Page 49 of The Sun & Her Burn (Impossible Universe Trilogy #2)

SEBASTIAN

I wasn’t the type of man to get or stay angry very easily, but in the wake of the paparazzi staking out Miranda’s house, I felt electric with it as if I might spark against the velvet couch and set fire to the house.

It helped to have a purpose.

I took a few deep breaths as I surveyed ingredients from the old, humming refrigerator and decided to make a lemon, parmesan pasta with chicken for dinner.

The Hildebrand/Kai house did not include something as fancy as a pasta machine, but I could easily make hand-rolled orecchiette using a rolling pin and my thumbs.

There was a small portable speaker on the windowsill over the sink, beside a row of potted herbs, that I connected to my Bluetooth so I could play some familiar songs from home.

It made me slightly homesick, for Napoli or my family I wasn’t entirely sure, as I dug my hands into flour, salt, egg, and water to mix the dough while I hummed along to Umberto Tossi.

“I recognize this song,” Adam said from behind me. “I think you used to play it in London.”

“I did,” I agreed without looking over my shoulder. “I’m surprised you remember it.”

There was an easiness between us that came, I thought, from having someone other than our history to focus on. We were joined not only by our time in London, but also by our mutual attraction and friendship with Linnea.

And the rapport I hoped we were establishing together again, too.

After our exploits at Sinclair’s club, I was uncharacteristically nervous like a shy teen confronted with his crush. My breath hitched slightly when I felt Adam come closer, his hip just barely brushing mine as he leaned against the counter to watch me work the dough.

“There is not a single thing I forget about the time we spent together,” he admitted with faux casualness. “Those memories have haunted me and I would not exorcize them even if I could.”

“Adam.” I said his name because it was the only word that would encapsulate my frustration and longing. “What is it you want from me?”

He hummed. “That is a question I have asked myself since the moment I saw you standing at Finborough Theatre, shining brighter than any actor on the stage, enchanting me with your golden eyes. I wanted you with a ferocity that stole my breath and made me go back on my vow not to allow Savannah and me to have any lovers for a time.”

“Look at how that turned out,” I muttered, not bitterly, because I would never be bitter about my time with them.

But maybe I was a little tired.

A little weary and broken like a man returned from war who forgets why he fought in the first place.

Savannah was not brave enough to be with me still even though she had to have known what she was doing by befriending me again over the years, towing me along like a fish on the line.

Was this Adam doing the very same thing?

I closed my eyes as I pounded the pasta dough into a ball and then began to wrap it in plastic cling so it could rest in the fridge.

“I will not survive if you cast me out of your orbit again,” I told Adam baldly, sweeping aside the thin layers of dirt over the fossilized pain at the heart of my soul so he could see the truth. “Do not take me where you do not want me to follow.”

Adam considered me for a long moment, his expression implacable even though something worked in his dark gaze. I appreciated that he took me seriously even though I couldn’t breathe through his silence.

“No matter what happens,” he said finally. “I do not think I could find happiness in this life without you in it. You are as elemental to me as the sky above us, as beautiful and illuminating as the stars in the night. We will be friends, always, Sebastian, if you would have me again.”

Part of my heart soared, giving me a sense of vertigo so profound, I had to curl my fingers over the laminate countertop.

“Just friends?” I managed to rasp, my gaze falling instinctively to that pale pink mouth in the golden stubble I wanted to scrape with my teeth.

I watched that secret, sly smile curl his lips and felt my heart pound.

“I will take whatever you are willing to give me,” he said, sincerely if not earnestly, a coyness in his tone that made my toes curl. “Your mind, your spirit, and your body are all of interest to me. But I appreciate that I am not what you deserve and might very well never be.”

He paused to grip the back of my neck in that way that made me want to drop to my knees and please him until my mouth ached.

“I do not think you have quite forgiven me, no matter that you say otherwise,” he noted, seeing into me so keenly it cut like a knife. “Until then, I think it best if we are friends. Don’t you?”

“ Si, d’accordo ,” I agreed, even though my mouth was watering and my knees were soft like they wanted to buckle until I was prone before Adam.

“Do not mistake me,” Adam said, suddenly stepping so close that our bodies were sewn together shoulder to thigh.

