But every time I touched my finger to the small trash bin icon, I found myself paralyzed. As if my body was staging a rebellion against my mind and would not, under any circumstances, bend to the directive to erase the evidence of the greatest love story I’d ever had.
Instead, I printed off a single copy and refused to look at it unless my heart ached so acutely, nothing else would curb the pain.
So I looked at it now. The wide, full-lipped smile on Sebastian’s mouth, creasing his cheeks and the skin beside those vivid yellow-gold eyes. Linnea, once the least interesting thing about the capture, now stole my focus with the force of her grin, her eyes almost Crayola purple against the backdrop of the Cornish Sea. The relaxed set of my shoulders as I slung an arm around them both and grinned like a boy into the camera. It was that expression that held me arrested most often, not the look of my lost love, but the look ofmein love.
It was dazzling.
And I had not seen such a look on my face for a decade until Chaucer handed me the photo of Linnea, Sebastian, and me from the skydiving experience. It wasn’t the one they put in most of the papers, of Linnea in my arms, our bodies curved like two sides of a heart into each other. This was the one Gary had taken just afterward, when Sebastian had finished tending to the parachute and rejoined us both. Linnea had slipped from my arms to pull Seb in by the hand, hugging him while still holding on to me so that we were gathered in a kind of clutch that wasn’t quite an embrace, but somehow was. I was still breathless with adrenaline and excitement, which was probably why I reached out myself, pulling Seb into my side with an arm around his shoulders while the other tucked around Linnea’s narrow waist to grip her hip and pull her in tight. They both curled into me, light and dark bookends with their faces turned away. Only my face was open to the photographer, and the recognition of my own expression hit me like a fist to the chin.
I was dazzling.
Lips parted over teeth, the dimple in my chin pronounced from the force of my grin, eyes green as the flash before the sun sets on the horizon.
Happiness, they called.
But happiness could be a poison, just as hope could be.
Both sensations buoyed me for the next week, through my dates with Linnea, where she was vivacious enough to bring me to life, through my nights alone, when I thought of having her in my life, and him.
Always him.
I had something to look forward to outside of work now, and it was strange and beautiful and scary as fucking hell.
So I wasn’t braced properly for the sight that awaited me when I pulled open my door after buzzing someone through the gates.
Sebastian’s rented Lamborghini SUV idled in front of the house, the passenger side window open to reveal an unmitigated view of my ex-lover holding Linnea with a fist in the back of her rumpled gold hair in order to pin her at the perfect angle for a luscious kiss.
The sight of it seared down my spinal column like a hot blade, cutting me in two. I could not make sense of the pain, the shock of it blurring all the details. It could have been jealousy, that Sebastian could kiss her like that or that she could kiss him at all, the man who was so totally off-limits to me. It could have been bitterness or betrayal. Some of it had to be self-hatred, the lash-whip of recrimination I inflicted on myself because I wasn’t fucking brave enough to take what I wanted and consequences be damned.
I’d seen what the consequences had done to my uni mate, James, and again when the paps released those slightly too intimate photos of Sebastian and me at Croyde Beach to thepress. The consequences meant I lost not only Sebastian but also Savannah.
My jaw clenched so hard that all I could hear was the grind of my molars.
As a man who prided himself on cool, rational thought, I was caught completely unaware by the ferocious impulse to stop what was happening by any means possible. I was storming from the house before I even realized I was moving, the door slamming shut in my wake.
The loud noise prompted the kissers—lovers?— to spring apart as if they knew they had reason to be guilty.
Even though, despite the way it burned through me, I knew they didn’t.
They were perfectly free to be together.
Maybe not contractually, given that Linnea had agreed not to have any indiscretions while we were engaged in this farce of a romance.
But emotionally? Nothing was stopping them from falling in love.
They’d known each other, been friends, for a long time, and even looking at them together in the clinch electrified me so I could only wonder at the alacrity of passion it set of in them both. They were, admittedly, well-suited in many ways.
So why was I watching my own hand reach out to rip open the passenger door just in time to catch Linnea as she spilled out of the car? Why was I hauling her up into my arms in a bridal carry, her long, smooth legs draped over one arm, her side tucked safely into mine?
And why, even with her secured in my arms, was that ravenous, greedy beast that had taken over my brain not satisfied?
Why did it long to haul Sebastian to me as well?
“Adam,” Sebastian said my name in a choked-off rasp, and I noticed his mouth was ruddy from their kiss.
I wanted to kiss those swollen lips, chase the taste of them both on his tongue.
My jaw clicked as I ground my back teeth.
