2. Sebastian
2
SEBASTIAN
“ I can manage it,” my sister repeated, a steel edge of determination in her tone. “You focus on what you need to do.”
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel as I sat outside The Ivy restaurant waiting to pick up Mrs. Savannah Meyers the following Friday afternoon. I’d driven her six times in the past week, but the rapport we’d established hadn’t been revisited. If anything, she was even more careful around me, a portrait drawn against the back seat in oils and old-school ideals.
“You don’t have to manage it, Cosi,” I said between my clenched teeth. “You think if we move to England, we completely abandon our values? I’m the man of this family. It kills me that you’re the one supporting la mia famiglia, but I understand that you need to do it for our mother and sisters. That doesn’t mean I’m not pitching in with what I can to lessen your responsibility, capisci ?”
“Sebastian, money is not an issue. Please, save what you make to get an apartment without four other males sharing the one bedroom,” Cosima insisted.
I didn’t want to dwell too long on how it was exactly that my twin sister was making enough money to support a family of five, including tuition at one of the top art schools in the world for our older sister, Giselle. I didn’t want to think about it because those dark, troubling thoughts that carved me up like a butcher with a cleaver were reserved for the dark hours I lay sleepless in bed, when the good little Catholic boy in me reared its naive head to worry about our eternal souls.
It disgusted my pride, as both a man and an Italian, two separate but entirely too arrogant sides of me, to rely on my sister to support my family. However, I was also disgustingly grateful because I had a plan. I just needed time.
I was a good actor. It could be argued that there were innumerable good actors out there.
I was also, it had been said by many, many women, unaccountably attractive. Of course, it was easy to see that there were many, many attractive people in this world, and it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that many of them wanted to be actors.
So what set me aside from the rest?
Well, I doubted very few people had grown up using their acting skills to survive as I had. When lying became a matter of violence or absolution, food or starvation, their safety or ruination. Everything in my life thus far had boiled down to being a good actor. If the Mafia came calling for my father, I had to be prepared to spin a good tale, convince them that he was coming back from wherever he’d disappeared to, and that of course, he would have their money for them on his return.
The safety of my mother and three sisters depended on me acting as the man of the house from the time I was eight years old. Now, eleven years later, I was still honing my craft, but even though the life-and-death circumstances had passed, I practiced with the same intensity. My tool of survival had become my passion.
I’d also been writing stories since I was a boy, stealing papers and articles from my father’s desk so I could pen my own words on the back using one of Giselle’s pencil crayons. They weren’t grand tales of dragons and princesses because I was a poor boy in the Italian countryside; we didn’t have the scope or sensibilities to waste time on other worlds. No, my stories were about desolation and small joys, the intricacies of life made so real on the page that I imagined I could feel the grit between my fingers when I held them. I reached out to the stack of papers that comprised the screenplay I had been working on for the past three years and fingered a page just to feel the texture of it.
Cosima knew these stories, these talents, and she called them “my gifts.” She spoke about them with the same reverence as a disciple of her religion, and I knew in a way that twisted my insides that she would do anything to ensure my gifts were brought into the light.
“I’ll send Mama and Elena what I can,” I finally responded. “I don’t care if you have it covered, Cosi, at least they’ll know I’m thinking of them and working for them too. They can use the pitiful cash to buy better groceries or save it toward Elena’s computer fund.”
There was a silence and then softly, “ Va bene, fratello mio .”
I closed my eyes and pounded my head back against the seat rest as pain radiated around my sensitive heart. “One day soon, mia bella Cosima , we will be together again.”
“One day sooner, not later,” she stated authoritatively, and I again wondered what she was doing in order to secure that promise. “ Insieme. ”
“Together,” I repeated in English, feeling the ache where my twin sister, my best friend, should be in my life like the loss of a limb.
The opening of the back door jarred me out of my thoughts, and I raised shocked eyes to the rearview to see Savannah Meyers sliding inside.
“ Cazzo ,” I cursed, knocking my script off the console between the front and back seats in my haste to disconnect my call with Cosima and apologize to Savannah for my lack of professionalism.
“Sebastian?” Cosima called before I could cut the call.
“What a lovely name,” Savannah said, her eyes creased at the corners with suppressed mirth even as the rest of her face lay perfectly still.
“You’ll be hard-pressed to find an Italian name that isn’t,” I told her with a wry grin as I quickly picked up the papers that had spilled into the back. I tried to distract her with my charm so she wouldn’t look at them too closely and wonder. “You’ll also be hard-pressed to find an Italian who wouldn’t curse like a sailor after being startled the way you did me just now.”
