22. Adam
22
ADAM
I t happened on a Monday, the perfect time to hit the news cycle.
TMZ was the first to report it, but it didn’t matter much. The other outlets followed in seconds.
I loved a lot of things about Britain, but the tabloids were not one of them.
In the months since my birthday, things had been good.
Good in a way I didn’t think it had ever been before.
Good in a way I should have known was too wonderful to last long.
I had just wrapped filming for The Devil Cares with a bone-deep feeling that it was the best performance of my life. Freddie Bannerman was one of the most complicated characters I’d ever had to embody. I relished the challenge, but I knew without Savvy and Sebastian at home waiting for me every late night or early morning, I would have ended the shoot run down and miserable. Instead, I got to recharge my batteries and remind myself who I was every time I sat down for a meal with them or fell into bed with them at the end of the night.
The carriage house was Sebastian’s closet and occasional office, but for the most part, we’d all given up the pretense that he wouldn’t spend every night with us. Our marital bed felt empty without his warm, big body pinning Savannah and me close.
Sebastian and Andrea were deep into preproduction for Blood Oath , having finalized the storyboard, shooting locations in New York and Italy, and finally, casting. He was barely our driver anymore, but neither Savannah nor I said a word. They were due to start filming in New York next month, and while we hadn’t spoken about the logistics, I fully expected both Savannah and I to go with him for at least part of the scheduled shooting there. Consciously or not, we had left time carefully marked out on the calendar around those dates.
Whatever semblance of our original deal remained, it was that we’d promised Sebastian we would get his career off the ground, and it was a promise we both took as seriously as any work-obsessed industry people would.
It was our own version of a blood oath.
Neither of us would be happy, I knew, until Sebastian held his first Oscar aloft, the golden of the statue a perfect match for those beautiful eyes that seemed to see more of me every single day.
But it was Sebastian’s birthday, his nineteenth, which made both Savannah and I feel ancient. So we all took the day off and went to a King’s Cross United football match because they were Seb’s favourite British team. In fact, Iker Ferrera and Sebastian had become fast friends after I’d introduced them a few months ago, and he’d become a frequent visitor at our Chelsea home. We were less careful around him, but only because I’d met him at the Dionysus Club, and he had a few kinky secrets himself.
We’d surprised our lover with tickets to our friend’s private island off the coast of Spain for a full week when Blood Oath wrapped filming in January, and the smile he’d given us had been worth every single penny and minute of time we’d spent on him in the past year of our lives.
There was no way we would ever be able to repay him for the way he’d healed our marriage. For the way he’d brought compassion and communication and love to our lives.
For the first time ever, I had no idea what the fuck I was doing or where this was going.
I was just living .
Enjoying.
Allowing the hedonist at the heart of me to thrive and imbibe and fucking love while I could.
Because even though I quelled the little voice at the back of my head that said this will end , I didn’t want to believe it.
That was why I stole Sebastian’s watch from him a week ago. A difficult feat because he wore it every day and took ridiculous and adorable care of it.
I’d returned it to him while we watched the match, sliding the cool rose gold into one of his wide palms.
“I thought I’d lost it,” he admitted with a slight blush. “I thought I was going to be sick.”
“I hope it was worth it. I wanted to make an addition that I hope you’ll like very much.”
August in London could be absolute shite, but it was a gorgeous day as if the world knew Sebastian deserved nothing less than perfect sunshine on his birthday. The light struck his face full-on as he turned to look at me, his eyes translucent yellow gems against his inky lashes.
“You already got me a present,” he reminded me. “A very extravagant one. I’m still miffed about it, Adam. I only gave you a picnic and surfing lessons. Lord only knows what I’ll get Savvy in September.”
I shrugged. “I’m older and wealthier than you, Sebastian. Don’t try to compete with me in the gift-giving arena. I’ll always win.”
He grinned at me. “I take that as a challenge.”
I only arched a brow and jerked my chin at the watch still in his hand. “Flip it over.”
His head bent as he did so, reading the words I had engraved on the case.
Our impossible universe .
I wasn’t surprised by the hiss of breath he sucked through his teeth. In fact, I’d been hoping for it.
Because even after all these months, I still hadn’t said the words.
I love you.
So simple to speak, just three little, itty-bitty words that meant so fucking much.
That meant the world.
Sebastian lived in this impossible universe where he believed that the force of love could eradicate the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of everyone else’s hate. It wasn’t the universe we existed in, but it was absolutely the one I found myself dreaming about.
