Page 17 of The Moon & His Tides
“Someone like me?”
“Someone to join us, covertly,” Savannah clarified.
“In bed,” I confirmed.
“In our lives,” Adam corrected. “We want to have an exclusive sexual relationship with you, Sebastian. Preferably, you’d move in with us to cut down on the messiness of matching schedules and sneaking around. We’d say you were our new chauffeur, but really, you’d share our bed and our lives. And we want to find the right people to produce your screenplay. It’s brilliant, and we believe in it, in you.”
I swallowed thickly, staring back and forth between them. The ground beneath me was quaking, tectonic plates perched on the edge of each other, about to change the shape of my future forever.
“Why me?”
Surprisingly, Adam answered, and he did after leaning in to take my other cheek in his palm so that they both framed me. “Because sometimes you meet someone, and the magnetic force at the heart of them connects with the force at the center of yours. Inexplicably, irreversibly. We aren’t stupid enough to let a man like you fall through our fingers. I promise this isn’t some ruse or game, Sebastian. We want to take care of you and make you happy because we know in a way that’s elemental that you’re going to do the same for us.” He paused, then moved closer until his full lips skimmed my own with each movement of his mouth. “Say yes.”
These two beautiful, wealthy people were asking me to exchange my hovel for a mansion, my lack of job security for a life of luxury, and my deep horrifying loneliness for the highest caliber of company I ever could have dreamed of. It seemed too good to be true. But looking at Savannah, her soft, childlike blue eyes wide with sincerity, feeling the connection to her I’d felt since the beginning, I trusted her to take care with me.
Turning my gaze, I blinked at Adam, noted the gorgeous tangle of his long, thick eyelashes over those forest-floor green eyes, and I was both surprised and not surprised that the answerthat bubbled up my throat to irrevocably change the course of my life was, “Yes.”
5
SEBASTIAN
My four roommates didn’t ask me where I was moving so abruptly, and I almost wished they had. Maybe then I would have hesitated over my answer enough to second-guess my impulsive decision to move in with an incredibly high-profilemarriedcouple I knew next to nothing about in order to be their driver and boy toy. But they didn’t.
In fact, the only two in residence as I crossed the living room with my leather duffel bag of meager belongings barely glanced up as I passed through. It reminded me of the deeper reason I’d agreed to Adam and Savannah’s indecent proposal.
Obviously, it was about the money and the chance to see my dreams come true.
But honestly, I would have agreed without any of that.
I would have agreed just for the intimacy I so lacked in London.
For someone(s) to care about where I went and when I would come home. For shared space that went beyond five adult men struggling to share a dingy toilet in Shoreditch because the rent was dirt cheap. These desperate men did not have the desire ormeans to indulge in the intimacy I’d grown up with, the kind I couldn’t shake the desire for.
They struggled merely to exist, while I yearned to be moved as the tides by the moon, by a power and feeling greater than myself.
I craved the familiarity of truly knowing a person; of understanding instinctively when to speak and when to listen, of reacting to a subtle cue a loved one didn’t even know they were projecting, and you didn’t even consciously know you were reacting to.
Of a person’s very fragrance feeling like home and a pair of arms to hold you tight whenever you had need of it.
I had my family, the four women who tethered me to the earth like gravity, but they were so far away. Italy might as well have been a different planet, and I didn’t have the means to draw it closer with frequent visits.
Still, I had them, and they made sure I knew it. Even my eldest sister Elena, who was not prone to wasting time and was not effusive, made a point to talk to me once a week on my calls home.
Christmas in London had been a lonely affair, but we’d all video conferenced for most of the morning, and on New Year’s Eve, when I went out with the lads, I’d found someone pretty to kiss at midnight without any hassle just as I never had to work hard for female attention.
So why was I so desperate for more?
And not just the body and mind of Savannah Meyers, beautiful, whimsical waif though she was.
But forhim.
The dangerous temptation of amanwith eyes greener than a verdant forest canopy and hands I couldn’t stop from imagining moving firm and domineering over my flesh like a horse breeder checking the quality of his livestock.
I wanted him physically in a way that made me sweat, but what shocked me most was the fact that I wanted his mind too. Just as I wanted Savvy’s.
I’d spent the past ten years of my life wishing for a life exactly like Adam’s. He was my idol, the light at the end of the dark tunnel of my adolescence. The fact that he was actually there now, a tangible figure who wanted a very prurient part of my life was too surreal, too tremendous to truly comprehend.
How was I supposed to resist the draw of that?
