Page 33 of The Sun & Her Burn (Impossible Universe Trilogy #2)

I crossed one ankle over my knee and leaned back. “The Critics Choice Awards are the weekend after next, followed swiftly by the Academy Awards. Interviews, podcasts, media events, and any other opportunities to put me in front of a camera for the purpose of winning awards. You know how it is.”

“I do,” she agreed, pausing for a moment to adjust the stems in a small bouquet on the table. “Are you taking a date?”

Just for a moment, an image of Linnea on my arm appeared in my mind’s eye. In full glam wearing one of her own feminine gowns, I wondered how many people she would stun with her fierce beauty.

I blinked, and the dream dissolved back into impossibility.

“No,” I said.

None of the people I wanted to accompany were available to me. Though, to stave off loneliness, I had asked Giselle to accompany me to the Golden Globes.

“I saw a photo of you with some woman on a surfboard recently,” Savannah mentioned airily.

“Did you?” I asked with a cheeky grin.

She pursed her lips. “Sebastian, don’t be childish. Who is she?”

It was good for my spirit to see her jealous, but I wasn’t cruel, so I merely shrugged and told her the truth. “Linnea Kai.”

I was startled by her reaction.

Mouth agape, hand froze with the teacup lifted halfway to her raspberry-painted mouth, eyes wide and blue as the saucers on the table.

“Linnea Kai?” she reiterated.

“The very one.”

She replaced the teacup without taking a sip, eyes narrowing. “As it happens, I just bumped into Linnea Kai on the arm of my ex-husband at Nobu the other day.”

Ah.

I fought my smile valiantly and lost, the edges of my mouth curling deeply.

She thought Adam and I were picking up where we left off.

Only not, of course, with her.

But with another woman.

A younger one.

I knew how much that would burn her and felt both juvenile-like excitement and retribution, and a deep sorrow.

You could have me for as long as you wanted , I felt inclined to remind her. You could have fought harder to keep us all together .

But I didn’t want to argue.

After finishing The Dream & The Dreamer and kissing two of my waking ghosts already, I didn’t have it in me to play games.

“Linnea and Adam are dating,” I agreed. “I introduced them.”

“You did?” she said. There was no outward sign of it, but I knew she was seething.

“You and Adam have been divorced for over ten years and you’ve been married to Tate for most of that time,” I reminded her. “Would you have both of us be miserable forever without you?”

Okay, maybe I did have it in me to play games.

Savannah’s small teeth clicked as she snapped her jaw shut at my remark.

“That was unusually rude of you.”

I shrugged. “I am tired. I stayed up most of the last three days working. It might have been blunt, but is it true? Cazzo, you have never encouraged me with any of the women I’ve dated. You must know I have been hopelessly in love with you for very many years. Does that seem fair to you?”

She blinked, caught off guard by my candor.

We did not speak of feelings or our past.

When we spent time together, we simply enjoyed the other’s company, and we rarely even flirted.

But something about being with Linnea, and Adam again, had left me raw and unwilling to hide from myself.

From her.

“Sebastian,” she whispered, leaning forward to play a hand on the table in front of me, almost but not quite an offering. “If that is the case, is not every time we spend together a gift?”

Part of me softened at hearing discernible proof that she was moved by me in her way, too. The other was irritated with her coyness.

I could get drunk off this , Linnea had said when I kissed her, everything she felt shining from those periwinkle eyes. Off you .

Savannah, for her part, could not even bring herself to actually touch me, her fingertips curling over the edge of the table instead of the inside of my thigh.

“Having experienced the bright light of true love, how can you expect me to be content to live in the shade?” I asked quietly.

Savannah rolled her lips between her teeth, obviously torn.

I let the silence roll out uncomfortably between us.

When I sipped the tea as a distraction, I remembered how much I disliked it.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” she asked finally. “How love isn’t everything?”

The words hit my heart like a bat to a pinata, shattering bits of it through my bloodstream so I felt as if I was coming apart at my seams.

“To me, it’s everything,” I said clearly. “ L’amour che move il sol e l’altre stele . Love that moves the sun and the stars.”

All at once, I was thrown back to the night she and Adam had given me the Patek Phillipe watch.

Savannah had assumed I wanted to be the man who moved the sun and the stars.

A powerful force in the universe.

Because she loved power and assumed everyone else did, too.

But Adam and I had both understood the truth.

I wanted nothing more than a love so powerful it moved the sun and the stars, redefined my sense of gravity.

I had thought for a long time that only Savannah and Adam were capable of giving that to me.

But had the beautifully cultivated piece of artwork that sat before me ever been capable of reciprocating that sentiment? Or, like a painting, had her only purpose been to evoke that emotion in others? So she could bask in that adoration while safely separated from reciprocation by glass and frame.

I needed to believe that every mistake Savannah had ever made was because of love. A love so big it overwhelmed her, made her fearful because its sheer enormity threatened to eclipse everything she’d known before it.

I had to believe that. I had to cling to it until my fingernails peeled and bled, until my teeth cracked from the pressure of holding on. Because if I didn’t, then what was all of it for?