Her lips pressed, but there was amusement there too. “Is that your way of apologizing for cursing in front of a lady?”
My grin turned wicked. “I believe actions speak louder than words… If we weren’t the definition of lady and the tramp, I would apologize in my usual way.”
Her pressed lips curled. “Let me guess, with a kiss?”
I winked at her. “Exactly, though not on the mouth. Surest way to get any woman outside of the family to forgive you. Trust me, nothing says ‘I’m sorry’ like an orgasm.”
This time, she let herself laugh and the wind chime sound peeled beautifully between us.
“You are outrageous,” she said with a shake of her head.
The movement dislodged a curl, tumbling it across the smooth peaches and cream of her cheek. My fingers twitched to tuck it behind her diamond-studded ear, and the papers I had successfully collected tumbled back to the floorboards.
I quickly ducked back over the console, twisting awkwardly to pick them up, but Savannah was already there with a sheaf of papers in her hand. I watched her eyes snap to the words like the collision of two magnets.
“You write,” she whispered, holding the discarded papers in her hand reverently.
“Uh,” I swallowed harshly. “Yes.”
“Screenplays?”
“Mostly.”
“Hmm,” she hummed lightly, then shifted the papers she held into her lap and held out her manicured hand to me. “Give me the rest.”
I barked out a surprised laugh. “ Scusi ?”
“Pardon,” she corrected me primly. “Now, Sebastian, hand me the rest.”
“It’s private.” I tried even though I recognized the determination in her eyes because I’d grown up with women, and I learned their capacity for stubbornness from an early age.
Her response was a sharply arched brow.
I sighed, feeling all few of my eighteen years as I petulantly passed her the screenplay I’d been working on for the past twelve months.
“Eyes on the road,” she reminded me as she settled back against the creamy upholstery with her eyes already trained on my words.
It was a seventeen-minute drive to Savannah’s beige brick and white paneled townhome on Halsey, but it felt infinitely longer with my story in her small hands, her big eyes eating up every word with an avidness that disturbed me.
I tried at one point to intervene after she let out a small gasp, but she merely held up a hand when I spoke her name, silencing me immediately.
My gloved fingers thrummed mutely against the wheel as I speculated what classy wife-of-the-amazing-Adam-Meyers Savannah might think of my story. It was about a poor immigrant boy in 1920s New York who ends up selling his soul to a variety of shady characters in order to pay for the safe arrival and setup of his big Italian family.
It was allegorical, obviously, but set in a period of time I’d always found awesomely mysterious, shadowed by backroom deals, Mafia corruption, and scandals that never saw the light of day, thanks to a few well-greased palms.
Corruption, greed, and a ruthless need to survive.
These were the things I knew.
These were things I had been taught growing up poor in Napoli, desperate to free my family from the shackles we’d been born into.
So I knew somewhere deep in the marrow of my bones that my story was good because it was true . It was so gritty I imagined I could feel the sand between my fingers as I touched the pages, smell the acrid scent of urine in the dank, muddy alleys of New York City before asphalt was poured. I loved it. It was good. In fact, I was banking my future and my family’s on it being fucking brilliant.
Yet my heart barely beat in the tight grip of fear that had hold of it at the thought that this woman––my sort of boss and total stranger––might not like it.
When I pulled up to the tall, gold-tipped iron gates of her townhome, I had to clear my throat twice before I could say, “Mrs. Meyers, we’re here.”
She ignored me.
I swallowed past the gargantuan lump in my throat and tried again. “Mrs. Meyers?”
Nothing.
“Savannah,” I finally barked, my nerves breaking under the stress of her silence.
Immediately, her head jerked up, her lips parted and eyes widened as though I had caught her doing something she shouldn’t.
“We’re here,” I repeated.
“Oh,” she said, surprised. “Do you have someone else to drive after me?”
“No…”
She nodded curtly. “Excellent. Then, as I am assuming you won’t want to part with these papers, you can either sit quietly or go for a walk while I continue reading.”
Before I could formulate a response, she pushed the button for the partition to rise between us and simultaneously sat back comfortably in her seat.
I was dismissed.
Not knowing whether to curse at her or do as she said, I chose the latter because it meant keeping my job. But I muttered filthy, derisive Italian words about the rich taking liberties as I shoved out of the Rolls and made my way away from the Thames toward Hyde Park.