Sebastian’s impossible universe.
And every day I spent with him, I wanted it with a greater and greater ferocity that seemed to eat up my insides.
All I could think was one day .
When we were old and done with our careers.
When the three of us could retire to a house in the South of France or the wilds of the Scottish Highlands or fucking Timbuktu for all I cared. Somewhere far away from the paps and the gossips and prying judgemental eyes.
Where we could love each other quietly, but openly until the end of time.
It wasn’t much of a promise. Much of a life to offer a nineteen-year-old soon-to-be superstar.
But it was all I had, and I wanted it with all my heart and soul and every bloody breath I breathed each day.
For that to be enough for him.
For me to be enough for him.
The promise of that impossible universe one day.
“Adam…” he said, twisting in his seat to face me because Savannah was taking a call at the back of our private box. “What are you saying?”
“Today, I’m saying I love you.” God, but the words felt carved from my very soul with a jagged knife. I winced as they came out, cut up and still bleeding. “It’s not much because we’ll only have… this for so long. But one day, I want exactly what you want.”
“Which is?” he whispered as the crowd got to their feet around us, cheering for the goal King’s Cross United had just scored to tie the game.
I took the risk of taking the watch back to put it on his wrist myself. My hands lingered over his, and I tapped the face with my nail as I looked into his eyes and said, “One day, I want your impossible universe to be our universe. I want to hold your hand and Savvy’s on a beach walk. I want to kiss you when we go to the supermarket. I want to love you in all the quiet and mundane ways of daily life that we can’t have right now. That… that we can’t have for a while.”
“How long is a while?” he asked, and he was eager , not judgemental, not scornful like I’d secretly feared.
“Until we retire?” I said like it was a joke, but of course, it was the truth, and it fell flat and broken between us.
“But you love me,” he reiterated, eyes so bright I had to blink away the sunspots. “You love me today and tomorrow and until then.”
“Until the end of time,” I admitted.
“Then Madonna santa , Adam,” he said empathetically, grabbing both my hands in his. “Of course, that’s enough. That’s fucking everything.”
“Not exactly a love to move the sun and the stars,” I admitted, feeling so fucking small that I hated it and had to fight the urge to remain open with him.
“Let me be the judge of that,” he argued with that movie star grin that made breath arrest in my chest. “Because from where I’m sitting, only a love like that could survive the wait.”
Fear pierced me sharp and narrow like a needle through the bullseye of my heart, right at the centre of my insecurities.
Because it wasn’t only Sebastian whom I doubted. That he would stay after a year or two years or five, satisfied with a secret relationship when he was such an open, honest man.
It was also me .
Even now, there was this risk of discovery that made my hair stand on end and my heart drum too hard and too fast.
I’d witnessed secrets just like mine bubble to the surface and ruin lives.
Even end them.
Could I live with the fear I’d been living with every day until I was old and grey that someone would discover us, and everything would disintegrate like castles in the sand?
I hoped so.
Sebastian was teaching me to be brave and bold for myself and not just my characters, so maybe, if I worked tirelessly and was very, very careful, we could have this.
This dream that seemed like such a far-flung reality.
“Let’s just love each other,” Sebastian suggested, sensing my disquiet as he always did. “Let’s just let that be enough for now.”
“I do, you know,” I said, a little urgently, too forceful. “Very much.”
“I knew before you ever told me,” he said with a wink. “You aren’t the kind of man to faff about with something you’re not completely obsessed with.”
I laughed, startled and relieved enough to laugh a little too hard and too long. When Savvy came back, she merely raised an eyebrow and told Sebastian to get up and switch seats so she could sit neatly between us.
She didn’t know in so many words that I loved him, but she was clever, my wife.
She knew.
And though she didn’t say it again after their confession in the car that night after the BAFTAs, I knew she loved him too.
We’d be okay.
Hours later, I was proven very wrong.
Before that day, there were three “worst moments of my life” that defined me more than I would’ve liked them to.
The first: losing my mother in the car crash that had her pinned behind the wheel, dying rapidly but not fast enough beside me in the driver’s seat. I’d held her bloody hand while she died, her last words a slurring rush of “IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou” that I could hear in the echo of my heartbeat anytime I felt panic. No one should watch their mum die, but the trauma was compounded by the way my father reacted.
Stiff upper-lip British stoicism.
