Page 31 of The Sun & Her Burn (Impossible Universe Trilogy #2)

SEBASTIAN

I didn’t sleep for three days.

That wouldn’t have been unusual when I was a teen, fevered with stories that would not release me to peace until I’d purged myself of every last word.

But I hadn’t felt so consumed by writing since Blood Oath, and quite frankly, I never expected to feel that way again.

I thought my ability to tell stories had atrophied right alongside my ability to fall in love.

Apparently, I had been wrong on both counts.

Because The Dream & The Dreamer poured out of me almost brutally, my lifeblood splattering against the keys, seeping into the characters like some kind of black magic.

And I knew what had awoken this slumbering part of me.

True love’s kiss.

After a decade of estrangement, Adam Meyers was back in my life.

After years of long-distance friendship, Linnea Kai was gorgeous, grown, and so suddenly an integral part of my daily life that I wasn’t sure what I would do when I had to go back to my home in New York.

I’d given the woman I wanted to the man I’d used to love because it would save them both from suffering.

Like the ultimate martyr, I hadn’t realized how much suffering it would cause me.

I ignored my phone for all seventy-two hours I worked bent over my computer, and when I emerged on the third day, the printer whirring beside me as it spat out the first screenplay I had written in a decade, the second in my life, I rubbed my eyes with one hand and picked up my cell with the other.

Forty-three notifications.

Texts and calls from my mother and sisters, a few new messages in the Lombardi Men group chat, which I had with their husbands, where we mostly conspired to surprise the women in our lives for their birthdays and anniversaries, a couple from my agent, Mali, and one from Chaucer.

There were three texts from Linnea.

Even one from Adam.

But the top notification had my heart dropping into my stomach and then soaring into my throat, where it choked me with its heavy beat.

Savannah: You missed the last three Sunday dinners, Sebastian. We are away this weekend, but I expect you to be here for the next. The Critics Choice Awards are that Saturday. We can debrief.

Savannah: I want to see you as much as I can before you go back to New York.

I blinked.

Had it really been three weeks since I last saw her?

I couldn’t remember the last time I had missed the opportunity to be with Savannah.

She and Tate lived bi-coastal like me, New York and Los Angeles, which meant we crossed paths frequently. It still hurt to watch them together, to see how much Tate loved her and how placidly content Savvy seemed to be with him.

I took solace whenever I needed it by knowing that she shared none of her basest self with him. I knew because I had once made a bawdy joke after too much wine about the beauty of Domination and submission. Tate had roared with laughter at the idea of those “silly sex games.” And Savannah?

She had pinned me with those iced-over blue eyes, and I had felt, for the first time, why people in the industry were so afraid of her.

Later, she had cornered me like a hissing cat, nails unsheathed and latched into my forearm as she whispered never to bring up her sexual proclivities again.

A thing of the past , she had said.

I never made such a joke again.

It hurt to imagine that she was living inauthentically, to know that something she had needed so much had been banished to the past because it didn’t suit her ambition. But it also made sense, because she made sense to me.

I had never known two people who seemed so confident as Savannah and Adam to be so secretly insecure.

And a small part of me rejoiced that Tate didn’t get that version of her.

He had the lady, but he did not have the wanton who emerged powerful and greedy under a steady hand and filthy command.

Only Adam and I had shared that.

That deep, vulnerable part of her.

So, I reasoned, I could more readily handle that Tate was married to Savannah, the Lady.

It had been years since I forgot about her existence enough to skip a date with her.

And here I had three times in a row.

I knew why.

Adam and Linnea.

They had consumed my mind to the point that I was overcome by the need to write this story.

This love story about a man who fell in love with the idea of a woman before he even met her, and then, upon glimpsing her in reality, began a crazed search that derailed his life in order to find her again.

I swallowed thickly, throat dry as dust, as I stared down at her text on the screen.

It wasn’t difficult to realize that Emerson’s obsessive search for Hallie Whitehall was a metaphor for my own obsessive vigil for Savannah.

The cell ringing in my hand startled me out of my depressing thoughts, Andrea’s name flashing across the surface.

“ Ciao ,” I answered in a voice that was creaky with disuse.

