18. Sebastian
18
SEBASTIAN
B eing home in Naples was both incredible and oddly dissatisfying. There was no denying I adored my mother, and I wasn’t afraid to make it known. When she braved traffic to pick me up in Naples with Elena, I’d lifted her and spun her around like we hadn’t seen each other in years instead of only a handful of months. The scent of semolina and rosemary that always perfumed her hair was the first sign I was home . She’d laughed in delight and patted my cheek before planting two smacking kisses on either one.
“ Ragazzo mio ,” she spoke around her gorgeous smile. “You’re home.”
When I’d turned to Elena, she was watching us with bright eyes she immediately averted so I wouldn’t catch her being sappy. My eldest sister prided herself on being above emotion, too intellectually minded to give into the dramatics of the rest of our family.
But what were little brothers for if not to embarrass their sisters?
I tackle-hugged her, gripping her around the middle and hauling her into the air. She slapped at my head as she protested, but there was a smile in her tone, and when I placed her on her feet, her gaze was reluctantly fond.
“ Patatino ,” she said, referring to me by my childhood nickname of “little potato” because I’d been born with a misshapen head. “It’s good to see you.”
I rolled my eyes at her formality and kissed her temple, wrapping each arm around both of my girls as we walked out of the airport, my duffel slung over my back. The cacophony of Italian voices raised to call out to each other throughout the terminal settled something in my chest I hadn’t even realized was restless. It was good to hear the language of my home and its people. England made me realize how many little cultural differences there were, especially now that I lived with the Meyerses. I loved learning about new customs, but it felt decidedly good not to be a foreigner for a little while.
I listened happily to Elena tell me about finishing her online undergraduate program and applications to law schools in the United States, to Mama moan about working under Eduardo in the restaurant she’d been sous chef at since we were young, and watched the landscape swirl by outside the window.
Our little house, old and too small for a family of five but too spacious somehow with only Mama and Elena living there, was exactly the same as I’d left it. The ancient piano Elena played more beautifully than anyone had the right to do on such an instrument. The bedroom I’d shared with my twin sister complete with our meager collection of books, mostly castoff textbooks from Seamus’s university courses and my prized poster of La Baia I Napoli signed by Sofia Loren herself, and the painting Giselle had done of la Giala beach we frequented almost every day of the summer as kids. My few friends in town had nothing new to report except a change in girlfriends. Everything else was the same, besides the absence of Giselle and Cosima.
I missed them.
Elena had never been the warmest or kindest of my sisters, her desire for more sometimes making her angry and bitter, but I spent as much time with her as she would allow.
“I’m not Cosima,” she snapped at me when we were having espresso in the kitchen one morning and I put my arm around her for a sideways hug. “I don’t need you suffocating me.”
I arched an eyebrow at her, unconsciously channelling Adam.
She scowled at me and then into her coffee.
“What’s up, Lady?” I asked patiently because she only lashed out when she was hurting.
The nickname was one I’d conjured years ago because Elena always acted like a lady, upper-class and haughty even when she was a child. It occurred to me that the two most aristocratic women I knew, Savannah and my eldest sister, had come from nothing.
I watched as she bit her lip, then jutted her chin out stubbornly before lifting flashing eyes at me. “You can’t just come home and act like nothing has changed. You and Cosima just… left me here.”
Anger curled like smoke in my gut. “You told Seamus and Cosima that deal to model in Milan was too good to pass up, even when Cosi said she didn’t want to leave the family! We left you to make money to get you––all of you––out of here.”
She scoffed. “You left to pursue your dreams of stardom. Don’t sugarcoat it.”
“I don’t have to,” I argued, dropping my espresso cup onto the saucer with a clatter. “Do you think Cosi and I wanted to be separated? Do you think I feel good knowing I’ve left my mother and sister in this hellhole with fucking mafiosos circling always just waiting for an in? Do you think I don’t lie awake at night worrying if you’re okay? Mama and Gigi and Cosima, too?”
