Page 25 of The Sun & Her Burn (Impossible Universe Trilogy #2)

ADAM

“ W hy is this so hard for you to admit?” my therapist, Dr. Eng, asked me. “It’s okay to like her, Adam.”

“You see, that’s not the point of this facade at all,” I said, opening and closing my hands fruitlessly as I sought to explain my frustration. “The point is not to like Linnea Kai. It’s to use her to erase the mark Oscar Hampton tried to taint my reputation with.”

“Let’s reframe that, shall we?” Dr. Eng said firmly. “Being gay or bisexual is not a ‘taint.’ It is, in fact, very natural and very beautiful.”

“Right,” I murmured, properly chastened.

We had been working on my language around my queerness, reworking how I viewed it outside of the bigoted context of my father and upbringing, and the fear that had been sown when my uni mate, Gregory, had committed suicide after being outed as gay.

“I only meant Oscar was trying to end my career with a sex scandal and force me to come out in a traumatic way.”

“Better,” she acknowledged kindly.

Dr. Eng was one of the best in the business and referred to me by Prince Arthur Whitley-Fairfax himself. We met over Zoom once a week, and I didn’t mind that the sessions were remote because Dr. Eng’s Britishness was essential in helping me understand some of my childhood hang-ups.

“Even if the point is to use this relationship to protect your reputation, is it such a bad thing if you happen to like the woman you are using to do it?” she pressed.

And it felt like that, pressure on a bruise. I wanted to wince but kept my expression smooth.

Yes, it bloody well mattered if I liked Linnea.

Because she wasn’t the kind of girl one simply liked .

She was the kind of girl you bought flowers for because her beauty reminded you of her smile. She was the girl you went home after your first kiss believing she would be your last.

She was sunlight and laughter and the first smooth dive into cool, clean lake water.

And she was being wasted on a man like me.

Three years of her life shackled to this false love.

Only, she didn’t treat it like a prison sentence or what it was—martyrdom in order to give her mother a better end-of-life experience, even when Miranda had been a shite parent all her life.

She approached each day with me like an adventure, bouncing over to me with a smile and leaning in close to whisper, “Come on, Adam, aren’t you curious ? Let’s go.”

And every time she uttered that word— curious —I found myself gritting my teeth against the flare of arousal in my gut.

She was so different from Savannah and the hurts I associated with her that it was hard to remember I had sworn off serious relationships with anyone .

Even beautiful girls with violet eyes and blindingly bright dispositions.

“Adam,” Dr. Eng called, pulling my focus back to her. “It’s okay to find some happiness in this shite storm. It’s okay to feel happiness at any time in any given situation. As a matter of fact, I thought we spoke about you making happiness a mindful practice.”

I fought the urge to roll my eyes and succeeded because I had been in therapy for enough years to realize that self-care wasn’t erroneous, even if I’d been raised to think it was self-indulgent laziness.

“Working on it,” I agreed.

“Our time is up, but I want you to make a promise to yourself right now. Let Linnea make you smile. It may be cliché, but the best medicine is often good company.”

I sat in my office chair after we rung off, staring at the photo I rarely took out from the locked drawer in my desk.

It was a photo of Sebastian, Linnea, and me from my twenty-ninth birthday on Croyde Beach, the surprise outing Seb had organized in the wake of a godawful row with Savannah.

We had taken the selfie on my phone, and it was only later—much, much later, after Sebastian had left because I’d asked him to, and Savannah had left even though I’d asked her not to—that I’d stumbled upon it.

Immediately, I had thought to delete it.

Phones could be hacked, and often were. There was no point in risking myself with a photo like that after conjecture about my sexuality started from a photo of Sebastian and me on that very day.

But every time I touched my finger to the small trash bin icon, I found myself paralyzed. As if my body was staging a rebellion against my mind and would not, under any circumstances, bend to the directive to erase the evidence of the greatest love story I’d ever had.

Instead, I printed off a single copy and refused to look at it unless my heart ached so acutely, nothing else would curb the pain.

So I looked at it now. The wide, full-lipped smile on Sebastian’s mouth, creasing his cheeks and the skin beside those vivid yellow-gold eyes.

