DANIELS, sebastian zachary

in all retrospect, the father and husband had no interview appearance going for him at all. he had to button his shirt to hide the spill-up stain that was running down his back and he had an overdose of cologne sprayed on him to hide the regurgitated food. beads of sweat were beginning on his forehead and next would be his nose, but he had made it to the interview room with thirty two seconds to spare before he could be called ‘late’ which since becoming a father, had been more frequent. ”no no, please, take your time.”, giving a slight smile as he adjusted his half pulled up tie and checked to make sure that his suite jacket was stain free. he wanted to buy a few more minutes and was thankful when the woman looked away and started to shuffle papers around her desk.. it gave sebastian a moment to breathe into his hand and check his breath, be sure he grabbed all the papers that he would need and that his phone was on silent and tucked into his pocket. he finished getting ready before she did and quickly took a seat. the woman was now kind of staring at him and smiling, but it was a different kind of smile. it was the kind of ‘I know something you don’t’ and Sebastian could feel that sweat beginning to form on his nose, ”is everything alright?”, he asked cautiously before he gave a swipe to his forehead and a small bow fell to the floor. must have came off evie when he gave her a goodbye kiss. giving a sheepish smile, ”new fashion trend i’m trying to start…it’s obviously not catching on.”, leaning down to swipe the bow from the floor and proceeded to tuck it away into his jacket pocket. what a way to start this meeting. chortling, he cleared his throat in hopes that it would restart the interview, ”myself? i’m twenty seven years old, father to one little girl, wife to a unbelievable woman. i am a…virgo. not that I really follow that astrology thing but that means my birthday is September 20th. work in advertising but mostly been a stay at home dad, only going into the office for big meetings and pitches.. he reached into his pocket to feel for the bow that was once upon his daughter’s head, finding it’s existence to be comforting.


this was where things began to get a little rougher to speak of. he thought he had a little more time to prepare for it but Sebastian knew what this interview was and he had been preparing himself to speak about the past. natalie helped him last night with just lying in bed next to him, wrapped in his arms, tracing the lines on his palms until he fell asleep. it was immature and childlike but this was a sensitive subject that Sebastian really, really did not want to speak of, ”new york. brooklyn to be exact.”, which was obviously not the nicest of the boughs. it had a lot of crime and Sebastian, well he was not proud to admit that he caused a small sliver of it, ”my job brought us here about three years ago...’, thankfully.


he gave a smile to the thought of who was in his life at this very moment and how lucky he was to even be in this office. natalie was really the heroine of the story and evie, well she had been keeping him grounded since the strip turned pink. ”my wife and daughter are my most important treasures, really. they are my best friends though i guess joseph would be sad to hear that. he is in my right hand man at the advertising firm. being here for three years, i have really gotten to know a lot of people and made some good, lasting friendships.”.

he physically cringed. it was a reflex that he could not actually stop. he had not looked back to his past since he met natalie and even then, it had taken a lot of fighting to get out of the pre-dug grave that he had in line. well…where to start..”, he could lie and skip over all the nasty things that he did in the past, the small police record that involved breaking and entering and even a count of assault (though complete misunderstanding there). he could push all the bad and just focus on when his life did turn around and when he reformed himself and his attitude to make something out of himself. but, in reality, sebastian knew that what he had and who he was could not have been made without learning the past of the mistakes, ”let’s go to the beginning”, he started before sitting up a little straighter. he brought the bow out to be in line with his vision, playing with the fabric before looking to the woman and giving her another sheepish smile, almost an apology to what he was about to say, ”but don’t say i didn’t warn you…”, and he was not going to hold back in the slightest.

”i must have been one hell of an ugly baby because as soon as my father got a look at me, he left. he was supposed to get diapers for me and instead, he just never came back. so for the first six of my life, it was just my mother and i…”, there was a change to his tone. he had admiration for his mother but speaking of his father, there was an apathetic tenor. he really had not dwelled on the sperm donor at all and he never brought it up to his mother or asked her for information about him. he knew his name, derek, because it was a middle name that sebastian was given until he was about five and then his mother changed it. ”life was hard for her. we had little money but she did everything for me…seriously. i mean I know, having a baby now, that a parent literally does everything but i mean, my mother sacrificed her dinners so that i could have a stuffed bear to hug as i got older. i gave that bear to evie …my daughter.”, he was still playing with that bow, smiling down at it now. he was so proud of his daughter, almost two and a half, smiling, giggly, he would give her the world if he had the chance. he wanted her to have everything he didn’t have but h knew that natalie was the best mother possible and he was still working on the title of best father. ”nothing really major happened until I was about fifteen, but i did get some asshole…pardon the language…step fathers until one good one came around. they will celebrate twelve years of marriage in about three months.”, he had a thing for remembering dates, usually remembering his and nat’s anniversary before she did. ”this is the grime of the story. i have done things i am not proud of…”, his voice was starting to shake with nerves as he stopped looking up to pay attention to see if the woman was listening, ”i promise i am not this guy anymore. i’m not a hood anymore. i don’t associate with that life but on the street, i was z. i had been recruited into a gang when i was sixteen and i thought it was the best. i made money, i was feared…it thrilled me, really. it was a sickness that i just kept feeding. i put so many targets on my back, even got shot at when i was seventeen..”, instinctively reaching up to rub at the shoulder where the bullet had just grazed past his skin. it still hurt, he still took a trip to the E.R. but he lived to tell the tale. ”i would have left school and done just illegal stuff…drug running, break and enters, car theft…but my mother insisted that i stay in school and i am so thankful that her hold over me worked.”, because who knows where he would have been. he would not have had natalie or evie, he probably would have even been alive, ”after the shooting, my mother and step father sat me down and explained…intervention style, how much I was scaring them and hurting them. my grades were not spectacular but i managed to get into a community college and i left the gang. they were pissed..they threatened everyone and everything in my life but i stood my ground. after about a year and a half into the college program, i was given the chance to go to the university and i jumped at it. it was out of brooklyn and i felt so much safer but of course..that’s when the best part of the story began.”.