She tossed her dark red hair over her shoulder and glared at the middle distance over my shoulder. For someone in her early twenties, my sister looked years older. Worn and tragic like an old oil painting left too long neglected in a dusty attic. “Don’t act like living in London and getting a paycheck is such a bad thing.”
“Elena,” I snapped, furious with her for being so brittle and with myself for letting her get a rise out of me. Cosima was the one who always mediated our disputes and the one who reminded me that our eldest sister only ever lashed out when she struggled with her emotions. “I have a new job with better hours and better pay, but until recently, I worked seven days a week as a driver on top of starring in a production at Finborough. I shared a one-bedroom flat with five different blokes. If you think that’s paradise, you’re mistaken.”
I hadn’t planned to tell her about Savannah and Adam, anyway, but sitting across from her at that moment, I ached to have the kind of relationship where I could confide in her. But it felt impossible to imagine her doing anything other than judging me for being a live-in lover. She’d call me a sellout, a puttano , a morally corrupt stain on our family.
I’d heard her say similar things to Giselle, and our sister had only had the misfortune of being pretty enough to attract unwanted lascivious attention in town.
Elena crossed her arms defensively. “If you were working that hard, we’d be living in the United States already.”
“Why are you being so ungrateful?” I asked her, frustration and disappointment curdling the affection I had for her in my gut. “I’m not saying you owe me anything, but I don’t understand this hostility, Lena. I’m your brother, porca miseria . I’m trying to do what’s best for all of us.”
Her laugh was hollow as she pushed out of her chair with a loud scraping screech and stalked out of the room, throwing over her shoulder, “If that was true, I wouldn’t still be here.”
Later, when I’d asked Mama about it, she’d just sighed loudly and shrugged. “Elena is a complicated woman. It is not possible to know her when she refuses to know herself.”
“We have enough money to get you both out of here,” I told her as we worked side by side in the kitchen making orecchiette pasta, folding the little ears of dough with our thumbs before placing them to dry on the trays. “I wanted to take you to dinner and tell you, but Elena’s bitterness stole my thunder.”
“ Patatino ,” she said with a cluck of her tongue that told me I was in for a mild scolding. “Be kind to Elena. She’s been very down lately. I think she and Christopher are having a rough time.”
Christopher was Elena’s much older boyfriend, a man she’d met through our father because they worked together at the university. I’d never liked him, nor had Cosima or Mama, which might have explained why Elena stayed with him when he was so obviously not good enough for her.
My sister was whip smart, tall, and gorgeous, with a great sense of style even on a budget, and a secret tenderheartedness that showed itself infrequently but gorgeously like a green streak at sunset. She deserved the world , not some stronzo .
“Why does she stay with him then?” I muttered, watching our hands moving in tandem as we pressed pasta dough between our fingers. It soothed me, the routine of it, the custom of making pasta with Mama since I was just a tiny boy.
Mama sighed. “I’m not sure I set good examples for you all, hmm?”
I winced because there was no way to refute that. Seamus was the worst kind of father and husband, but she’d put up with him for years. I understood that he was the primary breadwinner––even if he gambled it all away too often to count––and that our culture encouraged marriage until the end, no matter what.
But the truth was, when Seamus disappeared without a trace soon after Cosima left for Milan, we’d all felt acutely relieved to have him gone.
“Do you miss him?” I dared to ask. We never spoke about him, now. Honestly, we’d barely spoken about him when he still lived with us.
Caprice Lombardi was gorgeous in the way of old-school Hollywood starlets like Sofia Loren and Marilyn Monroe, all steep curves and sultry femininity. The only reason she didn’t have suitors knocking down the door now that Seamus had gone for good was because she had zero interest in men and a bad reputation for cutting them into very small pieces with her sharp tongue if they pressed too hard.
Elena had got that skill from her.
