Page 61 of Interlude

“Son of a bitch, Calvin!” Sebastian dropped his phone and the screen cast an oddly angled illumination on his face from the floor. He shot me a very unamused expression while fixing his glasses.

“We’re going to be stuck here a while.” I tugged the blanket from the back of the couch and shook it out.

“What?”

I brought my legs up, stretched out across the couch, then draped the blanket over me. “And it’s going to get cold real fast.” The sheer puzzlement on Sebastian’s face was almost enough to make me laugh and break the pretense. I had to bite the inside of my cheek in order to maintain the scene.

“Our building has a boiler—”

“Don’t be an obstinate fool,” I snapped.

“Obstinate fool?” he slowly repeated. “Are you okay?”

I shifted onto my side, raised the blanket in invitation, and gave his thigh a nudge with my foot. “Stop getting all twisted up about this, Snow. We’re conserving body heat, not fucking.”

Sebastian’s brows knitted together and he opened his mouth to further protest, but then I watched the realization slowly settle into his expression. The hard lines around his eyes and forehead softened, and a lopsided, handsome smile found its way across his face. “Oh.”

“So are you getting in the bed or not?”

Sebastian collected his phone and said, “It might not be safe.” He leaned toward me and whispered, “There’s a danger bigger than the storm.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. The mafia? Bigfoot? It doesn’t matter.”

“Ah. Okay.” I cleared my throat and channeled a bit of the authority I usually reserved for overseeing crime scenes. “The door’s barricaded and I’m armed.”

Sebastian’s smile grew and he nodded minutely in encouragement.

“And… and we’ll sleep in shifts. I’ll take first watch.”

Sebastian looked down at his phone, scratched the tip of his nose absently, then said, with just a hint of attitude, “Fine.” He turned the screen off, set the phone aside, and lay with his back to my chest. “But I swear to God, if I so much as feel your dick twitch, Winter, I’m taking it and your balls as spoils of war.”

“Jesus, baby.” I draped the blanket over Sebastian. Once we’d settled in and stopped shifting to get comfortable, the apartment became eerily still. The New York City street was silent. It almost did feel as if we were trapped in some isolated manor and not in the heart of the East Village. “What happens now?” I asked, after the moment had stretched on long enough.

“Usually there’s a lot of internal drama about being so close, wanting to give in, but not being able to,” Sebastian remarked.

“Why can’t they?”

“Someone’s in a relationship or—you know, something suitably angsty.”

“I see.” I slipped a hand underneath the blanket and brought it to rest on Sebastian’s thigh. I shifted, pressed up harder against him before he could turn, and kissed his exposed neck. “Every minute of every day I’ve wanted this—wanted you,” I whispered against his skin. I brought my hand up, slipped it underneath his T-shirt, and felt Sebastian’s stomach flutter against my touch. “I can’t breathe when I’m around you, but when you’re gone, I feel like I’m dying.”

Sebastian’s voice hitched as he breathed in.

I splayed my hand against his chest and kissed his neck again. I gave the skin a gentle bite and then a longer suck, because Sebastian was a total pushover for a good hickey, even though he never missed an opportunity to complain about it the next day. “We don’t have to ever talk about it,” I continued. “When the sun rises tomorrow—when we get out of this place—you’ll be Snow and I’ll be Winter and nothing had to have happened. I promise.”

Sebastian pushed back against me as he tried to roll over. “Calvin,” he said, and there was a sort of desperation in his voice that made my heart feel as if it were being squeezed in a vise.

“Yeah, baby?”

Sebastian was partially hanging off the couch after he managed to shift onto his back. He grabbed the back of my head, pulled me down into a kiss, and pressed his tongue against my own. He tasted like hops and cake—a little bitter, a little sweet—and that seemed to wholly encompass who Sebastian was.

“Were we supposed to give in?” I murmured against his mouth.

“No,” Sebastian answered, and he started to fall off the edge.

I shot an arm out, pushed the coffee table back, and fell to the floor with him, chasing Sebastian with kisses the entire way down.