I tried to let the clean, classic lines of Chelsea’s mostly Georgian architecture distract me from the strange power the woman in the Rolls held over me. Mostly, it worked. I loved the meticulousness of the neighborhood; how clean the streets were right down to the flowers trimmed perfectly in their window boxes and the acute angles of the hedgerows. It was the antithesis of Naples with its sloping buildings, cracked and painted sun-dried colors that hurt the eyes under the yellow afternoon glare. The people too, wrapped up neatly like presents in expensive scarves and layers of thickly knit weaves. They nodded or smiled demurely at me as I passed, their conversations muted, contained just to the pocket of air between them. In Naples, on any given day, the streets were teeming with families, markets, or traffic, the people sweating, yelling because they were aggravated by the heat and the noise and their small, small lives.
I inhaled a deep, cleansing lungful of damp, cold air and held it tight in my lungs. It helped anchor me to this place, which was so special to me because it was nothing like home.
Yet it was also empty to me in a way that home never had been.
Simply, I had no one to love in London.
And I was Italian enough, man enough, and romantic enough to believe that life wasn’t worth living unless you were loving.
I’d had brief flings with a handful of women in the few months I’d been there and countless nights with others just to slake my unquenchable thirst for sex, but none of that was intimate, and intimacy was something entirely different from sex. It was the way a body knew another, lusted after its uniqueness so much that only that single form could satisfy it. The way one human could anticipate another, the way they could strip you down to the bolts and build you back up again with their mouths when used to form kisses or words.
I craved that intimacy and found the promise of that in Savannah Meyers.
So even though I was terrified to have someone of her caliber read my words, I was also oddly touched and fiercely aroused because it was a part of me she held between her hands and scrutinized with her eyes. I felt the phantom touch of her even then as I walked down the streets away from her, trying to purge my mind of her.
I couldn’t.
Something about this woman echoed in me, and I knew I'd explore it if I was given the slightest opportunity.
Explore her until I knew her tight curves and satin edges as intimately as a tailor with his custom creations. I wanted to run my fingers over her seams and into her silk-lined depths, pin down her hands, and sew her mouth to mine with unyielding kisses.
My mind reeled with the imagery, loops of grainy black-and-white film clips on repeat behind the screens of my eyes. I tried to calm down, bit the inside of my cheek until it bled, and thought of Neapolitan grandmothers sweating and sagging in the sun, but still, by the time I reached the pink awning of Peggy Porschen Cakes on my way back from the park, my cock was so hard it was an actual miracle it hadn’t punched a hole through my trousers.
I figured, eyeing the explosion of pink and girly that was the bakery, that going inside to buy an outrageously priced cupcake was a good distraction. But the delicately frosted, pale pink frothed cakes seemed like something la duchessa would enjoy, so I bought one for us both.
I ate mine on the way back to the car, unable to stop the impulse to stick my thumb in the sweet icing and suck it off with a curl of my tongue and hard suction with my lips. I knew without knowing that Savannah Meyers’s nipples would taste just as sweet. And when the chocolatey cake melted on my tongue, I knew her pussy would melt between my lips just the same.
When I finally arrived back at the car, I was as agitated as a caged animal. I slammed the door closed behind me after I got in the front seat and immediately twisted to look at Savannah. Sometime while I’d been walking, she had lowered the partition and the papers in her hands, so when I found her, she was utterly demure. Her hands crossed primly in her lap, and her face was held in perfect repose.
Porca miseria , the need to fuck her wet, rough, and messy until she was ruined with orgasms, and I’d laid waste to her perfection, thrummed through me nearly too powerfully to ignore.
“Well?” I barked out.
She smiled only slightly, but it was smug, nonetheless. “I see that the ever-charming Sebastian succumbs to grumpiness when he’s nervous.”
My teeth ground together until a muscle in my jaw spasmed. “Hardly. If I’m grumpy, it’s because I should have been off the clock an hour ago.”
“We both know you can count this as overtime. Don’t be mean and spoil my fun, Sebastian. I was just about to tell you what I thought of your screenplay. Aren’t you at all curious?”
I glared at her faux innocent expression even as I loved her playfulness. “Of course, Mrs. Meyers, it’s not as though you practically forced me to give you my words. Why wouldn’t I want your very solicited opinion?”
She bit her lip in mock apology, but I knew it was to hide her smile. “Excellent. Well then, quite simply, I loved it.”
My eyebrows shot into my hairline. “Do not play with me, Savannah.”
“I’m not playing, not about this,” she said, all teasing gone. “Tell me, you’re meant to play the lead, aren’t you?”
I shrugged churlishly but lifted my chin in confirmation.
“I see it,” she said softly, her gaze pressed like soothing hands to my cheeks. “The intensity and the passion and the faux swagger all undercut by a soft heart.”
“What do you know of my heart?” I retorted.