“I miss the man I fell in love with,” she told me baldly. “He was this intensely handsome man with charisma and mystery. I fell in love with the idea of him more than the real him.” She shrugged, opening her semolina-coated hands to the heavens. “I was just a girl.”
“That doesn’t invalidate your love,” I said, maybe a little too quickly.
It was hard not to imagine what she might think of my affair with a married couple. Mama was surprisingly unjudgmental, but she would be disappointed in me for disrupting the sanctity of marriage. Even if I told her I was actually helping their marriage by sewing together their jagged edges like so many stitches.
“No,” she agreed. “But I thought I was so worldly because I was dating a foreigner. I thought he loved me because he enjoyed my beauty and my authenticity. When they grew old, his attentions grew stale.”
My thumb rent the little sphere of pasta in two.
Because Mama’s words hit just a little too close to home.
What would happen when, inevitably, my novelty wore off?
I’d been living with the Meyerses for months now, but things were still fresh and exciting. There were so many ways to touch and be touched, so many questions to ask and answer to get to the hearts of two very different people. Both Adam and Savannah lived for work, and they were knee-deep in Blood Oath with me, excited to launch my career the way she had once launched his.
But…
What happened when I was launched?
What happened in another six months or two years?
They were already married, and based on Savannah’s rhetoric, they didn’t seem to want children.
So would I live in the carriage house forever? Their good mate who spent a little bit too much time with them?
The loneliness that grew like weeds in the fertile ground of my belly deepened its roots and reached its limbs up into my throat so I felt like I might choke.
Alone, but not alone, forever.
Like I was in this family of broken spirits held together by blood and hope.
“If you could go back in time and do things differently, would you?” I asked, an edge of desperation in the question.
The relief I felt when she immediately said, “No,” was so acute, I had to grip the counter to regain my balance.
“No,” she repeated, twisting to face me and cup my face in her hands. “Never, patatino . Regrets are inevitable in life. There will always be weeds in the garden, but not all of them are ugly. Without Seamus, I would not have my babies who give reason to my whole existence.”
“But you could have married someone better and had children with them,”’ I argued, for the sake of understanding how deeply this feeling went in her.
So I could know how deeply it may one day go in me.
Pain spasmed across her features, fingers tightening on my cheeks. “Maybe. But I do not spend my time on this kind of thinking. What I had with Seamus when I was young was beautiful. What he gave me in my children is even more beautiful. I can’t regret any of it, and if I’m sad about the way it ended, well, then I focus on the future. And I hope that life has taught me to be a better version of myself, so if I have the opportunity to love again, I make a good choice for myself.”
“Have you ever loved anyone else?” I’d never considered it, really. She was so young when she met my father, and he’d only been gone for half a year.
But she was the type of woman who inspired poetry, and she’d given that to her daughters. She’d taught her son to look for that kind of moving beauty within and without, which was why the combination of Savannah’s intelligence and elegance hooked me right through the mouth.
“Yes,” she whispered, dropping her hands from my face like I was on fire and turning back to the pasta with a kind of dramatized busyness that made me think she was lying about something. “A long time ago.”
“What happened?”
Her hands hesitated over the drying pasta. “I-I wasn’t brave enough to trust it.”
“What happened to him?”
She turned from me, moving the pasta to the table and then going directly to the fridge, hiding her face behind the door. “I don’t know.”
It was a lie, but then, who was I to judge my mother for keeping things from me?
Mama’s vagueness had always bothered me. When I was a boy trying to understand why she stayed with my father, who was a good-for-nothing son of a whore, when I was a young man trying to make decisions to protect my family and Mama didn’t seem to share my desire to get us all out of Napoli, as a man now, trying to understand my sisters.
“A little mystery is a good thing,” she always said, and it was a pretty turn of phrase, but as I grew older, it seemed more like an excuse to keep secrets than anything else.
And though I’d do anything for my family, and I knew in my bones they would do anything for me, there was no doubt we were a family of secret keepers.