Linnea, once the least interesting thing about the capture, now stole my focus with the force of her grin, her eyes almost Crayola purple against the backdrop of the Cornish Sea.

The relaxed set of my shoulders as I slung an arm around them both and grinned like a boy into the camera.

It was that expression that held me arrested most often, not the look of my lost love, but the look of me in love.

It was dazzling.

And I had not seen such a look on my face for a decade until Chaucer handed me the photo of Linnea, Sebastian, and me from the skydiving experience.

It wasn’t the one they put in most of the papers, of Linnea in my arms, our bodies curved like two sides of a heart into each other.

This was the one Gary had taken just afterward, when Sebastian had finished tending to the parachute and rejoined us both.

Linnea had slipped from my arms to pull Seb in by the hand, hugging him while still holding on to me so that we were gathered in a kind of clutch that wasn’t quite an embrace, but somehow was.

I was still breathless with adrenaline and excitement, which was probably why I reached out myself, pulling Seb into my side with an arm around his shoulders while the other tucked around Linnea’s narrow waist to grip her hip and pull her in tight.

They both curled into me, light and dark bookends with their faces turned away.

Only my face was open to the photographer, and the recognition of my own expression hit me like a fist to the chin.

I was dazzling.

Lips parted over teeth, the dimple in my chin pronounced from the force of my grin, eyes green as the flash before the sun sets on the horizon.

Happiness, they called.

But happiness could be a poison, just as hope could be.

Both sensations buoyed me for the next week, through my dates with Linnea, where she was vivacious enough to bring me to life, through my nights alone, when I thought of having her in my life, and him.

Always him.

I had something to look forward to outside of work now, and it was strange and beautiful and scary as fucking hell.

So I wasn’t braced properly for the sight that awaited me when I pulled open my door after buzzing someone through the gates.

Sebastian’s rented Lamborghini SUV idled in front of the house, the passenger side window open to reveal an unmitigated view of my ex-lover holding Linnea with a fist in the back of her rumpled gold hair in order to pin her at the perfect angle for a luscious kiss.

The sight of it seared down my spinal column like a hot blade, cutting me in two.

I could not make sense of the pain, the shock of it blurring all the details.

It could have been jealousy, that Sebastian could kiss her like that or that she could kiss him at all, the man who was so totally off-limits to me.

It could have been bitterness or betrayal.

Some of it had to be self-hatred, the lash-whip of recrimination I inflicted on myself because I wasn’t fucking brave enough to take what I wanted and consequences be damned.

I’d seen what the consequences had done to my uni mate, James, and again when the paps released those slightly too intimate photos of Sebastian and me at Croyde Beach to the press. The consequences meant I lost not only Sebastian but also Savannah.

My jaw clenched so hard that all I could hear was the grind of my molars.

As a man who prided himself on cool, rational thought, I was caught completely unaware by the ferocious impulse to stop what was happening by any means possible. I was storming from the house before I even realized I was moving, the door slamming shut in my wake.

The loud noise prompted the kissers—lovers?— to spring apart as if they knew they had reason to be guilty.

Even though, despite the way it burned through me, I knew they didn’t.

They were perfectly free to be together.

Maybe not contractually, given that Linnea had agreed not to have any indiscretions while we were engaged in this farce of a romance.

But emotionally? Nothing was stopping them from falling in love.

They’d known each other, been friends, for a long time, and even looking at them together in the clinch electrified me so I could only wonder at the alacrity of passion it set of in them both. They were, admittedly, well-suited in many ways.

So why was I watching my own hand reach out to rip open the passenger door just in time to catch Linnea as she spilled out of the car? Why was I hauling her up into my arms in a bridal carry, her long, smooth legs draped over one arm, her side tucked safely into mine?

And why, even with her secured in my arms, was that ravenous, greedy beast that had taken over my brain not satisfied?

Why did it long to haul Sebastian to me as well?

“Adam,” Sebastian said my name in a choked-off rasp, and I noticed his mouth was ruddy from their kiss.

I wanted to kiss those swollen lips, chase the taste of them both on his tongue.

My jaw clicked as I ground my back teeth.

“Come inside,” I ordered, shocked by the gravel in my voice.

Seb swallowed thickly, but nodded.