Page 71 of The Sun & Her Burn (Impossible Universe Trilogy #2)
SEBASTIAN
I went back to the hotel to shower and change after the award show before heading over to Adam’s. I also needed to call Elena, and I couldn’t do that where he or Linnea could over hear.
“Oh patatino ,” Elena murmured through the phone after I explained the situation. “I am so sorry.”
I huffed a weak laugh and rubbed my hand through my wet hair. “Yeah, yeah, me too.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“No,” I said instantly. “It’s not the money. It’s…”
Could I stand to lose Adam again?
Could I bear not to have Linnea’s light in my life?
My dream had been within my grasp, grazing my fingertips, only to have it be pulled so cruelly away from me, ripped to pieces and scattered in front of my very eyes.
“It’s losing them,” Elena finished for me. “Giselle told the family that she’s lovely. Like sunlight, she said. And Adam? Well, you’ve always spoken about him like he hung the moon in the sky.”
I laughed because she had no idea how on the nose those comments were.
“I feel as if someone reached into my chest and tore out my heart,” I confessed, tears clogging my throat. More than Mama, Elena was someone I had gone to for advice. Mama was the shoulder to cry on, but my eldest sister was the one who would pick up a sword and fight for me.
“I’ll make this contract so ironclad, Oscar Hampton will be obliterated from the face of the earth if he so much as breathes a word of the sex tape to anyone.”
I exhaled a sharp chuckle. “Have I mentioned you are beautiful and terrifying?”
“It’s a well-earned reputation,” she acknowledged. “Have I mentioned you are loving and deserving of the whole world? I’m not sure Adam and Linnea were that for you, but if they were, I am so sorry, Seb.”
“I recovered from heartbreak once before,” I joked lamely, but God, this felt different.
Adam seemed different this time, older and wiser, more willing to consider the options than act in a blind panic. Linnea made it different, us and the situation. She wouldn’t want to let me go. My girl was a fighter just like a Lombardi.
“Come back to New York when this is done,” Elena suggested. “Come visit Rora and the twins, they miss their zio Sebastian.”
She meant she missed me and she wanted to be the one to watch over me protectively as I grieved.
“I might go to England to see Cosima,” I mentioned even though the thought hadn’t occurred to me until just then.
She was due with triplets any moment so she couldn’t come to me, and I found myself desperately needing the solace and intimacy of my twin sister.
She would understand everything without me having to find the words for the bloody massacre in my chest. She would tuck me up in one of those opulent bedrooms in her British manor home and lavish me with tea and treats and so much attention that I’d never feel alone even in such an enormous house.
I needed that more than I needed Elena’s sharp watchfulness or Mama’s smothering or Giselle’s quiet company and understanding.
I needed Cosima to smother away the loneliness yawning open in my chest like an insurmountable crater.
“I can take some vacation time,” Elena suggested. “I’d like to be there to meet the babies when they come.”
“Okay,” I said quietly because I wanted that, too.
Years ago, we hadn’t been able to stand each other, but love had changed Elena just as it had changed me, then and now.
“Will you be okay?” she asked.
“No,” I admitted on a raw laugh. “But they’re waiting for me, now. At least I have tonight to say goodbye.”
It was 4 a.m. in New York City, and my big sister had answered the phone on the first ring. She hurt for me, and it was obvious when she said, “Call me when it’s finished. No matter what time, d’accordo ? I’ll be here.”
“ Ti amo, sorella mia ,” I told her as tears burned my eyes but didn’t fall.
I love you, my sister.
“ Intimo sempre ,” she responded, together always.
It had been our safe words as children when we needed to hide from the mafiosos circling our father, Seamus, like carrion crows.
In moments like this, it felt like a hallelujah.
Even when I felt like I was staring down the barrel of gun, knowing I wouldn’t be spending the rest of my life with the people I loved, I had a reminder that I’d never be truly alone.
There were candles everywhere, but since it was California, even though it was only early March, they were flameless vessels with battery-powered ambient light.
Strewn across the sand at the base of the narrow beach in front of Adam’s property, they illuminated the night like stars fallen from the night sky above.