Cosima didn’t answer half of my phone calls anymore, Giselle hadn’t visited home in the year and a half since she’d left for Paris, and Elena disappeared for hours at a time, coming home angry and sullen.
A small part of me wondered what would happen if I shared my own scandalous secret.
Would it start some kind of domino effect?
Truths rushing into the light after years of hiding in the shadows? And what then?
How was my scattered family supposed to withstand the brutality of such honesty when we weren’t even together to work through it?
In the end, it didn’t matter because I didn’t have the balls to tell them, and even though they noticed me on the phone, smiling that private smile reserved for the Meyerses, neither of them had the balls to ask me about it either.
It was a relief to return to England, and not just because of the bad memories Napoli held for me or the inexplicable tension between Mama, Elena, and myself.
It was a relief simply to be back in the proximity of Savannah and Adam, who had become, in the short months I’d known them, akin to the sun and the moon lighting my life in their different ways. Without them, those two weeks in Italy were like a cloud-filled night, filling me with old feelings of being adrift and alone.
The moment I got out of the hired car in front of the gates to the Meyers’ Chelsea home, I felt something settle in me. It was the way I should have felt going home, yet I felt it now walking across the flagstones to the black lacquered door and using my key to enter the sweet-smelling interior. It was quiet within, which wasn’t surprising given it was hideously early on a Saturday morning, and even Savannah and Adam tended to take the weekend for a lie-in.
I dropped my things in the foyer, my keys on the round marble table between the tasteful chandelier and my shoes beside the closet, before I padded softly up the stairs. It was a bold move to climb the stairs to their bedroom when they weren’t expecting me and could be sleeping or even fucking. The thought sent warmth tumbling through me. Two weeks without either of their hands on me when I’d grown accustomed to warming their bed almost every night was torturous. I was already half hard just thinking about them sleep-warm and scantily clothed in bed. Savannah always wore these little silk slips in feminine colours, and Adam slept in his boxer briefs, snug over his muscular thighs and ass.
It was a bold move but one I felt comfortable making because of the two months I’d spent living with my married lovers. I’d only spent a handful of nights in my own bed in the carriage house.
I had every hope they’d be just as eager for our reunion as I was.
Which was why I wasn’t expecting the sight of Adam sitting alone on the edge of the unmade bed, hair rumpled, face creased with lack of sleep, and eyes vacant as they fixed on something disturbing in his mind’s eye. He didn’t notice me as I stood in the doorway, so I had a moment to take in the open door to the walk-in closet, the empty hangers on Savannah’s side of the closet, and the clothes tossed haphazardly on the floor as if she’d packed in a hurry. The vase filled with flowers that usually rested on Savvy’s marble-topped bedside table was currently shattered to pieces at the base of the wall beside the bathroom, water and bits of greenery clinging to the broken picture frame housing a lovely photo of them both on their wedding day. Even the air in the room was thick like a slowly dispersing mushroom cloud after an atomic detonation.
And Adam, a shell of a being, tossed on the edge of the mattress like so much debris.
The frightened, immature part of me wanted to break the terse silence with a joke, but I forced the impulse back down my throat and summoned the courage to move forward quietly to crouch at Adam’s side. Only when I placed a hand on his strong thigh did he seem to come back to himself, swiveling his head to look at me a little blankly before he blinked and recognition settled in. His hand instantly covered my own, squeezing a little too hard.
“Sebastian,” he said.
A sound of pure relief, a little desperate, a lot hopeful.
It made some last wall erected around my heart crumble into dust.
“Adam,” I soothed. “What happened?”
He swallowed so hard, the movement looked painful. “We fought.”
“That’s not very like you,” I noted, because they hadn’t had so much as a tiff since I’d lived with them.
At least to my knowledge.
Adam’s smile was a mockery of the term, crooked like the picture frame on the wall. “It’s very like us. It’s all we ever seem to do these days.”
