9. Sebastian
9
SEBASTIAN
I t was late by the time I dragged myself back to the carriage house.
My carriage house.
At least, temporarily.
It felt good to toe my shoes off and move through the cool, shadowed space, but I wasn’t in the headspace to be alone and enclosed. The animal within me was restless, prowling, and growling. It wanted something more than Adam’s cum on my fingers and Savannah’s orgasm on my tongue. It wanted… It wanted .
It was as simple and overwhelming as that.
I had a home. I had lovers. I had the promise of success.
Yet I was still alone.
Without Cosima, without Mama and Elena and Giselle.
Without the comforts, however rank, of my home country.
A foreigner in a foreign land.
Called like a wolf by the moon, I moved to the mullioned window overlooking the corner of the pool and fought the urge to howl.
I scrubbed my hands over my face, then checked the time on the clock over the microwave. Three in the morning. The guests had left, save for Savannah’s good friend, Ramona Waters, and Miranda Hildebrand, who had been put to bed after too much liquor hours before. Adam had locked himself in his office with a well-known producer and director soon after our tryst in the garden.
The pool was empty, and I desperately needed to purge myself of this energy.
It would have been easier to come. I’d given two orgasms that night and had none of my own. But the idea of crawling into bed and touching myself until I came on my stomach, seed cooling, body spent but mind ringing, was its own kind of torture.
So I shucked off my clothes right there beside the front door, leaving only black boxer briefs because I didn’t own swim trunks, and pushed back through the door.
It was cold, the kind of damp chill special to England that gnawed hungrily at your bones, but I’d always run hot, and I enjoyed how it sharpened my tired senses. The pavers were slightly slick with dew, and the lush grass crunched underfoot as I cut across to the pool. Without hesitating, I dove into the deep end, body knifing with minimal splash into the heated depths.
When I emerged, shaking water from my hair like a dog as I treaded water, a cool, American accented voice said, “Eight out of ten from the American judge, a six out of ten from the Russian, and ten out of ten from the Brit.”
It was a husky voice, yet oddly lyrical and feminine. When I turned, it surprised me to see a young woman, a few years younger than myself, sprawled across a chaise lounge. Even in the dim pool lights, her riot of overly thick, wavy hair was honeyed blonde. Her features were in shadows, but it was clear from the coltish length of her thin limbs that she was still a teen.
“I expected higher from the American,” I countered, pushing my slicked-back hair off my face to smile at her.
She shrugged one bony shoulder. “Americans like star power, and you’re an unknown.”
A true laugh startled up my throat. “Touché. Why don’t we rectify that? I’m Sebastian.”
She gave an unladylike snort as she leaned forward, legs straddling the chaise, elbows falling between her thighs so she could curl over and prop her chin on her hands. The movement brought her out from the shadows and showcased a face crowded with large features. A wide mouth, full, lush lips that dominated, and large, catlike eyes a rich indigo blue. Thick light-brown eyebrows slashed across her forehead and though her nose was well formed, it was lost amid the drama of her other features.
She wasn’t beautiful, not really. But I knew with the certainty of a man who’d been raised with beautiful women, who worked in an industry where beauty was currency, that she would be a knockout when she grew into her big-featured face and put some meat on those long bones.
“ Just Sebastian?” she asked suspiciously.
I flipped on my back to float leisurely. “Just Seb, if you want the intimacy. Though, if we’re going to be friends, I’d like to know what to call you.”
But she wouldn’t be deterred from cynicism. “You’re supposed to introduce me by your full name so I can ooh and aah ”––each exclamation was met with a hilarious expression of exaggerated amazement––“over what movies you’ve been in or directed or produced.”
“Well, I haven’t done any of that.”
She waited, one thick eyebrow cocked, until I laughed and amended. “Yet.”
“Ah,” she said with all the gravitas of a much more mature woman. “There we have it. Give it a bit and you’ll be introducing yourself by your last name first.”
“Like Bond?”
“Yes, but honestly, he’s probably the only one who deserves to do that,” she allowed graciously.
She was a riot, the best conversation I’d had all night. Oh, I’d enjoyed Adam and Savannah, but they twisted me up until I couldn’t breathe, and this slip of a bold thing was unspooling me with good humor one inch at a time.
“He’s a fictional character,” I pointed out as I started doing a lazy backstroke. “They’re capable of pulling off things most people would never dream of.”
“True. But if I had the choice, I’d live like that, too.”
“Like Bond?”
“Like my life was a storybook.”
“Why don’t you, then?”