Her lashes fluttered over her eyes like curtains caught in a breeze, and I realized that she was showing me everything in that gaze, a panoramic view of her soul. “Sebastian, you’re an artist.” She gently rustled the papers as she picked them up. “I just spent the past ninety minutes reading it, and now, I’m holding it in my hands.”
I swallowed thickly and rubbed at the back of my neck.
“Do you have work as an actor?”
“ Si ,” I answered, forgetting myself for a moment. “I’m over at Finborough Theatre doing Bury the Dead .”
She pursed her lips in thought for a moment before she straightened her shoulders. “I’m sure you know that my husband is a very well-regarded actor here in England.”
I snorted. To say that her husband was “very well-regarded” was such a typically British understatement. After I’d learned I would be driving his wife, I’d done my research. I’d watched him through the silver screen for years, but finding out more about his life had been a revelation.
Adam Meyers’s story had been open to public consumption since he was a boy. He’d been born to a family of nobility that had long ago lost their estate but not their brand of wealth or elegance. He’d been a top student at Eton, which is where he met and became best friends with the princes of England, Arthur and Alasdair Whitley-Fairfax, and hobnobbed with the crème de la crème of British society before he’d gone on to study business at Oxford University. When Arthur enlisted in the navy, Adam had too. After four years in the service, they had both emerged as men, but surprisingly, while Arthur had resumed his princely duties, Adam had turned to acting. Unsurprisingly, his fame was assured before he took his first step on the London stage as the youngest ever Hamlet to be cast in the West End, but it was secured the moment after the curtains closed and he received the first of many standing ovations.
If Cosima thought I was gifted, Adam Meyers was a messiah.
So, yeah, I understood that Adam Meyers was “very well-regarded.”
“I may be Italian, but I haven’t been living under a rock for the last decade,” I told her.
“So dramatic, it’s a wonder I didn’t guess you were an actor from our first meeting,” she scolded me. “Well, what most people don’t know is that Adam’s secret weapon is me.”
“You?”
“Yes,” she said, sitting up straight like a straight-A student preening under attention from her teacher. “Me. We met when he was working on his first film, and ever since then, I’ve scouted his projects for him. You see, I have an eye.”
“An eye,” I repeated, amusement washing away my anger.
“Yes.” She pouted. “You don’t believe me, but you see, I’m a modern-day muse.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” I said, my eyes moving over her loveliness. “You certainly inspire me.”
She rolled her eyes, and I loved that I’d broken through her porcelain doll shell to see the spirited woman beneath it. “Focus, Sebastian. I’m trying to tell you that not only do I love this screenplay but I’m also in a position to do something about it.”
My heart stopped, then restarted with a painful, stuttering thud.
“I’m serious,” she stated before I could doubt her again. “Please, let me make a copy of this quickly. I’ll run up and photocopy it and then give you back the original. I won’t make any promises, but I think I can get this into the right hands.”
I peered at her and swallowed four times before I found my voice. “Why would you do that?” When her face softened, I sharpened my tone. “And don’t give me some cazzate about you just doing something nice for a fellow human being. Everyone has a reason tied to greed for doing anything , and you? The classy wife of a celebrated actor, what reason could you possibly have to help an Irish-Italian immigrant chauffeur wannabe writer and actor?”
Suddenly, Mrs. Savannah Meyers looked as I imagined she had as a child, a little lost but edgy with restless need and impossible hope. She licked her lips nervously and looked up at me through her lashes. “You’re right. I’m not altruistic by nature. I’m selfish and savage in my pursuit of what I want… You don’t get to where I am by being generous.”
“A society wife?” I asked, hiding my vulnerability behind cruelty.
“Yes,” she sniffed. “And a muse. It might not seem like such an accomplishment to you, but I was born in hell on earth, and now I live in heaven. I can do that for you. Just let me copy these papers, Sebastian. Trust me even though you have no real reason to besides the fact that it feels right .”
I hated her for knowing how right it felt. If she remained impervious and perfect, hidden behind the partition meant to separate us, I would have said no. But she’d let down her guard enough to show me her flaws, and it was those, her selfishness, and ruthless ambition that made her tangible to me. The intimacy germinating between us took root and began to flourish.
I held her wide blue eyes solemnly as I said, “Make the copies, but if nothing comes of it, I don’t want to know about it, capisci ?”
Savannah pressed my screenplay to her chest, and I imagined that through those pages, pure extensions of myself, I could feel the thrum of her heartbeat against my own.
“ Capisco ,” she said with a bad accent and the most beautiful grin I’d ever seen.
And I decided even if she trampled all over my dreams, it was worth it to see a woman like Savannah Meyers gift me with her smile.