At my puzzled look, he let out a short chuckle that was more a barking scoff than true laughter. “Before you, it was all we could do to maintain a charade in public. With you, it’s been, well, brilliant again. I thought we might regain some of what went missing over the years, but then you left, and… it all fell apart again.”
“How, though?” But even as I asked, I could imagine it now that he’d brought their tension to my attention.
I’d often thought of them as my moon and sun, guiding me, acting on me in their different yet elemental ways. But I’d never thought about their relationship to one another. How did two opposing forces coexist in perfect harmony?
They didn’t, not really. One took the spotlight at night and the other in the day. They had a symbiotic nature, of course, the moon reflecting the sun and one giving way to the other, but rarely did you see them together in the same sky.
And maybe for Adam and Savannah, I was that strange anomaly, the moon viewed during the day, two opposites held together in the same sky.
What an awesome and awful power.
What a wild responsibility.
Adam tipped his head back and closed his eyes, like even recounting the argument was exhausting. “She was angry with me for agreeing to talk to Sylvia Ramone about a theatre project in the West End after filming finishes for The Devil Cares . I want to stay in London for a while longer. I want to have some time to rest. Savannah doesn’t believe in being idle.”
I winced a little bit because I knew her well enough to acknowledge that truth.
Though she was always poised, Savvy was rarely still. Her datebook was busier even than Adam’s most days, filled with meetings about ad campaigns, future projects, networking with studio executives and the wives of other influential actors and generally famous people. On the rare day when she didn’t have much to do, she roped me into keeping her company on a variety of tasks she seemed to pick from thin air to pack her schedule with.
Success is never attained by the lazy , she liked to say.
While I thought she was right, it still puzzled me slightly that she was so focused on success, yet it was never directly for her; it was always a proxy. Adam, mostly, and now, myself.
Before Adam, I knew she had been with an influential American who moved to Britain with her and whose success Savannah took a large deal of accreditation from, but she never told me who it was.
“I told her I was tired,” Adam admitted quietly as if he was confessing some great flaw and not something that was easily comprehensible.
The man had been making three to four movies every year for the past four years. When he wasn’t filming, he was on a press tour or preparing for the next role. He was like some kind of savant machine, slipping in and out of characters so seamlessly I wondered secretly if he ever forgot who he truly was.
“It’s okay to feel burnt out,” I told him, squeezing his thigh and moving to my knees between his thighs.
I was tall enough that when he tipped his head back down, he wasn’t much taller than me even seated on the bed. This close, I could see the dark circles beneath his verdant green eyes and the tension in the crow’s feet beside them. He looked tired of body and of spirit. No, even more than tired, he looked defeated.
By his very own wife.
“Savannah should understand more than anyone how hard you work,” I said carefully when he only searched my face intently, looking for validation I was eager to give him. “She’s the one who manages you, after all.”
“She does. I’ve often wondered if that might be the problem,” he admitted softly, reaching for my shoulder as if to ground himself. “At some point, I became her puppet more than her husband.”
“That’s harsh,” I objected because I couldn’t believe Savannah was that cold, no matter how hard she tried to prove she was in business.
He shrugged expansively, an Italian expression that I thought he might have picked up from me. “The truth often is.”
“So you told her you were tired, and she stormed out? That seems like an overreaction.”
“I may be the actor in the family, but she doesn’t lack drama,” he quipped. “She was already angry with me for other things. Jealous, too, I think, that I’ve taken the lead on producing Blood Oath . She had a meeting with Tate Richardson from Hypnosis Studios the other day about financing without realizing we already decided to take an independent approach.”
“ Che cavolo , she would not like that.”
“No,” he agreed, gesturing to the thrown vase remnants. “It escalated from there. I am not a good client, and I am not a good husband, though that was only said as an afterthought.”
“Where did she go?” I wondered.
“Bobbi’s husband has an estate in Yorkshire. She went for the weekend to clear her head.”
I pursed my lips, thoughts colliding into each other with such force, it made it difficult to keep them from spouting from my mouth.
