Some part of my brain that had not turned into a beast noted that with Savannah, things had always been arranged differently. I had lusted after her first, loved her like a worshipper at an altar, but we had never had the same sense of equality in friendship that I had fostered with Adam or Linnea.
In the wake of the revelation, fear surprised me by burning metallically at the back of my throat.
Something in Adam’s eyes flicked and cooled.
“Ah yes,” he said quietly, rubbing a thumb along the side of my neck where he still held me. “There it is. The anger.”
He had misread me, but it accomplished the same thing so I didn’t correct him as he squeezed me once before letting go to step away from me.
“And Linnea?” I asked, my voice rough-edged as I tried to regain my equilibrium.
I’d asked the question without really knowing what I meant by it.
Adam raised a dark blond brow and leaned his hips against the counter again to cross his arm over his—distractingly broad—chest.
“She is in the shower having a wee cry I think,” he admitted with a little frown. “But if you meant in regard to us, do you think it’s best if we ask her what she wants?”
It was my turn to raise a brow. “Usually, you operate more as an autocracy than a democracy.”
He shrugged a shoulder. “Usually, things do not work out very well for me. Perhaps this time will be different.”
I swallowed down the hope that burgeoned in my throat so hard it made me wince.
“She wants us both, I think,” I confessed as I gathered myself enough to start on the pasta sauce. There was a bag of lemons in the fridge, and I knew Linnea loved citrus-flavored anything, so I started making a simple sauce with lemons, garlic, butter, and parmesan. There was Italian parsley in one of the small plants on the windowsill, which I pinched off to use later as a garnish.
“Yes,” Adam agreed. “I think she’s made that clear.”
The silence made me uncomfortable only because it was filled with so much unsaid that I could not, uncharacteristically, find the words to say.
“Do you want us both?” I found the ability to say, the vowels scorching my tongue as they came out.
Adam’s laugh was a bitter little cough. “Never doubt that I want, Sebastian. It is never from lack of wanting that I hold myself back.”
“So you want us, then, but you won’t let yourself have us,” I corrected.
Or let us have you, I followed up with a flare of fury that scorched up my spine.
It was so wildly frustrating to deal with a man who had the best of intentions but the horrible habit of falling on his own sword. He believed that anything bad that could happen would happen to him and his, and I wasn’t sure he was entirely wrong.
But I knew life kicked you in the teeth, it was almost the only guarantee.
Love was what happened when you fought through pain and adversity to reach the other side. It was what made life worth living, even when it hurt.
But ten years of separation and yearning had left me tired in a soul-deep way I wasn’t sure I could battle back from without something more tangible from Adam.
Or Linnea.
I wasn’t willing to play games of the heart as recklessly as I had when I was just eighteen. At twenty-eight, I was all too aware of the stakes and the tolls it could take.
Adam didn’t respond to me. Instead, he moved into the living room to set up for our impromptu movie night, leaving me alone as he was so apt to do.
Linnea emergedfrom the bathroom a long forty minutes after she had disappeared into it with flushed cheeks that still retained the heat of the shower and wet gold hair that dripped down the back of her oversizedRomeo in BloodT-shirt I had sent her in the mail years ago. It had the poster for the Shakespeare adaptation I had starred in on the front of the black fabric, my silhouette with a rose and a gun stylized so that, at first glance, you couldn't tell one from the other.
She smiled at me when I made note of the shirt and hugged herself as she walked barefoot into the kitchen from the back hall.
“It’s my comfort shirt,” she explained as the fabric slid off one slim shoulder and the hem flashed around the very tops of her long thighs, turning the faded old shirt into something unspeakably sexy.
The sight of her like that combined with the knowledge that something I’d given her years ago had brought her comfort, the sexiness of that intimacy, made my cock twitch in my jeans.