Even though he was obviously eviscerated by her death, he insisted we move on briskly and efficiently.
Within a week, all her things were packed up and sold off or disposed of, the empty spaces in the house glaring to my eleven-year-old gaze.
We weren’t allowed to talk about her. The name Juliet scrubbed from our vocabulary as if she had never existed.
And then, ten months from the day, my father remarried a woman whom he’d courted for the past four months.
Within the span of a year, the memory of my mother was eradicated except for the special space I kept for her in my own heart.
Happily, I was sent to Eton shortly after and then Oxford after that.
Though the family purse supported me until graduation, I never returned home to visit him and his new wife.
And when I enlisted in the Royal Air Force to be with Arthur Whitley-Fairfax, the future King of England, because he was my brother more than Andrew had ever been my father, our last correspondence was the letter he sent me threatening to disown me if I risked my life so foolishly.
I didn’t mention I was enlisting with the bloody Crown Prince of Britain and that our station was probably the safest place on earth because of it. It wasn’t worth the breath it would have taken to reassure him.
The second was just as devastating but perhaps harder to categorize.
Arthur and I had another best mate in grade school at Eton, a lad by the name of Gregory Madison. The three of us were thick as thieves until our third-year in uni when suddenly Gregory stopped coming round.
Arthur and I both pretended we didn’t know why, but we did.
The last time we’d seen Gregory, he’d been bent over the couch in his apartment, taking it from behind by an older bloke I recognized vaguely from the graduate library.
I didn’t know why I didn’t ring him and say “Hi, mate, no need to feel embarrassed. I bugger the occasional bloke too. Looks like we have more in common than we thought.”
But I didn’t ring him.
And then it was too late.
Because Greg decided to take his own life two days before graduation after he told his parents he was gay, and they told him they never wanted to see him again.
Arthur and I found him when we dropped round to drag him out for a pint to celebrate the end of our courses.
Whenever I needed to summon tragedy for a role, it was Gregory I thought about. The way his beautiful body had looked naked and pale as paper in the bath surrounded by bloody water and the glint of razor blades. The way I’d dropped to my knees hard on the tile and dragged him from the cold water into my lap to begin CPR that was much too late. The way Arthur had stood there utterly ashen, looking as close to death himself as he could get while still breathing.
This was the boy who’d encouraged me to join the school theatre group. He’d rode his bike to my mother’s house in Chelsea, where I stayed during holidays, nearly every day to keep me company in the big house. The first lad I’d ever thought to fancy with his big grey eyes and coltish limbs, who bit his lower lip when he was nervous, which was often because he was sweet but shy.
The boy who’d been my best mate for more than half my life.
Dead in my arms because of the shame others had forced upon him.
When I enlisted that summer, I knew it was Arthur’s way of running from the incident but also from his truth.
Not one of us three had been straight as an arrow, and Gregory’s death stalked us like some dark, knife-sharp shadow. If it caught us, I don’t think either of us knew what would happen.
When I met Bryce in the Air Force, I wasn’t ready to accept any part of my bisexuality, but he was hard to resist. Stolen moments in empty barracks, weekend leave spent in hotel rooms we never left.
At first, when he was killed in action, I thought it was inevitable.
Of course, he would die.
That was what happened in these kinds of situations.
“These kinds of situations.”
Like being gay or bi or pan was situational and not natural, fundamental.
Unchangeable.
By the time I met Savannah, I’d spent a good few years burying my sexuality in a long line of women.
Because I was so fucking afraid.
It felt inevitable that I would lose those I cared about: my mum, Greg, Bryce.
And that the odds increased exponentially if I loved them, and it was in their nature to love me too.
So the night I’d read Sebastian’s screenplay, I’d been fucking terrified.
Because my wife was already entranced by him, and it was bloody impossible to say no to her.
But more, because for the first time since Bryce, I wanted to know a man beneath his muscle and bone. I was captivated by the makings of him and not his packaging.
Then, the moment I saw him stand on that Finborough stage, I’d felt blood-curdling terror.
Because he was brilliant.
Brilliant enough to chase those knife-wielding shadows away and lull me into a false sense of security.
They say getting old makes you wiser.
But that clearly wasn’t the case.
I’d really thought I could do it.
Have my cake and eat it, too.
Be straight seeming but have my male lover on the side.
What a bloody fool.
I knew it the second the first football fan stopped us on our way out of the stadium to shout, “ Faggot .”
