That’s what she’d told herself. That’s what she’d thought right until she’d left for the Amtrak station and New York. Right until she’d seen Sebastian again.
* * *
After lunch, Abby helped Jasper pack up the leftovers and load the coolers back in the van, then reminded everyone to reapply their sunscreen and refill their water bottles. She rode sweep, mostly keeping Lily Mackenzie company, and having a not-entirely-unpleasant conversation with her mother about a scandal involving a movie star’s yoga-instructor-slash-Instagram-influencer wife, who’d claimed to be Spanish and had faked an accent for years before the Internet sleuths discovered she was from Medford, Massachusetts.
“I don’t understand why someone would do something like that,” Eileen said, and Abby agreed that she didn’t get it, either.
“But you have to respect her commitment. I mean, all those years of”—Abby did her best to replicate the way the woman spoke—“how you say, coo-cumbray?”
Eileen laughed, shaking her head. “Maybe it was just role-playing that got out of hand.”
Abby wasn’t sure what was more shocking—that Eileen knew what role-playing was, or that she’d let her daughter know that she knew. She decided not to dwell on it. If Eileen was happy, and not driving Abby crazy, she’d do her best to enjoy it.
As Abby had predicted, Sebastian and Lincoln were way out front… although, to their credit, they’d been eating actual food at lunch, not just lab-engineered food-like substances. At three thirty, she had just finished checking the mileage to the hotel and was congratulating herself on having successfully avoided Sebastian for the entire day when she saw him standing by the side of the trail, holding his handlebars and frowning at his front wheel.
Abby waved her mom on ahead and let her bike coast to a stop. “Flat tire?” she asked.
He gave a curt nod.
Payback! was Abby’s first gleeful thought. She scolded herself for being petty, and reminded herself that, as the trip’s leader, she needed to display calm and expertise.
Abby unclipped her feet from her pedals, climbed off her bike, and leaned it against a tree. She saw that Sebastian, who was still stubbornly refusing to wear his reflective pinny, had managed to figure out his quick release and get the front wheel off the bike. He had his two tire irons seated underneath the rim, but that was as far as he’d managed to proceed.
“Need a hand?” Abby asked. Clearly, he did, but she’d be damned if she was going to jump in before he explicitly requested her help.
“No,” Sebastian said.
“Okay, then.” Abby watched him, sipping from her water bottle.
“I’ve got this. You can go,” said Sebastian, as one of the tire irons slipped free and fell to the ground. He muttered a curse, then said, “This isn’t a spectator sport.”
“I’m not spectating,” said Abby, who decided that she would have given large amounts of money to be able to climb on her bike and pedal away. Even when he was sweaty and grumpy; even though she knew he’d slept with hundreds of other women—maybe thousands!—she still found Sebastian annoyingly attractive. “We’re not supposed to abandon our riders if they’re having mechanical difficulties.” She kept her tone casual, watching as his lips compressed, wondering if he’d read any of the small print on the Breakaway literature. Her guess was that he hadn’t even read the large print.
“Fine,” he said shortly, and continued to wrench, fruitlessly, at his tire.
“I wouldn’t want to ditch you in your hour of need,” she said.
“This is not my hour of need.”
“That’s fine. No worries. I’ll just keep you company until you’re back on the road.” Abby sat at the base of a tree, unfastened her helmet, and pulled her hair free of its scrunchie, shaking it loose, then smoothing it back into a ponytail, watching Sebastian struggle and curse. When he’d finally gotten his tire free from the wheel’s rim and pulled out the deflated tube, Abby extended her hand.
“Give me your tire. I’ll check it for glass.” She thought she would relish every second of Sebastian’s struggle, but what she’d realized was that she just felt sorry for him. And, still, attracted to him. He was wearing a white bicycle jersey that had gotten sheer with sweat in the vicinity of his shoulders, and in his Lycra shorts, his legs looked like the Platonic ideal of male legs.
His face was stony as he handed Abby the tire, more or less shoving it at her with a muttered word that might—if Abby was feeling generous—have been “thanks.” He wasn’t looking at her. Abby wondered if that was on purpose as she ran her fingers carefully along the inside of the tire, eventually finding a tiny shard of glass.