Page 82 of The Moon & His Tides
“But you could have married someone better and had children with them,”’ I argued, for the sake of understanding how deeply this feeling went in her.
So I could know how deeply it may one day go in me.
Pain spasmed across her features, fingers tightening on my cheeks. “Maybe. But I do not spend my time on this kind of thinking. What I had with Seamus when I was young was beautiful. What he gave me in my children is even more beautiful. I can’t regret any of it, and if I’m sad about the way it ended, well, then I focus on the future. And I hope that life has taught me to be a better version of myself, so if I have the opportunity to love again, I make a good choice for myself.”
“Have you ever loved anyone else?” I’d never considered it, really. She was so young when she met my father, and he’d only been gone for half a year.
But she was the type of woman who inspired poetry, and she’d given that to her daughters. She’d taught her son to look for that kind of moving beauty within and without, which was why the combination of Savannah’s intelligence and elegance hooked me right through the mouth.
“Yes,” she whispered, dropping her hands from my face like I was on fire and turning back to the pasta with a kind of dramatized busyness that made me think she was lying about something. “A long time ago.”
“What happened?”
Her hands hesitated over the drying pasta. “I-I wasn’t brave enough to trust it.”
“What happened to him?”
She turned from me, moving the pasta to the table and then going directly to the fridge, hiding her face behind the door. “I don’t know.”
It was a lie, but then, who was I to judge my mother for keeping things from me?
Mama’s vagueness had always bothered me. When I was a boy trying to understand why she stayed with my father, who was a good-for-nothing son of a whore, when I was a young man trying to make decisions to protect my family and Mama didn’t seem to share my desire to get us all out of Napoli, as a man now, trying to understand my sisters.
“A little mystery is a good thing,” she always said, and it was a pretty turn of phrase, but as I grew older, it seemed more like an excuse to keep secrets than anything else.
And though I’d do anything for my family, and I knew in my bones they would do anything for me, there was no doubt we were a family of secret keepers.
Cosima didn’t answer half of my phone calls anymore, Giselle hadn’t visited home in the year and a half since she’d left for Paris, and Elena disappeared for hours at a time, coming home angry and sullen.
A small part of me wondered what would happen if I shared my own scandalous secret.
Would it start some kind of domino effect?
Truths rushing into the light after years of hiding in the shadows? And what then?
How was my scattered family supposed to withstand the brutality of such honesty when we weren’t even together to work through it?
In the end, it didn’t matter because I didn’t have the balls to tell them, and even though they noticed me on the phone, smiling that private smile reserved for the Meyerses, neither of them had the balls to ask me about it either.
It wasa relief to return to England, and not just because of the bad memories Napoli held for me or the inexplicable tension between Mama, Elena, and myself.
It was a relief simply to be back in the proximity of Savannah and Adam, who had become, in the short months I’d known them, akin to the sun and the moon lighting my life in their different ways. Without them, those two weeks in Italy were like a cloud-filled night, filling me with old feelings of being adrift and alone.
The moment I got out of the hired car in front of the gates to the Meyers’ Chelsea home, I felt something settle in me. It was the way I should have felt going home, yet I felt it now walking across the flagstones to the black lacquered door and using my key to enter the sweet-smelling interior. It was quiet within, which wasn’t surprising given it was hideously early on a Saturday morning, and even Savannah and Adam tended to take the weekend for a lie-in.
I dropped my things in the foyer, my keys on the round marble table between the tasteful chandelier and my shoes beside the closet, before I padded softly up the stairs. It was a bold move to climb the stairs to their bedroom when they weren’t expecting me and could be sleeping or even fucking. The thought sent warmth tumbling through me. Two weeks without either of their hands on me when I’d grown accustomed to warming their bed almost every night was torturous. I was already half hard just thinking about them sleep-warm and scantily clothed in bed. Savannah always wore these little silk slips in feminine colours, and Adam slept in his boxer briefs, snug over his muscular thighs and ass.
It was a bold move but one I felt comfortable making because of the two months I’d spent living with my married lovers. I’d only spent a handful of nights in my own bed in the carriage house.
I had every hope they’d be just as eager for our reunion as I was.
Which was why I wasn’t expecting the sight of Adam sitting alone on the edge of the unmade bed, hair rumpled, face creased with lack of sleep, and eyes vacant as they fixed on something disturbing in his mind’s eye. He didn’t notice me as I stood in the doorway, so I had a moment to take in the open door to the walk-in closet, the empty hangers on Savannah’s side of the closet, and the clothes tossed haphazardly on the floor as if she’d packed in a hurry. The vase filled with flowers that usually rested on Savvy’s marble-topped bedside table was currently shattered to pieces at the base of the wall beside the bathroom, water and bits of greenery clinging to the broken picture frame housing a lovely photo of them both on their wedding day. Even the air in the room was thick like a slowly dispersing mushroom cloud after an atomic detonation.
And Adam, a shell of a being, tossed on the edge of the mattress like so much debris.
The frightened, immature part of me wanted to break the terse silence with a joke, but I forced the impulse back down my throat and summoned the courage to move forward quietly to crouch at Adam’s side. Only when I placed a hand on his strong thigh did he seem to come back to himself, swiveling his head to look at me a little blankly before he blinked and recognition settled in. His hand instantly covered my own, squeezing a little too hard.
“Sebastian,” he said.