“It takes a lot of courage to go after what you want,” she said the way my mama might have, scolding me for being naive. “I’m only sixteen, you know. One day, though. Even if I never do anything worthwhile, I’m going to introduce myself by my last name. It’s easy to get away with stuff when you’re that confident, and opportunities always seem to come to people who believe enough in themselves. Even when they shouldn’t.”
“You’re very wise for a sixteen-year-old,” I told her sincerely, as I hopped out of the pool and leaned back on my palms, smiling slightly as her eyes raked over my wet, muscular torso and then rolled in disdain. “I know we just met, and I still don’t know your name, but I’m halfway enchanted by you already.”
“It’s the confidence,” she agreed, peering at me like an old woman through spectacles. Arriving at some decision, she abruptly flipped onto her belly, face still in her hands as she faced me, feet kicking an easy rhythm in the air behind her head. “My name is Linnea Kai.”
“Lovely name for a lovely girl.”
“Don’t flirt with me,” she scoffed. “Not when it’s just pity flirting.”
“Who says?” I demanded, kicking my feet through the water to splash in her direction without actually spraying her.
She waved a hand toward her body, the oversized Caged band tee swallowing up her scrawny figure and that glorious mane of rumpled hair. “C’mon. I’m young, but I’m not dumb.”
My laugh felt good in my chest, loosening the tension I’d harbored there all night. I held my hands up in surrender. “If I’m feeling any pity tonight, Linnea, it’s for me, not you.”
“Now you sound more like an actor.”
I laughed again and watched the way that wide mouth twitched as she fought a smile. This was a kid who’d had to grow up a little too fast and now resented her youth instead of embracing it. I knew the feeling because I’d been the very same.
Maybe I still was.
Eighteen going on eighty.
“What brings you to the Meyers’ house?” I asked, swinging my legs through the backlit waters.
She moved again, quicksilver, to sit upright and hug her knees to her chest. I had the feeling she didn’t often keep still.
“My mother,” she said with a sniff. “She loves these things.”
“Most people do, even if they’ve never been.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, looking into the distance at something I couldn’t see in her memories. “I’d rather be back home.”
“Home?”
“Maui.”
“I’ve never been before.”
“You wouldn’t want to leave. It’s so… alive. It’s not just a paradise, you know? People think it’s all sunshine and flowers, but there’s an underbelly. A balance. Volcanic rock and fertile soil. Scorching days and storms that roll through, whipping up the ocean and ripping open the earth.” A pause as she shivered, falling out of her reverie. “You wouldn’t want to leave,” she said again for emphasis. “I never have before now.”
It was late after a long, tiring, and frankly confusing night. January in London was as damp and chill as any other month, and my skin was starting to numb. Yet I found myself leaning toward her, a flower tipped toward the sun. Her energy was a palpable thing I wanted to bask in.
“You sound like me when I speak about Italy.” There was no reason to share with this girl. She was a stranger. Absolutely nothing linked us together but being in the same place at the same time in mostly the same mood. Somehow, there was a magic in that. A space for intimacy that was made sacred and safe by the fact I’d probably never see her again. “Everyone thinks it is the most beautiful country in the world, but it has its shadows, and I grew up in the darkest pit.”
“But you loved it.” She uncurled her legs to stand, tall and gangly, the points of her collarbones sharp through her shirt.
“I did.”
“Why did you leave, then?”
“There was nothing there for me. No future, anyway.”
“Because you wanted to be an actor?”
“Because I wanted more for my family and myself.”
Why was I talking to this slip of a girl about any of this? I watched wearily as she stepped to the edge of the pool deck, toes curling over the tiles. All that hair rustled in the wind, softening her striking bone structure. She was a beauty, already, the signs barely buried beneath the surface ready to be unveiled, but she didn’t have a clue. She was all awkwardness and young candor standing there in front of me with her head dipped to one side, eyes earnest even in the dark as they took me in.
I had the sudden revelation that she wasn’t looking at my body, wasn’t aware of my beauty, at least not in an impactful way. She was peering beyond that, into the shadowy depths I hadn’t shared in so long.
It made me uncomfortable, but not as much as it made something long-neglected, deep inside my chest stir with warmth.
“Are they still back there?” she continued her line of questioning. “My dad and my uncles still live on the island.”
“My twin sister moved to Milan on our eighteenth birthday. My older sister is in Paris studying art.”
“Fancy.”
I shrugged, the movement dislodging a piece of wet hair over my forehead into my eyes. “All Giselle ever wanted was to be an artist. Cosima and I have been working since we were kids to make it happen.”
Linnea cocked her head. “Why would you put her dreams before your own?”
It was such a childish question that it threw me for a moment. There were only a handful of years between us, but I suddenly felt ancient, bones heavy and creaking beneath my skin.