They spilled warm golden light on the two golden hair beauties lounging on a black velvet blanket on the sand.
They seemed like something from a fever dream, skin glowing, limbs tangled and undulating slowly like the waves rocking softly into the shore, their naked bodies alternatively hard and lush, perfect as usually only exist in the imagination.
But they were here.
They were real.
And they were waiting for me.
None of us said a word as they unclasped their bodies and rolled to their knees to wait for me to approach.
As soon as I was in their reach, they disrobed me as if it were part of a sacred ritual, kissing every inch of skin they uncovered, smoothing their hands along the curves of muscle in my arms and legs, testing the weight of balls and the heft of my thickening cock.
Only when I was naked did they push me to the blanket. I settled between Adam’s spread legs, my back against his chest, his erection flush across my spine, while Linnea climbed into my lap. Sandwiched between them, their hearts beating on either side of my chest, I almost started to cry.
It felt like something holy. A kind of love that transcended language and was spoken only through flesh and blood and bone.
“I wanted to tell you this under the moonlight,” Adam said into my ear, rubbing his nose into the hair over my temple and pausing to breathe deeply as if my fragrance was a drug he could get high off. “I wanted to hold you skin to skin while I told you the truest thing I’ve ever known.”
His arms wound around me, one diagonally across my chest to rest his palm against my heart, and the other banded over my hips as if he wanted to fuse us.
“I love you, Sebastian,” he said directly into my ear as if he didn’t want any space between us to sully it.
“I loved you then and I love you now in a way I know in my bones and marrow I’ll never stop.
I live a half-life without you, and I never want to experience that pain again.
I wish I had the watch to give you, to show you how serious I am, but maybe one day I can give you a ring. ”
He sucked in a deep breath that I mimicked because I had forgotten to breathe until just then.
“I told you once that I would love you until the end of time, and I meant it,” Adam continued.
“I still want your impossible universe. Only now, Linnea had reminded me that it doesn’t have to be impossible.
One day, maybe years from now, I’m going to put a gold ring on your finger that matches your eyes and you, me, and Linnea will exchange vows on the beach and vow to love each other forever even though we already have and always would.
” He swallowed thickly. “I hope one day, when we can walk away from the fame and film, we can have a family with children who look like you and never stop moving like our trottolina . I have this mad hope in my heart that you want that with me, with us, too. But even if you don’t, you have always been my North Star, lighting up my life and leading me along the right path, the truest one to happiness. My Polaris.”
“I don’t want there to be an us without you,” Linnea added, stroking her hand down my neck, pressing forward so her breasts were crushed against my chest and Adam’s arms, her legs twined around my back and Adam’s hips so we were as conjoined as three could be.
“I think I fell in love with you at sixteen before I ever really knew you because I could see your heart in your eyes, and it spoke to me in a way no one ever had before. Most people never find their soulmates, and somehow, I’ve been lucky enough to find two. ”
She pressed her forehead to mine, and I swallowed my heart as it tried to leap up my throat and go to her. I raised my hands to cup her face and smoothed my thumbs over her cheekbones, trying to find the words under the crushing grief in my chest.
To be given the gift of these two hearts knowing I would have to break them in the morning was damnation befitting Dante’s ninth circle of hell.
“ Sei il mio universe ,” I told her in Italian. “You are my universe. Both of you. The moon and sun that redefine my sense of gravity. No matter what happens, please, promise me—swear to me—you know I love you both madly and eternally.”
Adam made a pained sound in his throat a second before he was moving up and flipping out from under me to press me down to the ground by the shoulders so he could kiss me.
Only Linnea was already there, her tongue in my mouth.
We made room for him there, kissing each other in a way I had never done before, sharing breath and tongue and nipping lips until our bodies were warm and slick with sweat.
Their hands wandered over me, tracing the same skin they had touched earlier, testing the firmness of my abdominals, squeezing their fingers around my cock until it was sheathed in their touch.
They aroused me so sinuously, I was close to coming before I even realized how they’d done it.
I blinked dazedly up at the moon in the starry sky as they lowered their mouths to my groin and took turns sucking my dick, and I thanked whatever God might have ruled the heavens that I could have this.
Even if it was just for a night.