I wasn’t even standing beside Sebastian.
Savannah was under my arm as we walked together toward the car, and Sebastian was following not too close behind.
But I knew with gut-clenching certainty.
Something had happened.
“Hey!” the bloke yelled again, red-faced with drink as he slapped his chum on the shoulder and pointed at me. “That’s the actor snogging the bloke on the beach.”
My blood ran cold. In fact, it felt as if it froze in my veins.
“Adam,” Savannah said, quiet but urgent, ushering me now by the arm a little faster toward the car. “Come on, darling.”
There was static in my ears like the radio cranked too loud through a tunnel pass. I couldn’t hear beyond it even though I recognized Savvy was still talking to me as we reached the Rolls.
Sebastian appeared in my vision, and I flinched away from the sight of him.
Faggot!
“Not now. Get in the car.” I watched Savannah mouth to him before opening the door and shoving me inside.
I went willingly, cold and drifting like some spirit through the ether. I imagined the graves of Gregory, Bryce, and my mother cropping up in the car park, empty graves with markers reserved for Sebastian and Savannah and myself beside them.
When Savannah got in on the other side, I said woodenly, “What is it, then?”
She was already on her phone, tapping away madly. When she froze, eyes wide on the screen, I winced at her curse.
She wasn’t a woman who swore.
“Bad?” I asked, but I couldn’t hear my own question through the static.
I stared at my hands, touched my fingers together experimentally and found I could not feel them.
She was talking to Sebastian, voice clipped, and then raising her phone to her ear to call someone.
Probably my agent and publicist.
Something touched my knee.
Sebastian.
I didn’t flinch this time because I seemed to have lost sensation in my limbs.
“Here,” Sebastian mouthed and pushed his phone into my hands.
I looked down at the grenade thrown into my life.
A single photo.
The latest article of The Daily Spread .
Adam Meyers Caught Kissing A Bloke!
We weren’t kissing.
But we were closer than you saw most mates on most days.
The shot had been taken at Croyde Beach months ago, the day of my birthday when Sebastian had taken us to meet Linnea for surf lessons. We were in the shallows, laughing so hard our faces were creased and contorted. I remembered the moment vividly.
I’d just tackled Sebastian to the sand, pinning him there with my whole body and using my one hand to secure his hands above his head so I could smear wet sand on his face and chest.
The photo caught us body to body in the froth-frilled edge of the ocean with my hand above his head, the other pressed flat to his naked chest, and our faces too close together, smiling those bright, wild smiles that spoke of fierce, unguarded happiness.
I’d never seen such an expression on my face outside of films.
And some fucking sleaze had captured it and sold it to this drivel to derail my entire life for a few hundred quid.
“ FUCK! ” I roared, hurling the phone into the half-raised partition, where it cracked harshly and fell soundlessly to the carpet.
“Adam––” Sebastian said quietly.
“Shut up,” Savannah snapped. “Both of you. I’m handling this.”
We both quieted.
For my part, not because I cared about whoever she was talking to on the phone––I doubted they could do much to rectify the damage.
But because I was having a full-blown panic attack.
Air squeezed out of my lungs faster than I could replace it. My eyes and throat were too tight and dry. I raked my nails over my neck as I tried to rip open the shirt I was wearing to get more air. Blood trickled down my chest, but I didn’t notice. Spots popped across my vision, black and growing larger by the second.
All I could focus on was trying to breathe through the pressure of guilt and shame and devastation pressing the life out of me.
“Savannah!” I heard vaguely. “He’s having a fucking panic attack. Get his head between his legs.”
Something pushed my head between my legs, but instead of comfort, the movement made me nauseated.
Seconds later, I threw up on my shoes.
“Jesus Christ,” Savannah cried out as I retched and retched, unable to stop even when nothing was left in my rancid gut but yellow bile.
“Get him some water,” Sebastian ordered, but Savvy stayed pressed to the other side of the car away from my sick.
I didn’t blame her.
My head rested on my thigh, damp forehead against the cool fabric of my denim. My vision swam so I squeezed my eyes closed and grabbed the seat beneath me, trying to right the vertigo.
This couldn’t be happening.
How could life be so cruel to kick me in the teeth when I’d finally found the courage to express exactly what I wanted out of life?
It wasn’t even a choice, not really.
I couldn’t live with the truth coming out.
I’d seen what had happened to other actors, how it upset the trajectory of their careers, but I couldn’t deny in the safe recess of my own mind that it was so much more than that.
