Page 118 of The Sun & Her Burn

“And if I close mine?” she countered, not quite combative, but something close to it, almost condescending. She closed her eyes as she spoke, “What color are my eyes, Mr. Bain?”

“Blue,” Adam replied immediately. “As the sky.”

“Violet into indigo,” I murmured as Thatcher. “The color of the sky the moment sunset fades into twilight.”

Linnea opened her eyes, the very same color as I had described in the script, and smiled at me with acute tenderness.She looked like a different person,myperson, the girl I had known at sixteen and twenty-six.

“Violet eyes do not exist in nature,” Adam argued as Emerson, ruffled and indignant both because he wasn’t used to being corrected and because his best mate was interfering in his pursuit of the woman he had been hired to track down. “It’s a trick of the light that they might look purple sometimes.”

Linnea slid an icy glance his way before fixing her gaze back on me with a tiny, secret smile that flexed one side of her mouth. “Love at first glance is a trick of the light, too. If you want to love a girl, Mr. Bain, you have to do it without sight. It is easy to love with the eyes and less so with all of the other senses.”

“You would rather a blind man?” he blustered.

“I would rather someone with soul,” she returned archly, sharing a surreptitious look with me because Thatcher and Hallie were, at this point, engaged in an illicit affair. “You may call on me again if you find one.”

The silence that followed was a tribute to the scene.

I was the one to break it. “How did that feel?”

Linnea sucked in a deep breath as if she had been holding it underwater before she smiled, a cat-got-the-cream kind of grin.

“Good,” she said, flexing her fingers as if shedding Hallie’s skin. “Right.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” I said, lifting my phone and opening the recording app. “Do it for me again.”

In the scene, Hallie was meant to be donned in an extravagant 1920s-style dress with diamonds at her throat and ears and long silky gloves on her arms. But even in herRomeo in Bloodtee, with her wavy, wet-tipped hair, Linnea managed to bring her wealth and posterity to life in such a way that captivated both Adam and I.

I had known she would be talented, but seeing her occupy a character in such a way was one of the most erotic moments of my life.

I knew Adam felt the same way because his body was tight with strain pressed against mine and the pulse in his neck thrummed visibly.

When I sent the video clip to Andrea without a caption, I did not expect him to respond until the morning.

Thirty minutes later, I got a response.

Andrea: Chiodo scaccia chiodo. If you are sure, I am sure. She is magnifica.

The expression meant “one nail drives out another,” no doubt in reference to Linnea driving out the pain of losing Savannah. I wasn’t sure one had anything to do with the other. I had loved them both for a very long time in very different ways, and I was just coming to understand now—watching as Linnea batted dialogue frommyscript back and forth with Adam—that love didn’t have to mean suffering.

It could mean this: sitting on the living room floor after a catastrophe, taking care of each other because it felt good to do so.

I thought about a lifetime of evenings like this with the two of them, allowing the dream to unravel like a velvet carpet before. We would coordinate our jobs so that we didn’t have to be apart for longer than a handful of weeks at a time, and when we weren’t working, we could split our time between my place in New York City and Adam’s perfect Carbon Beach house. Linnea would flourish in her career and attend her own premieres, where Adam and I would just be her two very willing accessories. Adam’s career would be unaffected by his open love for both a man and a woman, and in tandem at that. I would be inspiredto write even more screenplays now that the stale pain around my heart had come loose in the cool tide of Adam and Linnea’s presences back in my life.

I held that precious, impossible dream in my heart for as long as I could hold my breath, before I exhaled a future that would never be.

Hope, I had to remind myself, was its own poison.

So why did I keep willing drinking it down?

23

ADAM

We fell asleep tangled together like puppies.

It was mostly my fault, too.

Linnea had still been reeling from her mother’s episode and I wanted to shelter her with my body and soul, so I tucked her into my side as if I could shield her from the world where we lay. Even though it was foolish, it made me feel better.