“Many reasons,” I murmured, looking into the glimmering blue of the pool, shining with lights in the dark night. “She had a bad time of it in Naples, too soft and young and pretty. Every place has its underbelly, but we lived in the one in Napoli, and she drew bad characters to her like moths to a flame. But she had talent. Talent enough to get into the school of her dreams and get a tidy little bursary so we could afford to dole out money for the rest. I’m still saving money for my eldest sister to attend graduate school in the States. She’s whip smart,” I confessed proudly. “She wants to be a lawyer.”
“What about you, though?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
She peered at me closely, twirling a lock of thick blonde hair around her finger like a cog working in a machine. “Following your dream now, I hope.”
“I always was,” I assured her, though for a moment that hadn’t been true.
When I was fourteen, I’d almost capitulated under the weight of pressure from the local mafioso to join his ranks. We hadn’t seen our gambling addict of a father, Seamus, for weeks, and Mama was down to making us pasta in olive oil and ground pepper for every meal, the portions getting smaller every day. A mafioso showed up at our house when Mama was out and the girls were all home with me. He’d threatened to take them as payment for Seamus’s debts.
I’d never felt fear like that before or since, the bone-deep certainty that all that stood between my sisters and a truncated lifetime of misery was me .
I shivered, and it had nothing to do with the cool British air.
“So you want to be famous?” Linnea clarified, walking on her toes at the edge of the pool, all long lines and fluid grace, dragging a toe in the heated water from time to time and balancing with her arms held out at her sides.
I shrugged. “As a byproduct of acting and being good at what I love.”
She shot me an unimpressed glare. “Are you just saying that to like… impress me?”
I arched a brow. “You’re sixteen years old. Why would I want to impress you exactly?”
“Because you know my mum,” she insisted, jutting her chin forward.
“Who is…?”
“Miranda Hildebrand,” she said almost pugnaciously, and I wasn’t sure if it was me she was taking umbrage with or the fact that Miranda was her mother.
Given that Miranda was currently sleeping off about six drinks too many in one of the Meyers’ guest bedrooms, I assumed it was the latter.
Still, I didn’t want to insult my new young friend by pointing out that Miranda was a B-list celebrity at best, known more for her failed marriages to famous men than for her own mostly soap-filled career.
Instead, I said, “I live in the same estate as Adam Meyers and his wife. Don’t you think I’ve already got as much of a leg-up as I need?”
Her full mouth flatlined, and she fisted her hands on her hips. “So you do want to be famous.”
“ Cazzo ,” I muttered under my breath. “Of course, I do. Anyone who wants to be an actor wants to be famous because you cannot perform without an audience and it’s better to perform for one who loves you than hates you. It’s hardly something to judge someone over. Everyone wants validation of some kind, especially an artist.”
I paused, noting the way she rolled her lips between her teeth.
“Don’t you?” I asked softly.
She jerked a little as though I’d pushed her. “No.”
I cocked my head. “It’s not a weakness, you know?”
“I don’t care what anyone thinks,” she stated mulishly, and then, when I maintained steady eye contact with her, the line of her shoulders softened. “Unless they matter to me.”
“That’s fair. I want people to enjoy my work, but I don’t care much about what people think of me as a person beyond my family. They mean everything to me.”
“Families don’t often survive this,” she warned me, as though she was a sixty-year-old veteran of cinema and not a girl on the cusp of womanhood. “Fame and success and Hollywood.”
“If you love something, you fight for it.”
“But it comes down to the question of which you love more, fame or family? Sometimes, it’s too much to fight for both.”
She watched me shrug a little helplessly with those intense purple-blue eyes and brought her arms up to hug herself as though she was only just now noticing the cold. After a moment, she let out a soft, dramatic sigh Scarlett O’Hara would have been proud of and collapsed in on herself like a ribbon, falling seamlessly to the tiles beside the pool. Lying on her back, she trailed a hand in the water and looked up at the sky.
“You can hardly see the stars in London,” she murmured. The words practically ached with homesickness.
I slipped back into the water to warm up, still unwilling to go to bed even though exhaustion tugged at my lids. Resting the back of my head on the lip of the pool, I looked up at the same sky, my gaze automatically finding the moon.
“When I miss home, I think about my loved ones looking up at the moon. It makes me feel better to know wherever we are in the world, we’re under the same sky.”
For the first time that night, Linnea looked over at me like I was someone worthy of looking at. Like I was beautiful.
“I like that,” she whispered before looking up at the stars again. “Under the same sky.”
We stayed like that for a long time, staring up at the dark night littered with dim stars and the fat swell of the moon. It was peaceful in a way that settled my restless spirit, and when I finally dragged myself to bed, I fell into a deep sleep the moment my head hit the pillow.