Page 74 of The Sun & Her Burn (Impossible Universe Trilogy #2)

SEBASTIAN

S unrise came too early, spilling pale tangerine light over the shimmering waves and toeing my toes like a warm kiss.

It did little to heat the coldness emanating from my heart turning my body to ice where I lay enfolded in the bodies of my lovers.

I had the morbid thought I would have liked to be entombed like this, after death, in a tangle of Adam’s and Linnea’s limbs until we all turned to dust.

This morning felt like a death, so I took a moment to lie in my coffin and remember all of the beautiful moments that had led to this.

Seeing Linnea for the first time in so long in a yellow sundress in the middle of the interview that threw me back into Adam’s orbit.

Realizing that the girl I had considered one of my best friends since she was sixteen was now a woman I could easily fall in love with.

Showing up at Adam’s house and pretending that I didn’t ache every time he looked at me or breathed or moved.

Concocting the scheme that, in hindsight, had been more than a little selfish, my subconscious last-ditch attempt to bring me closer to Adam, to heal hurts in him and Linnea that weren’t mine to heal.

They would treat each other well, I knew, and their grief over losing me wouldn’t rip them apart the way it had done with Adam and Savannah. Instead, it would knit them closer, Linnea’s clever hands sewing them together in a way I was sure could not be undone.

If I let her, I knew she would do the same with me.

I had to get up before they woke.

But we had turned to each other so much in the night, my body was sore in ways it had never hurt before, and every atom of my being resisted the idea of moving out from under their warm, heavy bodies.

Only the thought of saving Adam and Linnea from Oscar eventually got me moving.

Because if the sex tape released, it wouldn’t just impact Adam, but Linnea, too. The speculation on around her being his beard or her being stupid enough to marry a gay man––because bi-erasure was alive and kicking––would hurt her career and their relationship.

I held my breath as I maneuvered away from them, and then froze when Adam cracked an eye open to regard me with sleepy confusion.

“I have to use the restroom,” I lied, and the words hurt coming up.

He grunted, curling around Linnea. “Hurry back.”

I closed my eyes a second after his closed and fought back the sob that lodged in my throat. Giving in to one last impulse, I leaned forward to kiss Linnea’s forehead and then found Adam watching me from one squinted green eye.

“I love you in any universe,” I told him before kissing him lightly as if I would do as he said and hurry back.

“I love you in this one, my Polaris,” he replied firmly, cupping the back of my head to bring me in for a harder, longer kiss.

The nickname scored through me as deeply as the kiss did.

“If you aren’t back in ten minutes, I’ll drag you back here.

I intend to have you both again when the sun is properly up. ”

“Yes, sir,” I agreed with a lopsided smile and then waited until his hand dropped and he closed his eyes to get up and collect my clothes.

I dressed beside them but for my shoes and then slowly climbed the wooden staircase built into the cliffside to reach the house.

It was empty and dark inside, too early even for Bruce to be in the kitchen or Chaucer to be up for her endless errands.

I collected my belongings from Adam’s spacious suite as quickly and quietly as I could.

The streets of Los Angeles were quiet, too as I drove back into town toward the hotel I’d barely used in the last week. Blurry-eyed and hollow-souled, I left my car with the valet and shuffled into the elevator.

I thought about calling Elena and decided I would do that after I booked flights to England and got a few more hours of sleep.

So I wasn’t prepared to open my hotel door and find Savannah Richardson sitting on my bed.

I rubbed my eyes hard to erase the vision, and when that didn’t work, I merely stared at her.

“Hello, Sebastian,” she said softly, hands clasped in her lap, face devoid of its usual makeup.

In fact, her hair was pulled back at the crown in a kind of ponytail, the short ends escaping at the bottom, and her outfit was a subdued cashmere knit set in stone that she normally wouldn’t wear out of the house. She looked…soft. Soft and sad. A half-erased sketch of the person she usually was.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, and my voice sounded strange in my ears, almost combative.

I guessed I was at the end of my very long rope.

Her smile fell flat on her face, and she gestured to the suitcase I just now noticed huddled in the corner of the suite.

“I left him,” she whispered. “I left Tate.”

I blinked, suddenly unsteady on my feet as if I had been hit in the head.

I wondered if perhaps I had.

Because this was too surreal to process.

“ Scusi ?” I asked, forgetting English.

“I left Tate,” she said again, more firmly this time as she tilted her chin up to meet my eyes with steely determination. “For you.”

“For me,” I echoed.

“For Christ’s sake, Sebastian, yes for you,” she snapped, then smoothed a hand over her dishevelled hair. “Of course, for you.”

“I don’t think there is any ‘of course’ about it,” I protested. “I asked you weeks ago to be with me, and you showed me the door.”

Cazzo , that seemed like such a very long time ago.