I’d seen the way censure had obliterated Gregory’s spirit.
I’d lived through losing him and my mother and Bryce.
I couldn’t live through the slow erosion of my relationship with Sebastian and Savannah because of the hate and judgment and lies they’d spin about us like an ever-tightening net. The way they’d take a love so fucking pure it was like fresh oxygen delivered straight to my veins and make it some kind of poison, something toxic for strangers to poke at and ridicule in the comments.
Everyone would hate us, and how could we insulate ourselves from that?
All that hate would just make us hate each other.
And then I’d be left with no wife, no Sebastian, and no career.
But maybe… if they could withstand the fire… if they wanted to face it together…
“Omari and Georgie are getting ahead of this,” Savannah’s cool, professional voice cut through my spiralling thoughts. “They’ll both meet us at The Savoy in twenty minutes.”
“Why not the house?” Sebastian asked.
“It’ll be surrounded by now.”
“It’s a gossip rag,” Sebastian said, trying to catch my eye as I straightened to rest my head back against the seat. “Surely this will pass over without much fanfare.”
My laugh was hollow and led to another retched gag.
“Nothing is trivial if it gets media attention. It didn’t start with The Daily Spread . It’s been picked up by most major entertainment outlets,” Savannah corrected, fingers flying over the keyboard on her phone, brow furrowed. “We have to make sure we handle this indirectly without seeming to handle it at all.”
“Why not just let it blow over?” he pushed, curious but also scared.
Scared of what it meant for him.
I gagged again behind my hand and closed my eyes, trying to find peace where there was none to be had.
Because of course, this meant one thing for Sebastian.
For us.
He needed to go go go and not come back.
There could be no more photos of us at football matches or hanging out with Andrea at local wine bars. There could be no more intimacy behind closed doors because there would be no more privacy.
The British paparazzi were the worst in the world.
They’d scale walls and pay off garbage men. They’d flood the street of our house for days just hoping to confirm that the man in the salacious photo with Adam Meyers in fact lived on the same grounds as them.
They’d say Savannah was my beard, and Sebastian was my illicit lover.
It would tarnish The Devil Cares entire media cycle, destroying credibility for one of my career's best performances and films.
I’d been in negotiations to play Fitzwilliam Darcy in the remake of Pride & Prejudice , a role I’d been dying to get my hands on since I’d started acting, and that would go up in smoke tomorrow if this didn’t go away quickly.
Mr. Darcy was a timeless romantic figure.
They wanted Adam Meyers, in love with his wife, handsome and straight-laced and straight to play the role.
“Adam, breathe .”
I nearly jumped out of my skin because suddenly Sebastian was in the open door crouched beside me, lightly slapping my cheek to get my attention.
Contrary to his edict, I found I’d forgotten how to draw breath at all.
“Come on, vecchio , don’t give out on me now. Breathe , dammit. Like this.” He took my numb hand and flattened it to his chest as he breathed in an exaggerated fashion. “Like this.”
My vision flickered in and out. I hoped it would cut out completely and I could wake up in a different reality than this. My gaze snagged on the rose gold watch on his wrist, and without thinking, I reached out to grasp it. It was cool to the touch, Sebastian’s skin warm. I could feel his pulse thrumming away madly, and it, more than anything, brought me slightly to my senses.
Because I knew with stomach-plummeting certainty that this would be the last time I held him.
“Adam,” he whispered brokenly, eyes scouring my face. “Where have you gone?”
“Back to reality,” I said, surprised by the sound of my voice.
“Come back to me,” he said urgently, and I realized we had pulled into the back of the hotel where there was no access for the press. Savannah was outside the car speaking to the hotel manager while texting on her phone. “We can get through this.”
I flinched at the we because of how funny it sounded now.
How childish.
I watched detached as Sebastian’s eager, earnest expression dissolved molecule by molecule into something that made my heart ache as if it had been dipped in acid.
“Don’t do this,” he said, grip tightening on my frozen hands. “Don’t you remember what you said only sixty minutes ago? Don’t you remember promising me one day ?”
“One day can’t happen now,” I said, but I was watching myself from high above our heads, as if the whole thing was happening to someone else.
Was this how Gregory felt when we walked in on him?
Exposed and turned inside out for everyone to leer at?
“Adam,” Sebastian called harshly. “Look at me. This will go away.”