“I want you so badly that I can imagine the taste of you on the back of my tongue and the shape of your cock in my mouth. The way you smell drives me absolutely mad, and when you look at me with heat in your eyes, I feel I will burn up to ash.”

My breath stuttered and died in my lungs.

It was not just the incendiary words that painted a salacious, intoxicating image in my mind’s eye, but the feel of him against me.

He was so utterly masculine, hard-bodied like a professional athlete or a body builder, someone whose job it was to maintain peak physicality, because it was .

The demands of Hollywood and this career were less so for men than women, but they still existed, and Adam Meyers was nothing if not a perfectionist when it came to his craft.

Heat surged through me as if I had been doused with kerosene and lit with a torch. All from the simple press of his hips into mine and the brutal honesty of his husky confession.

Friends did not affect each other in such a way.

I knew this because Linnea had the same impact on me.

Some part of my brain that had not turned into a beast noted that with Savannah, things had always been arranged differently. I had lusted after her first, loved her like a worshipper at an altar, but we had never had the same sense of equality in friendship that I had fostered with Adam or Linnea.

In the wake of the revelation, fear surprised me by burning metallically at the back of my throat.

Something in Adam’s eyes flicked and cooled.

“Ah yes,” he said quietly, rubbing a thumb along the side of my neck where he still held me. “There it is. The anger.”

He had misread me, but it accomplished the same thing so I didn’t correct him as he squeezed me once before letting go to step away from me.

“And Linnea?” I asked, my voice rough-edged as I tried to regain my equilibrium.

I’d asked the question without really knowing what I meant by it.

Adam raised a dark blond brow and leaned his hips against the counter again to cross his arm over his—distractingly broad—chest.

“She is in the shower having a wee cry I think,” he admitted with a little frown. “But if you meant in regard to us, do you think it’s best if we ask her what she wants?”

It was my turn to raise a brow. “Usually, you operate more as an autocracy than a democracy.”

He shrugged a shoulder. “Usually, things do not work out very well for me. Perhaps this time will be different.”

I swallowed down the hope that burgeoned in my throat so hard it made me wince.

“She wants us both, I think,” I confessed as I gathered myself enough to start on the pasta sauce.

There was a bag of lemons in the fridge, and I knew Linnea loved citrus-flavored anything, so I started making a simple sauce with lemons, garlic, butter, and parmesan.

There was Italian parsley in one of the small plants on the windowsill, which I pinched off to use later as a garnish.

“Yes,” Adam agreed. “I think she’s made that clear.”

The silence made me uncomfortable only because it was filled with so much unsaid that I could not, uncharacteristically, find the words to say.

“Do you want us both?” I found the ability to say, the vowels scorching my tongue as they came out.

Adam’s laugh was a bitter little cough. “Never doubt that I want, Sebastian. It is never from lack of wanting that I hold myself back.”

“So you want us, then, but you won’t let yourself have us,” I corrected.

Or let us have you , I followed up with a flare of fury that scorched up my spine.

It was so wildly frustrating to deal with a man who had the best of intentions but the horrible habit of falling on his own sword. He believed that anything bad that could happen would happen to him and his, and I wasn’t sure he was entirely wrong.

But I knew life kicked you in the teeth, it was almost the only guarantee.

Love was what happened when you fought through pain and adversity to reach the other side. It was what made life worth living, even when it hurt.

But ten years of separation and yearning had left me tired in a soul-deep way I wasn’t sure I could battle back from without something more tangible from Adam.

Or Linnea.

I wasn’t willing to play games of the heart as recklessly as I had when I was just eighteen. At twenty-eight, I was all too aware of the stakes and the tolls it could take.

Adam didn’t respond to me. Instead, he moved into the living room to set up for our impromptu movie night, leaving me alone as he was so apt to do.

Linnea emerged from the bathroom a long forty minutes after she had disappeared into it with flushed cheeks that still retained the heat of the shower and wet gold hair that dripped down the back of her oversized Romeo in Blood T-shirt I had sent her in the mail years ago.

It had the poster for the Shakespeare adaptation I had starred in on the front of the black fabric, my silhouette with a rose and a gun stylized so that, at first glance, you couldn't tell one from the other.