20. Adam
20
ADAM
B y the time we entered London proper again, I was sleepy and warm with contentment, half-dozing against the passenger side window as Sebastian drove us competently through the dark streets. Coldplay played quietly through the speakers, a pleasant soundtrack to my lazily meandering thoughts. I didn’t allow myself to dwell on anything dark or unpleasant, instead focusing on the best birthday I’d had in years.
We’d ended our surf lesson with the splash fight and then collapsed on the beach against sun-warmed towels to dig into the cooler Sebastian had packed back at home. Our cook made thick sandwiches filled with turkey, cucumber, and sprouts, and freshly made shortbread dipped on one side in bright lemon glaze. There was enough for Linnea, too, who entertained us both with chatter about her elite London day school and life back in Maui. Her parents had been teens when they had her and were not very much in love, so it was her father who fought for her and was granted custody.
It sent a pang through my heart, listening to her talk about her mother as if she was nearly a stranger. It was how I’d felt my entire life about my father, and the sense had only deepened when my mother died. Even though I’d just met the girl, I found myself oddly grateful that she had her father and uncles to love her well.
Everyone deserved someone to love them unconditionally.
“You’re very quiet. Did I kill you with too much activity, old man?” Sebastian mocked gently, reaching over to squeeze my knee.
Before he could move away, I gripped it with one of my own, tracing the ridge of calluses across his palm just because I enjoyed his hands. They were so strong and wide palmed, unlike any man I’d been with before.
I wondered with a little wince if I’d only pursued more effeminate men because of some kind of internalized homophobia. To be fair, Savannah had always been the Venus flytrap, catching suitable men for us to play with, but still. I resolved to do better.
I’d never be comfortable… coming out or anything of the like.
But I could do better for myself, at the very least.
Be a little more honest and a little more courageous.
“I had a brilliant time,” I admitted baldly. “I think it might be the best birthday I ever had.”
“And it’s not over yet,” Sebastian promised with a wink. “Though I am pretty salty that you ended up winning that favor. You don’t have any need for one! We both know I’d do anything you’d ask. It’s me who needed a little help.”
“Anything I asked?” I echoed, my mind plummeting to dirty depths instantly. “Should we test that, do you think?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Hmm,” I hummed, tapping the slight divot in my chin as I pretended to think about it. “I do have a fondness for putting you on your knees. Usually it’s for Savannah’s pleasure, but I think it might be time I put you to use myself. I’ve wondered how that beautiful mouth would look wrapped around my cock. The last time, Savvy’s pretty cunt was in the way of my viewing pleasure.”
Sebastian’s tongue flicked over his bottom lip, and his gaze darted to mine as he turned left. “It is surprising how much I liked the taste of you. The feel of you in my mouth.”
My cock kicked in the confines of my trousers at the husky timbre of his voice saying those words to me.
“The idea of coming down your throat has me instantly hard,” I admitted, palming my thickening erection for him. “But I’d hate to pass up playing with your tight arse again. Maybe even finally fucking you.”
A small tremor rattled his broad shoulders.
“Would you like that?” I asked, voice hardening into that tone that came over me when I slid into my dominance.
“Yes,” he admitted quietly. “I can’t seem to stop thinking about it. I’m nervous, but I’ve gotten myself off in the shower to the fantasy one too many times.”
I groaned. “Sometime I’ll make you jerk off in the shower with me to the fantasy and then make you lick your cum off the tiles just because I can.”
“ Che cazzo , why is that so hot?” he asked, stopping in the driveway for the gates to open and leaning forward to nip playfully at my lower lip.
His enthusiasm was fuel to my fire, sparking even hotter fantasies. Fucking him in the shower, tying his wrists to his ankles so he’d be open for whatever the fuck I pleased, teasing him until he was a sweaty, trembling mess, fucking him while he fucked Savvy.
My vision almost whited out at the flurry of images in my mind’s eye.
“Has anyone told you that you are a very dirty, very dangerous man?” Sebastian asked as he pulled forward into the courtyard and parked.
When he turned to face me, the lamp light from the fixtures over the garage caught his features in stark black-and-gold relief. Looking at him made it hard to breathe.
I’d worked with beautiful people for nearly a decade, and none had this effect on me.
Maybe because beneath the surface of his beauty lay a heart even more lovely than its packaging.