Why did she have to put us through all of this? The yearning and pain and utterly human suffering.

Why do it if not for love?

The answer to that was not pretty. It was mean and cruel and promised to rip me apart.

Did she even still have the watch I’d returned to her in New York City when I’d first seen her engaged to Tate? I had never asked, but the question burned in my throat.

The ache around my heart moved up into my head and throbbed like tandem wounds.

I felt under attack by my own psyche as I tried to fight my way through the thicket of the past and the tangled mess of my present, where, it was quite possible I was on the precipice of loving three very different, very unattainable people.

My mama used to shake her head at me and say of all her children, I was the one who always insisted on choosing the most difficult course for myself.

At this moment, I had to agree with her.

“I do have feelings for you that will never die,” Savannah confessed with a wince, pulling her hand back to clasp it tightly in her other one as if she needed to self-soothe. “But believing love is everything is naive. There are other factors.”

“Maybe back then,” I allowed. “When I had no money or fame. But now? What is stopping you from leaving Tate and being with me the way we could have been all along?”

“Sebastian,” she said, a sharp reprimand.

“Savannah,” I pushed back. “I’m being serious. If you love me as I have loved you, what is stopping you?”

“I am a married woman,” she hissed, thrusting her enormous diamond ring out in front of her.

“That didn’t stop you before.”

She was out of her seat and slapping me before I could blink, the blow smarting instantly.

I stared at her in shock, disbelieving that she really would have hit me.

It was a passionate thing to do, so wildly unlike her.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have given me hope, but it did.

I was from a country where people shouted and pushed and went over the line in the heat of the moment.

My mother had thrown fish heads at Seamus when he returned from three consecutive nights of gambling and debauchery, Elena had nearly screamed the apartment building down when she found out Giselle and Sinclair were expecting their first child, and Alexander and Dante had quite literally killed men for insulting their wives.

Perhaps this was like that.

An excess of emotion that overflowed from the small vessel Savannah had culled her heart into.

I dropped to my knees on the ground before her chair where she still stood, eyes blown black with her own surprise, hand lifted in horror to her chest.

“This is the second and last time I will ask you this,” I told her solemnly, the way one swore fealty to a feudal king.

“Leave him and be with me. Choose me this time, as I have to believe you wanted to before. Be brave, Savannah, and pick passion over power. Choose us over anything else. I have held my tongue for the past six years we have been just friends, and I will not do it any longer. That is not the man I am.”

A small voice in the back of my head reeled at my proposition.

What if she actually chose me?

It seemed like such a pipe dream, but she could shock us both and reach down to clasp my face in her hands and make a decision with her heart instead of her head for the first time in her life.

What then?

Of Adam.

Of Linnea.

Of them .

They had each other, though. Even when I had set them up in this Hollywood deception, I had hoped they would fall in love.

Two people with hearts like theirs deserved a love that could swallow the world down to nothing, make everything outside of their two twined hearts seem inconsequential in comparison.

If anyone could convince Adam—beautiful, broken Adam—to love again and do it fiercely, it was Linnea Kai.

And there was no room for me with them.

I did not fit in Adam’s world, his male lover, and I wasn’t sure I could love Linnea with half my heart when the other was mired in the past.

Mired in duchessa mia .

I stared up at Savannah, her blue eyes pale but intent on mine. Her gaze scorched me, hot and sharp instead of comforting, as if she was trying to burn away the layers of my skin to see through to my heart.

If Adam had once been my moon, had Savannah been my sun?

How could she have been when the image conjured only violet eyes and caramelized skin, the wide smile of a girl who could never sit still or leave well enough alone?

Who tipped her head to the sky to bathe in the warmth spilling from the burning planet we orbited around as if each golden ray was a gift.

“Sebastian,” Savannah rasped.

And I knew then, in those three syllables, what her decision would be because she had already made it all those years ago when I stood in a hotel room begging her to leave her first husband for me, too.

No.

“I wish I could,” she finished on a weak exhale, hands trembling as one rested on my shoulder and the other pushed through my hair. “If things were different, if I had made different decisions as a young woman, but now… I am sorry. I can’t just run away with you.”

Was it running away if it was meant to be coming home?

“ D’accordo ,” I murmured, rocking back to my feet to stand and step away as quickly as I could. “ Naturalmente . Quando mai sono stato abbastanza ?”

Of course, when have I ever been enough?

I moved to the leather messenger bag I had dropped beside my chair and fished out the stapled pages of the script before I dropped them on the table in front of her. They clattered against the china, the teacup upending from the saucer and spilling brown water across the immaculate white marble.

“I wrote a script,” I said woodenly, ignoring her little gasp. “I made you a promise that you could be the first to read it, but you should know, I won’t make this movie with you and Tate.”

“Seb—”

“You should know,” I repeated, the words whipping from my tongue to lash across the space between us so hard she flinched. “We were never just friends, Savannah, and now? Now, you have chosen for us to be nothing.”

I walked away then, believing until the very last moment I got into my car and pulled away from the house that she would come after me.

Of course, she didn’t.