I had been holding on to her ghost for so long that it hadn’t even felt like a death when I’d given her up because I had already mourned for years.

It was different with Adam. I hadn’t been able to speak to him for loving him and being unable to have him. Living without him had been like breathing through an open wound because I’d loved him with a part of my soul Savannah had never seen fit to reach out for.

I had never been able to reconcile the loss of Savvy because the trauma of leaving the Meyers had felt so monumental, and she was an easier substitute as a part for the whole.

She’d been easier to love, in a way, easier to fantasize about a future with because she was a woman and I’d always been attracted to women, but also because she’d done it.

She’d left him! Which seemed like the logical first step in being with me.

So I’d never understood how she could have done that and not come to me.

I could never reconcile that hole blown through my heart, and I’d thought it would remain empty forever.

But I couldn’t have known Linnea would rise in life like the sun in the east utterly eradicating the long shadows cast by my troubled past, and that I would grow to love her the way I did.

I couldn’t have ever dreamed, even in my impossible universe, that the way I’d love Savannah would be a mere shadow of the way my heart was devoted to Linnea.

Just because she was the only thing that had ever made sense to me didn’t mean that she was the only thing to exist.

I couldn’t ever have conceived how loving Linnea could open the door to loving Adam again when I’d thought it forever closed and locked to me.

Yet none of that mattered now.

Because Oscar Hampton had closed the door on that future for me.

Fury writhed like snakes in my gut. I just wanted Savannah to leave so I could go to bed and cry in peace like a real man.

I knew now that she had never loved me.

Not like Adam did in ways enormous enough to terrify.

Not like Linnea did, as if I was as elemental to her as the stars in the midnight sky.

Polaris, Adam had called me last night.

Their North Star.

“Savvy,” I said, voice weary. “If you’re having problems with Tate, you should work through them. He loves you, and he deserves a chance to fight for you.”

“And don’t I deserve a chance to fight for you anymore?

” she countered, standing up to stalk to me and poke a finger into my chest. Her indignation and passion shocked me out of my stupor slightly.

“Why do you get to make grand declarations and not me? I just left my husband for you , Sebastian. Do you understand what that means?”

“Do you?” I countered, brows raised.

“It means I love you,” she shouted, shoving two hands into my chest and pushing hard enough to rock me back on my heels. “I love you, you fool, and I have since I met you even though it’s screwed up my plans.”

My laugh was a series of empty shell cases pinging to the floor. “And it hasn’t disrupted mine? If you are here to make me feel guilty, I won’t have it. All I have ever done if try to love you and be good to you.”

“You have been,” she said, suddenly so gently it almost gave me whiplash.

Her big blue eyes were wide with sincerity.

It occurred to me that though she was eighteen years older than Linnea, in so many ways she seemed more immature.

“I don’t care what it does to my plans or my life.

I don’t care about any of it anymore. I have to have you. ”

“Is this because of Linnea and Adam?” I asked because I knew she had a feeling I was involved with them again.

Her mouth thinned for a moment before her eyes limned in tears. “It has to do with this,” she declared, pulling something from her pocket.

My watch.

The Patek Phillipe Celestial the Meyers had given me in London.

My fingers shook slightly as I took it from her and flipped it over to read the inscription on the back.

For the man who wants to move the sun and the stars .

When I looked up at Savvy again, I felt a hairline fracture in my already broken heart, just a crack for her to wedge into, one hammered there by long-lost hope.

“That watch was a promise,” she told me earnestly, taking my numb hands in hers, the watch between our fingers, “to love you in a way that rearranged the universe so that we could be together forever, no matter the obstacles between us. I wanted to give that back to you so you would know I meant it this time. I want us to be together no matter what it takes. I want to be your duchessa again. I want to love you again.”

My universe felt as though it had been flipped on its head. I couldn’t make sense of what was happening in the wake of grief I felt leaving Adam and Linnea, but a part of me that had existed for ten years reared its retired head and looked at Savannah’s proposal with eager eyes.

This was all I’d ever wanted once, for a very, very long time.

And in the wake of losing Adam and Linnea, was there room to find solace with an old love? Could we mean anything to each other again?

The whisper of an eighteen-year-old boy who spoke in my own whispered, yes .

Even though my shattered heart screamed no.

They would never forgive me for taking up with Savannah again.

But maybe that wasn’t a bad thing?

How else could I convince them that what we were was over than to move along with the one woman they couldn’t stand?

They had to believe I was done with them at least until I could try to figure out a way to fuck Oscar over without him fucking them over. And they were both too loving, too eternal to take my leaving lying down.

I stared at the watch and thought about the kind of love that moved the sun and the stars.

The kind of love I had for them.

“Okay,” I told Savannah as I shifted my wrist for her to put the watch on me. “How do you feel about a trip to England?”

The End For Now.