“You bring me to my knees,” I admitted, possessed by some feeling that had seized my soul and urged me to take his chin in my fingers and bring him in for the kind of kiss I never gave any man.
I pressed my mouth to his, soft and open but without invading with my tongue. I tasted his lower lip, trailed my tongue over the top to feel its plush texture, and dragged it between my teeth to test its plumpness. Only when he moaned, hand reaching up to clutch at the back of my head, did I tilt his chin and slide my tongue into his mouth to tangle with his own. He tasted of the iced tea he’d bought from a petrol station and of sea salt still clinging to his skin. His scent swarmed my senses, sun-baked and salted musk and the remnants of the spicy cologne he always wore.
I wanted to bury myself inside him, beneath all that lovely skin. It seemed, at that moment, the only way I would ever find peace.
“In another universe,” he pulled back just enough to whisper, the movement of his lips still pressed to mine as if he wanted to feed me the words. “We’d be together. I’d love you here in the shadows but also in the light. I’d walk down the beach holding your hand, and it would be the rightest thing in the world. I’d tell people la luna è la mia amante , the moon is my lover, and I’d be so proud.”
“Sebastian,” I muttered, gut-wrenched because wasn’t that so bloody lovely?
Wasn’t that exactly what I’d been wanting all day, to reach across the sand and take his rough-palmed hand in mine?
Wasn’t that what I’d secretly yearned for all my life? The other yin to the yang of loving a woman. Both together, balanced and precious inside my soul?
Hadn’t I been waiting for a declaration of affection since the moment he told my wife he loved her? Hadn’t I yearned with a kind of desperation that made my chest ache and my breath come too short and too quick?
“Have I told you that?” he murmured, searching my eyes with a faintly amused smile on his lips. “You have this pull over me the way the moon does over the tides. It’s elemental and terrifying, and I wouldn’t change it for anything.”
“I can’t––” I started to say, the words cut into pieces by the blades stuck through my throat.
“In another universe,” he agreed with a sweet, sad smile before kissing me again with both of his big hands framing my face.
I held both of his wrists as if I could anchor him to me forever. I wanted to protest even though it was true. Such fantasies were possible only at another time or another place, and maybe even then, only for other people.
“It’s enough to love you,” he admitted. “If you’ll let me.”
I swallowed around the stone in my throat so hard I winced. No matter how hard I tried, my voice wouldn’t cooperate. So I nodded and hoped it would be enough.
Even though it wasn’t.
Even though I’d never be able to give him even an ounce of what he deserved.
Yet the smile he gave me was absolutely beatific, bright as sunshine trapped between his lips.
“ Bene ,” he whispered, almost to himself, a little giddy. “ Molto bene .”
“It’s not much.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” he declared. “It may be your birthday, but you’re the one giving me the best present. C’mon, let’s get dressed. There’s more to come that will hopefully tip the scales.”
He took me somewhere I’d never been before, which was a surprise, given I thought I’d been everywhere worth going in the city.
Bernardi’s was a tiny hole-in-the-wall Italian place in Shoreditch that Sebastian had discovered whilst living in the neighborhood with his four flatmates. The exterior was a plain, dirtied white stucco, but the interior felt as if it had been transported straight from Italy itself. Lifelike fake olive trees studded the interior, string lights, and terra cotta planters that perfumed the air with rosemary, oregano, and basil. It was busy, a mingling of languages and accents raised merrily over clinking glasses of big bowled red wine and traditional ceramics.
Sebastian beamed at me when I told him it was magical, and I felt the echo of that grin in my chest. I rubbed at my breastbone as I followed him to the table, a little concerned I was turning into some kind of sap.
Stoicism, practicality, and conservatism were hallmarks of my family, and while I’d shunned most of their principles when my father remarried, I’d still been raised with those ideals.
It was hard to shake the fact that I was out for dinner with a man even though I’d dined with countless men over the years. It felt different with Sebastian even though I knew no one was aware of our relationship. It just seemed so… unlikely that casual observers couldn’t tell that I was head over arse in love with him.
I was so caught up in him, risking a look at his arse in those black trousers, that I didn’t notice a woman was already sitting at the table.
