publicist's Plight (Book I in The Harrison Inc. Series) | ✓

Chapter Thirty Three: Heart of a Boy, Mind of a Man

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I am now sitting on my bed in the guest house, staring at my computer screen with a vacancy in my eyes. It is afternoon, and Loretta is back and making a late lunch in the kitchen. She senses the tense air that still lingers around the main house, but she doesn't ask any questions about it. Either that, or she seems to know more than I do.

I haven't even started packing for Seattle yet; everything seems to be happening all at once and so quickly I'm not sure where to begin. So, of course, the best option is to sit and make absolutely no progress in my bed.

After Fiona was dissed by Sebastian, she stormed off into the dining room without saying a word, and Elizabeth followed. For a moment, I stood there dumbfounded and wondered, again, if I should tell them the reason for his contempt, but I was sure they thought it was because of Sebastian and Garrett's fallout a week before, which is partially or mostly true.

So I went back into the library and waited on the couch as Sarah was on the phone with the hospital in Washington. When she hung up, she told me that we were set for tomorrow, and I responded with the usual response: I'll get the word out. She wanted to ask more, and so did Lucas, given he looked so unoccupied and uninvolved in the corner chair, but I just stayed silent and brought out my laptop, and indication that I'd rather not speak about it, and began to do what I do best.

I hear dishes clattering downstairs that snaps me out of my flashback. I shake the last of my trance away and scoot back to the headboard of my bed and take my phone from the bedside table. The first thing I click on is the Google App, but my thumb hovers over the search bar as if I don't know what I meant to search.

But I do.

Instead of fighting against my judgment any longer, I type in Sebastian's name slowly into the bar and wait for the results to load. Everything foul and tainted about him comes up on the screen before anything remotely good does—some things I'm aware of, others I'm not. I see the Opera fiasco, the fair, Oliver Epps' party, the baby drama with Felicity Felix which says that apparently she has come forward and admitted it was false, but of course there will still be doubters who will still try to leech a story out of it. I also see a story on the fact that Sebastian doesn't have any social media, but I think that's both a good and bad thing (mostly good) at this point in time.

The video results are old interviews he has done in the past. I click on the most popular one, showcasing Sebastian's ability to make himself look like a drunken fool on television towards a reporter on ACCESS Hollywood asking about his life of debauchery. I click on the next one from 2006, MTV Cribs, of him showing America around his multi-million-dollar mansion in Beverly Hills with the crudest humor carrying on throughout the video as he gives the camera crew a tour of his lavish, draw dropping-beautiful property. Once scene even shows a group of beautiful models in skimpy bikinis lounging by the pool, and with that, the video ends with him saluting MTV before jumping into the pool with the rest of the girls following. I rub my eyes and hang my head down in disappointment over the sounds of their laughter mixed in with Alternative music.

This is 2006 for you.

I research the rest of YouTube for an hour. Some videos are of him hosting parties, others of him DJ'ing at other clubs, and the rest from Entertainment channels talking about his escapades with countless women with a slideshow of his adventures with one actress, then another super model, then another heiress, all of them not lasting longer than two to three months. But I notice something that I didn't notice before when I used to watch videos; his eyes. They're different—at least different from what I remember. When I look at the videos now, I see the empty sadness in them, like a person dragging their body throughout the crowd just to get by. And it makes all the sense in the world. But why can't I bring myself to do anything? It's like discovering the cure for a disease but not knowing what to do with it or who to tell. Maybe Sebastian is putting on the mask for the entire world, and the real Sebastian, the one that hides behind all of the smiles and laughs and humor, is the one that cried in my arms this morning.