I looked at the hotel room around me and winced at the discarded water bottles littering the floor, three trays of room service that had largely gone uneaten and were sitting stale on the rumpled bed linens I hadn’t slept in for days.

“Sebastian,” Andrea shouted joyfully. “Come downstairs.”

I rubbed my gritty eyes again, thinking I had misheard him because Andrea should have been at his home in Tuscany.

“What?” I asked blearily.

“Come downstairs,” he demanded again. “ Vieni . I am waiting at the bar.”

He hung up before I could question him again.

I stared down at my grimy white tee shirt and the same grey sweatpants I’d been wearing for much too long and decided, if Andrea was really downstairs, he could wait five minutes while I took a shower.

Afterwards, dressed in jeans so old they were softened to white in some places and a new, clean T-shirt, wet hair dampening the collar, I made my way downstairs to the hotel bar.

Andrea sat in one corner at a small table nursing a rocks glass of what I was sure was grappa even though it was only eleven in the morning.

He stood when I approached, carting me into his arms to kiss me firmly on both cheeks as if I were just a boy and not a man six inches taller than him.

“Andrea,” I said on an exhaled huff of amusement and joy. “What are you doing here?”

“I read the pages you sent,” he said, speaking too loudly but in Italian, so I didn’t mind. His excitement was plastered across his swarthy features, his hands cutting shapes into the air as he spoke. “I had to come.”

“You liked them?” I guessed because if he hadn’t, he would have called me to say I had lost the plot.

Andrea was not a man who held back.

“Like them?” he grunted. “I do not have words in the many languages I know to tell you how much I loved them. Genius, Sebastian, pure genius.”

I gaped at him. “You’re kidding.”

“Do I kid about such things?” he asked, as if joking about art was blasphemous. “Never. The Dream & The Dreamer is award fodder. No doubt in my mind about it. With the right cast, this film could be iconic. One for the history books.”

“I hadn’t even finished what I sent to you,” I tried to push back.

He waved my words out of the air. “That does not matter. The bones? They are there, and they are gold. Have you finished the rest?”

I ran a slightly trembling hand through my hair and decided I had low blood sugar. “Yes, just now. I didn’t sleep for three days.”

Andrea laughed, so deep from his belly that his entire body swayed with the motion. “ Eccellente . You will give them to me after you’ve had a coffee, hmm?”

He beckoned a server over and fired off my usual order of a double espresso before asking the kitchen to bring me a loaded breakfast. I was sure breakfast service was over, but the server was probably an aspiring actor himself, and he wasn’t foolish enough to say no to one of the greatest directors of our time.

“We will shop this immediately,” Andrea continued after the server hustled off. “Artfield Productions would be a good fit, maybe Hightower Studios. We need the budget to do it right and film on location. We could drum up a bidding war, but I’d rather you and I decide which fit is best.”

“I promised Tate Richardson I would offer it to him if I ever wrote again,” I admitted, staring down at the phone I’d placed on the table.

Savannah’s text was still up on the screen.

I didn’t know why it bothered me so much, but I felt like it was important somehow.

Both the text admitting she wanted to spend time with me, and my own reaction to it.

But everything was too tangled up in my gut, more emotions than I’d felt in years, and all through the fugue state of my exhaustion.

“Absolutely not,” Andrea said immediately, leaning forward to peer at me with dark eyes. “Why would you do that to yourself? It is bad enough you spend personal time with them. Working with them? And on this ?”

He said this as if there was a connection between the script and them.

As if he knew I was as obsessive about Savannah as Emerson was about Hallie.

The truth was, of course, that he was right.

It would be pure madness to work with Tate and Savannah on any film, let alone this one, which had roots in my own heartbroken past.

But a part of me also thought the making of the film should be as emotionally painful as the writing of it, as the story itself.

It was the artist in me.

I would always be willing to suffer for a good story.

Yet another part of me remembered how validating it had been to share that first screenplay with Savannah and Adam. How they had seen its potential and set both it and me up for the kind of success that had launched a long and fruitful career thus far.

“I’ve never done this without them,” I admitted in a small voice. “It feels wrong to create something like this separate from them.”