Savannah watched me move toward her with an uncharacteristically guilty expression. Her short cloud of pale curls was caught up in a black velvet ribbon at her crown that matched the Audrey Hepburn style dress and pearls she wore. She’d always been a vision, even before she took to refinery and elegance—when wearing jeans she bought at Target instead of Walmart was the height of her fashion. Sometimes I missed that girl with the Southern drawl, who ate with her elbows on the table and sang along loudly and off-key whenever Dolly Parton came on the radio.
She’d always been a vision, and she always would be, through all her iterations, because Savannah was a woman who knew her worth and demanded others take note of it. It made her wonderfully compelling, and even after years of marriage, the cracks that had sprung up between us, I felt it still, staring at her in the low light of an Italian restaurant we’d never be caught dead in if not for the magnetism of Sebastian Lombardi.
The sight of her hurt as much as it healed.
She’d caused me more pain than I wanted to admit with her barbs late last night, but ironically, she was the only one who could make them all better.
I wanted her to hold me close and whisper promises into my ear.
I won’t push you so hard .
You’re more than your career.
I’d love you even if you retired tomorrow.
You are my priority .
I blinked hard to dispel the desire.
Even in a day as brilliant as this one, that was one fantasy too far.
The fact that she was even here was miracle enough.
She wasn’t one for contriteness or apologies.
Obviously, Sebastian had worked his special brand of magic and brought her back.
“Adam,” she said softly, so softly I couldn’t even hear her over the cacophony of the restaurant, but I’d long ago memorised the shape of my name in her mouth.
She stood from the table as Sebastian and I paused beside it. We were tucked into a far corner behind carefully arranged olive trees and a wood-panelled screen, so we had a modicum of privacy.
“Another birthday present,” Sebastian announced with a little encouraging smile in my direction. “One that couldn’t be missed today.”
“No,” Savannah agreed quietly, but she stepped forward so that only a sliver of space existed between us, charged with all the words we never said. “Your wife should be with you on your birthday. That is… if you want me?”
The hesitation was new and, irritatingly, endearing. Why was it so easy to forgive her for her cruelty? Because I knew that she’d been brought up without love and didn’t speak its language fluently? That I could relate to that and make exceptions for it because it was still better than I’d ever been loved before?
That was, until Sebastian.
Who’d shown up in our lives with an entirely new lexicon of love that he’d been teaching us slowly but surely the last five months.
And now, well, I wasn’t sure what Savannah and I had between us was enough. If we could apply what Seb was teaching us to our tattered relationship or if we would both continue to focus on our newer, healthier one with him.
“I want you,” I told her, surprised by the rawness of my words.
But it was the truth.
Healthy or not, I’d always want Savannah.
She was the one who took a brooding, restless soldier returned from war with too much baggage to ever unpack and focused his attentions on the one thing he’d ever felt passionate about.
Acting.
It was Savannah who found my first auditions, who sweet-talked the director of Hamlet into letting the unknown actor, but well-known aristocrat, star in his modern adaptation of the Shakespeare classic.
It was Savannah who recognized a need for male companionship and indulged me in threesomes that quenched both our thirsts.
Savannah had made a man with dreams into a man people dreamed about .
She had made me relevant on my own terms.
Not my father’s or my family history’s or my best mate, the Crown Prince of England, Arthur’s.
My own.
So, of course, I loved her.
The way an artist loved his muse.
Or more, the way Pinocchio must have loved Geppetto, maybe.
I reached for her, sliding my hand into the hair at the back of her neck to bring her up onto her tiptoes for a kiss. My lips slid over the gloss there, vanilla scented, and my tongue found the familiar taste of her mouth.
The kiss was more than an apology. It felt like a promise between us both to do better.
When we broke apart, she smiled at me with a tenderness I hadn’t seen in ages.
“Happy birthday, my darling,” she breathed, reaching up to clean the remnants of lip gloss off my mouth with her thumb in a gesture she’d completed for me a million times in our lives.
The repetition made it more poignant.
I bit the pad of her thumb playfully. “Thank you for the gift of your presence, Savvy.”
“ Excellente ,” Sebastian crowed, clapping his hands together before pulling out Savannah’s chair for her and then moving swiftly around the table to do the same for me. My wife giggled at his enthusiasm, and I was grateful to him for breaking the serious note into a lighter cadence. “Now, we can feast.”