Sebastian Stan Short Stories

Sebastian Stan [2]

"We're Definitely Not Adults"

Present day, fiction

*

"It really isn't that hard," Sebastian said, smirking from the other end of the couch.

"You grew up speaking freaking Romanian. I didn't," I reminded him.

"It's not that hard. Just a couple phrases for when we go visit my family," he pleaded, even going so far as to pout.

"You're saying them too fast," I countered. He rolled his eyes, but smiled nonetheless.

"If I slow down anymore it won't sound right," he reminded me. He reached for my outstretched foot, but I pulled it back before he could try tickling me. Again.

"Then write it down so I can at least read what I'm hearing," I suggested. He conceded silently and took my notebook of the coffee table. I watched as he wrote several lines on the paper. He passed it to me once he was done.

"Seb, I can't read this," I laughed. It was chicken scratch, second only to doctor's handwriting. The fact that it was a foreign language only made it harder to read.

"Oh come on. Is that how you learned Russian? Seeing it written?" he asked.

"Да, это," I answered proudly.

"Of all the languages," he said to himself. "You speak four other languages, excluding English. Which, might I add, is ridiculously hard to learn."

"I learned those languages when I could see them," I argued. Seb rolled his eyes again dramatically, and I was tempted to throw a pretzel at him. Trying to learn Romanian would be the death of me. "Maybe you're a bad teacher."

He stared at me incredulously, his bottom lip beginning to poke out. I nudged him with my foot, but he just kept pouting. I kept smiling but my sweet Seb refused to do the same. Actors and their drama.

"Fine," I muttered. I put my bowl of pretzels down in the floor and nearly jumped on him, surprising him out of his mood. He caught me as I awkwardly fell on him, somehow keeping me from falling on the floor.

"You could be a bad student," he suggested.

"Do you remember when you got your mom's recipe for sweetbread and-"

"I distinctly don't remember that," he said, cutting me off before I could remind him of the last time he tried to 'teach' me something.

"You're blocking it out," I laughed. "We smoked out the loft, Sebastian. The property manager almost called the fire department, there was so much smoke coming out of the window."

"You're exaggerating just how bad it was," he said, smiling at me. "What about the time you decided to paint the bathroom and ended up painting the bath tub instead?"

"I'm willing to own up to that one," I answered, starting to laugh. I rearranged myself around Seb, elbowing him in the gut while he patiently accepted the accidental beating. Once I was settled with my back against his chest, sitting between his legs, I tried thinking of what else we had both screwed up. The sweetbread incident was brought up fairly regularly. It had been a triumph in culinary catastrophes.

"There was the time you told me my flight to Atlanta was on a Tuesday, and it was actually on a Thursday," I recalled. I burst out laughing halfway through the sentence, and Seb joined me.

"That aerial yoga attempt with your sister," he said simply. My cheeks turned bright red. "Besides spraining three separate muscle groups, you ripped your yoga tights and showed off your bright purple-"

"Yeah, yeah. I remember," I said over him, while he struggled to balance speech and chuckling.

"-to half of the city," Seb finished. I let my head fall back against his chest, and he hugged me closer to him.

"We shouldn't be trusted to be adults," I told him. I tilted my head back even further to get a look at him.

"I can see up your nose, babe," he told me nonchalantly.

"Fine, I'm the only adult in this relationship," I decided. I reached up and tapped him on the nose with a single finger. "I mean, I can see up your nose too, but I'm mature enough not to mention it."

"I'm older than you," he informed me. I didn't remind him that he was only a few weeks older. I stretched out across Seb so I could grab my drink, once again sinking my weight onto his diaphragm. "That makes me more mature by default."

"Says the man who tried fitting thirty-something candles onto a single cupcake," I said quietly, sipping my drink.

"That was a beautiful fire," he murmured proudly.

"Maybe we should move closer to a fire station," I mused.

"Obviously you've forgotten how difficult it was to move this couch up a flight of stairs," Seb said behind me.

"We just couldn't pivot enough around that corner," I tried. I felt the laughter in his chest before I heard him.

"Then what was the problem with the bed frame? It was hard to move too," he reminisced. "We nearly broke it."

"We've almost broken the bed several times," I corrected.

"More like severely injured," he laughed. I nodded in agreement.

"Maybe we shouldn't do the moving," I said.

"Or the cooking," Seb agreed.

"Or the painting."

I laid against his chest quite contentedly. Filming breaks meant my productivity sunk like a rock. We worked like dogs when we were apart so we could be shamefully lazy together. We spent most of our free days like this: in our home, teasing each other and joking, making more embarrassing memories.

"It's still your fault we nearly burned down the block."

"Which time?"

"All of them."

"I can live with that."

*

Author's Note:

I told you I'd find a way to work in my minimal Russian vocabulary. Да это translates to 'yes, it/this is.'