“It won’t if you don’t. It won’t because now there is speculation. Every time we are seen together, someone will dig up this photo, and rumors will swirl. This will stalk us our entire careers if we don’t stop it now.”
“You mean if Omari and Georgie don’t get ahead of it?” he asked, but we both knew the answer.
It was written in the heartbreak dawning over his features, turning the gold of his eyes to wet sand, heavy and dark.
Shaking my head felt like moving ten tons of bricks, but I must have been successful because he winced, run through by the simple movement.
“I won’t beg you,” he warned, so proud even now, shoulders strong, chin tipped up at that haughty angle he’d adapted from my wife. “I shouldn’t have to. You promised me one day we’d live in our impossible universe, but until then, we’d be together however the hell we could in this one. And at the first sign of trouble, you bail on it?”
I blinked at him, the words and emotions I’d felt so acutely when I’d seen the picture purged from my body when I’d vomited. Now, I was just a hollow aching shell.
“I will love you in every universe,” he told me fiercely, a declaration of war as much as it was one of love. That he was willing to fight for me when I was not. That he was brave and filled with enough conviction to hone it into armor against all the judgements of the world.
For one crystalline second, it made me waver.
If he could bear the strain, couldn’t I?
If he set the example, I could follow because it meant I wouldn’t have to lose him to the fear and hatred around us.
But then Savannah appeared behind him and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Let’s go upstairs.”
As was our habit, we followed her. There was sick on my shoes, but there was no one at the back entrance to notice, and the service elevator took us up to a floor that had obviously been cleared for us.
The click of the lock opening under the key card in Savannah’s hand seemed to echo through the empty place.
None of us spoke.
Not even when we filtered into the gorgeous room and took up positions away from each other. But no matter how far apart we were, we remained three points of the same triangle.
“Adam wants me out,” Sebastian told my wife combatively, daring her to agree. “He thinks it’s the only way. Tell him how absurd that is.”
I closed my eyes, turning my head away.
Because I knew what she would say.
Sebastian didn’t because he’d always have rose-colored glasses on when it came to my wife. I’d watched her put them on him and kept quiet.
Because I wanted to look at her that way, too, despite evidence that illustrated her otherwise.
“It’s probably for the best,” she said softly, almost inaudibly.
I felt Sebastian’s shock like a nuclear blast, rocking me back on my heels so I had to brace myself against the fireplace mantel.
“ Scusi ?” he breathed, reverting to Italian in his surprise.
“Just for a while,” she amended. “You shouldn’t be seen with him. But we can put you up somewhere, and you and I can still make time… it’s just dangerous for this to continue with Adam. For… a while, at least.”
“For a while,” he repeated with a rough laugh that scored through me.
It didn’t sound a thing like him.
“ Vaffanculo! You Brits love your ambiguity,” he insulted. “What the fuck does that mean? You put me up in some hotel like a cheap mistress until I can come home again?”
Home .
Through the glacial ice that had formed over my soul in the last half hour, I heard a great creaking crack in my ears, and a second of searing pain lashed through my chest.
He thought of us as home.
And we were taking that from him.
Nearly a full year of life together with him as ours, and we were ripping it all asunder.
For good reason, for the right reasons.
Even if he didn’t understand now in his youthful ignorance, he would understand later.
In five years or ten.
It was best to avoid the inevitable bitterness and hatred that would settle between us over time.
A quick, violent end was better than a slow death by a thousand cuts.
“Don’t be immature. Not now,” Savannah scolded. “We can’t have you two associated with each other this way when there is so much on the line.”
“My heart is on the line!” he shouted, thumping himself viciously across the chest. “What more is there to care about?”
“The career we’ve worked so hard to launch?” she suggested icily. “The career Adam has worked at for years. His passion. My passion.”
“Am I not your passion, too, then?” he asked, quivering with anger and hurt, a stuck bull caged in a space too small for everything roiling through him. “Am I so easily cast aside at the first sign of trouble?”
“I can still see you, my love,” she said, the ice queen act cracking for a moment as she stepped forward, arms outstretched to him, hope stark across her face. “We’ll have to be careful, but there won’t be as many eyes on us as there would be on you and Adam.”
It was cruel to all of us, what she was proposing.
For them to continue without me was worse than losing him altogether. The idea of catching his scent on her blouse, seeing the bruise of his mouth against her breasts… it would be a knife through the chest every time.
For us both, I thought.
But Savannah had never been good at giving up what she wanted, the consequences be damned.