he always lit up when the topic of his wife came around and well, after the community college life, he was brought into the university and instantly made friends. he chuckled to the mere thought and finally looked up to see that the woman was just staring at him. he could not read her expression but he could catch some disappointment in her eyes. she barely knew him and yet, she was disappointed. sighing, he sat up straight now, able to fully discuss the next bit of life without flinching or cringing. he could be proud, ”became a frat brother and at one of the mixers, we had to find a girl to talk to. it was a strange initiation thing but i found natalie in the corner with a group of her friends. she was perfect. her eyes were the first thing and she gave me a look over once and then looked away. I had to talk to her and i did, she didn’t seem to eager to meet the man she was going to marry – which i told her was the case.”, he grinned, ”i knew from the second i laid eyes on her that she was going to be my wife..”. he was now starting to play with the wedding band but his eyes were locked on the woman’s as he continued on, ”miraculously, she gave me, the arrogant ass, a chance and agreed on a coffee date. she still didn’t seem to keen for me when we were on that date so i bought her a brownie and then somehow, got her to have dinner with me later that week.”, and that was pretty much how they fell into the pattern of dating. the woman’s eyes were now lighting up herself because of the way that sebastian talked about his wife. she literally was his entire world but now evie shared that ownership too. they both had him wrapped around their fingers. ”she was kind of dating someone at the time but i stole her away and put a ring on it.”, flashing his own golden wedding band to the woman before smiling, ”got married and then a little later, we moved here because of my job and then she got pregnant and we had evie and yea. i am a cliché success story but…”, he shrugged before pocketing the bow once more as he no longer needed a security blanket, so to speak, to keep him going.


the present him was the only one that he could of, he did not want to go back to being angry at the world and bitter about the step dads and addicted to whatever the gang had put him on to keep him so loyal and so dedicated. no, he was changed and he was not going to drift back to that world every again, not as long as he had his two girls with him. ”well, my wife would say i am arrogant but adorably so…I rub it in her face all the time that i was right at the party and i do toot my own horn sometimes. she keeps me humble though and evie, she is just starting to learn how to really talk but she has her mother’s attitude for sure..”, he was getting off topic again. ”my mother would probably say i am stupid..”, he chuckles, shaking his head, ”but dedicated and loyal.’ because his love for his mother never faltered in all the dark years that he went through. his step dad was someone that got to know sebastian when he was in that dark phase, the start of the gang member life, but he knew his step dad would say he was proud of who sebastian had become. ”my clients and my co workers would probably say that i am a goofball but I know the time to get serious too. I do bits and then I am a hard ass when it comes to things like dead lines..”, he nods before giving a smile, ”i don’t go into the office too much these days but that will be changing when evie goes into preschool. my job is important to me, and people say that i am creative and a little unconventional when it comes to my art but each to their own.”. he also had a camera with him, not currently as that would have been very unprofessional but it was in his car and most of the card was filled with pictures of evie and natalie or the two of them or the three of them as a family.

he nodded, ”I do. these people are the ones that know me best. everything that nat says is probably true…but my mother has a pretty good file on me too.”, chuckling before he could feel his phone starting to buzz in his pocket. he put his hand over the fabric, trying to find the silencer button. he attempted to smile through the distraction until the call went to a voicemail, ”i will say that I am quite charismatic….and maybe a little arrogant..”.

”wife.”, he bluntly corrected the woman as she had been talking about natalie non stop for nearly the entire time that he had been there. every answer to her questions mentioned her somewhere. sure, I had a bit of a …scandalous past when it came to girls but all of that changed with natalie. i was so corny when proposing to her too - well i took photos of natalie all the time, places that i would take her and i basically mapped out a scavenger hunt throughout the city. we were twenty two at the time, young and graduated students. she had just started her career as a teacher while i was still hunting for a spot for myself. it was in new york when i proposed to her. she had to go through all the first places, the coffee shop, the hill, random stores, apartment buildings, clubs..everything until she came to the last stop on her journey which was the school where she worked, it had taken me hours and a lot of little hands to help tape pictures around the gym floor. starting with the w and going to the question mark was our journey together. i had sold my bike, something that was a piece of trash anyway, for the money for the poor looking engagement but she loved it anyway. her eyes lit up and i was down on one knee at the end of the words, being the period of the question mark cause i'm cheesy like that...and i asked her and she said yes. i don't know if she was expecting it, but inside the band says "told you so" because i did end up being her future husband..” the woman gave him a brief longing stare before smiling and standing up as she indicated the end of the interview and sebastian followed suit.


’same to you. thank you for everything..” which would include letting him recount his past without having judgement in her eyes like most people. he did not usually just blurt this stuff out to strangers but the question asked and sebastian was an honest man. giving the woman a hand shake, he stepped out of the office before pulling his phone out and calling natalie back, talking to her all the way back to the car as he explained everything from the bow on his forehead to the end.