Adam seemed to sense my tension and smiled slightly at me, moving his hand up to my neck to give it a squeeze. “What is it, Sebastian?”
“Do you love her?” I dared to ask because the truth was, I did.
I loved her so much that I often woke up in my small room in Italy with the smell of freesia in my nose and Bach stuck on a loop in my head. I loved the way she made me feel worthy of the success I’d yearned for since my youth. I loved the way she let just a little of the true Savvy, that teenage Southern girl in the grass longing for more, peek through when we were together. Loving her felt like a privilege, even if she never returned the sentiment, and I was unsure if I could give it up.
Even for the man I was falling in love with, too.
Adam’s sigh was long and soft as an unspooling ribbon dropped at my knees. When he looked into my eyes, his were fierce and filled with fundamental certainty. “I do,” he said. “But does that matter if the woman I love doesn’t love me?”
I blinked, caught off guard by his honesty. “She loves you, Adam.”
He only arched a brow in question.
“She does,” I insisted. “Why would she be so intense about your career, about your success if she wasn’t? Why would she bring me into the equation unless it was because she hoped it would help your marriage?”
Because she’s selfish .
Adam didn’t say the words, and I was reluctant even to think them, but they were a whisper at the back of my mind that was hard to ignore, a whistling wind through a crack in the door.
Adam didn’t say the words, but he did say, “It’s my birthday today, did you know?”
I rocked back to sit on my heels, staring at him a little slack-jawed. My hand would have slipped off his thigh if he wasn’t holding it like an anchor. “Are you serious?”
“As death.”
“Well…” I tried to find a way to rationalize Savannah’s tantrum on her husband’s birthday, but I honestly couldn’t understand it.
In my family, no matter that we had no money, birthdays were a big deal. It was the day to do exactly what you wanted with exactly who you wanted. Just one little day in 365 of them each year. It wasn’t a big ask, really.
Not diamonds or Aston Martins or castles in England.
It was just the simple belief that you deserved to be loved on your birthday just a little more than you were loved every other day of the year.
And Savannah had left him for a country house in the north because she was frustrated with his work ethic.
My jaw clenched with a spasm of anger I couldn’t control.
I had to remind myself that this wasn’t really my life or my relationship. Sure, I’d been invited in, something more than a guest but less than a permanent fixture, but it didn’t mean I really got an opinion on their marriage.
So I rolled my lips between my teeth to keep my thoughts sealed and stood, clapping my hands together. “Well then, get up right now.”
Adam stared at me with a knot between his brows, but I only shook my head and offered him my hand again to tug him to his feet. The length of his body pressed along the length of mine, hot and hard, sparking an electric current between us.
“It’s your birthday,” I repeated, a little soft, tipping my head to press my forehead against his so those tangled brown lashes and Granny Smith-apple-green eyes were all I could see. “And it’s illegal to mope around on your birthday. So enough of this. We’re going to spend the day having fun.”
“I have a meeting at half past nine,” Adam started to say, but I pressed my entire palm over his mouth and leaned back a bit to smile at him.
“Cancel it. You have a Lombardi living in your house, which means it’s absolutely non-negotiable that your birthday is one of the best days of the year. Leave it to me, I’ve got this. Now, I’ll give you twenty minutes to shower and get changed before I drag you out of this house.”
I could feel his smile against my palm and moved it slightly so he could say, “And if I say no?”
“You won’t,” I said with my cocky grin.
“Confident, aren’t you?”
“Supremely. Because if you agree to Sebastian’s day of fun, I’ll give you Adam’s night of debauchery to do whatever you want to me.”
I meant it to be fun and flirty, but the instant my words hit the air, they sparked the latent heat between us until every inch of my skin felt like it had caught fire.
“Anything?” Adam whispered thickly, his lids lowered, gaze caught on my mouth.
I licked my lips to tease him before stepping away, walking backward with my hands in my pockets to contain my temptations. “Anything. Twenty minutes before your birthday begins for real. Hurry up.”