Sebastian was already shaking his head, but he stepped forward too, taking her hands and dragging her roughly against his chest.
“Come with me, then,” he coaxed. “Adam won’t face the music to be together, but you could.”
“Change the narrative… make him a cuckold instead of a homosexual?” Savannah actually mused.
He flinched, checking her face to make sure she wasn’t joking.
She wasn’t. I could have told him, but I didn’t.
“I don’t care about the narrative,” he said slowly, bending down to look her in the eye. “I care about you. Both of you.”
“Of course,” she soothed. “But it’s not a bad idea.”
I’d had enough.
Enough of Savannah acting like my manager instead of my fucking wife.
Enough of seeing Sebastian fight for us when I knew he would only fail.
Savannah would never leave me for him, and he didn’t understand that.
Even my star power was growing stale for her, and Sebastian was just on the cusp of success himself. She couldn’t be satisfied with that even if she was satisfied by us in her heart and her body.
For her, it would always be about the mind.
And what Sebastian and I could give her.
“Get out.”
They both looked at me, caught in their dramatic cinch, surprised to see me standing straight and tall.
“Get the fuck out,” I told Sebastian coldly, allowing every frozen over particle to infuse my voice. “And you will not be taking my wife with you. This is over.”
“Adam,” Sebastian said, stepping away from my wife and toward me, every feature falling to such abject despair it was beautiful.
Beautiful because he loved me.
In every universe.
And it still wasn’t enough.
I’d been a fool before to think such foolish thoughts as love conquered all.
The world wasn’t built to run on such lies.
“Go to the house and collect your things. We expect you gone by this time tomorrow when we get home.”
He stopped midway between Savannah and me, hands held up and open in benediction.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked coarsely. “You know we can get through this.”
“This is only one moment in thousands,” I corrected. “It will happen again and again, and the more we fight it, the more we confirm it. This has to end, and it will. Now.”
“An hour ago, you loved me,” he accused.
An hour from now I’ll love you still , I thought.
“Not enough,” I said.
Tears pooled in his eyes but didn’t fall. He stared at me for so long, searching for secrets I refused to tell. He was so attuned to emotion that I wondered if he could see how gross my lies were, but after a minute, he seemed to buy them.
And a tiny portion of my soul I’d never recoup broke off and crumbled to dust.
Finally, he turned slightly to look at Savannah, who stood with her hands clasped before her hips. You had to look very closely to see the way they trembled.
“Savvy, duchessa ,” he said gently, holding his hand out for her. “Come with me.”
She sucked in a small breath and rolled her lips between her teeth.
She wanted to go with him. Some small but profound part of her wanted to be swept away by our teenage romantic and forget about the foundation she’d built her life and sense of self on for so many years.
Maybe when she was younger, she would have gone.
Maybe some part of me wanted her to.
“No,” she whispered.
Sebastian stepped back like he’d been shot, one hand pressing hard to his chest to stem the blood flow. His head dropped as if his spine had been cut off at the neck.
He stared at the floor for a long moment and then said, “Right. This was how it was always going to end.”
“Yes,” I said to make it easier for him. “Now, get out.”
I hoped he’d hate me, that the teeth of that rage would break apart any love left in his heart and make it easier to digest and expel.
I hoped that he’d recover from this.
He was young and beautiful and full of love so I had to believe he would.
We wouldn’t.
Savvy and me.
But he didn’t need to know that.
And when he turned on his heel abruptly and stalked toward the door, tears streaking back along his cheeks, I knew he never would.
Savannah and I were masters of deception.
Maybe we’d even lie well enough to deceive ourselves.
It was certainly something to hope for.
The door slammed shut behind him.
A vase of flowers on the entryway trembled at the force. I walked forward instinctively to settle it, but the moment my hand touched the ceramic, I threw it across the room at the same door still vibrating in its frame.
“FUCK!” I roared.
I stared at the shattered pieces of clay and crushed petals until I heard the choked sound of muffled sobs behind me. When I faced her, Savannah had both hands cupped over her mouth, her eyes wide like she couldn’t believe she was crying so hard.
I sighed, my body heavy as I moved across the floor to my wife.
When I wrapped my arms around her, she flung hers around my neck and stopped trying to muffle her cries.
It made it easier to give in to the tears myself.
Because even though we held each other like we’d never let go, I had the bone-deep feeling it wouldn’t be long before we said goodbye to each other, too.