Page 93 of The Moon & His Tides
“In another universe,” he pulled back just enough to whisper, the movement of his lips still pressed to mine as if he wanted to feed me the words. “We’d be together. I’d love you here in the shadows but also in the light. I’d walk down the beach holding your hand, and it would be the rightest thing in the world. I’d tellpeoplela luna è la mia amante, the moon is my lover, and I’d be so proud.”
“Sebastian,” I muttered, gut-wrenched because wasn’t that so bloody lovely?
Wasn’t that exactly what I’d been wanting all day, to reach across the sand and take his rough-palmed hand in mine?
Wasn’t that what I’d secretly yearned for all my life? The other yin to the yang of loving a woman. Both together, balanced and precious inside my soul?
Hadn’t I been waiting for a declaration of affection since the moment he told my wife he loved her? Hadn’t I yearned with a kind of desperation that made my chest ache and my breath come too short and too quick?
“Have I told you that?” he murmured, searching my eyes with a faintly amused smile on his lips. “You have this pull over me the way the moon does over the tides. It’s elemental and terrifying, and I wouldn’t change it for anything.”
“I can’t––” I started to say, the words cut into pieces by the blades stuck through my throat.
“In another universe,” he agreed with a sweet, sad smile before kissing me again with both of his big hands framing my face.
I held both of his wrists as if I could anchor him to me forever. I wanted to protest even though it was true. Such fantasies were possible only at another time or another place, and maybe even then, only for other people.
“It’s enough to love you,” he admitted. “If you’ll let me.”
I swallowed around the stone in my throat so hard I winced. No matter how hard I tried, my voice wouldn’t cooperate. So I nodded and hoped it would be enough.
Even though it wasn’t.
Even though I’d never be able to give him even an ounce of what he deserved.
Yet the smile he gave me was absolutely beatific, bright as sunshine trapped between his lips.
“Bene,” he whispered, almost to himself, a little giddy. “Molto bene.”
“It’s not much.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” he declared. “It may be your birthday, but you’re the one giving me the best present. C’mon, let’s get dressed. There’s more to come that will hopefully tip the scales.”
He tookme somewhere I’d never been before, which was a surprise, given I thought I’d been everywhere worth going in the city.
Bernardi’swas a tiny hole-in-the-wall Italian place in Shoreditch that Sebastian had discovered whilst living in the neighborhood with hisfourflatmates. The exterior was a plain, dirtied white stucco, but the interior felt as if it had been transported straight from Italy itself. Lifelike fake olive trees studded the interior, string lights, and terra cotta planters that perfumed the air with rosemary, oregano, and basil. It was busy, a mingling of languages and accents raised merrily over clinking glasses of big bowled red wine and traditional ceramics.
Sebastian beamed at me when I told him it was magical, and I felt the echo of that grin in my chest. I rubbed at my breastbone as I followed him to the table, a little concerned I was turning into some kind of sap.
Stoicism, practicality, and conservatism were hallmarks of my family, and while I’d shunned most of their principles when my father remarried, I’d still been raised with those ideals.
It was hard to shake the fact that I was out for dinner with a man even though I’d dined with countless men over the years. It felt different with Sebastian even though I knew no one was aware of our relationship. It just seemed so… unlikely that casual observers couldn’t tell that I was head over arse in love with him.
I was so caught up in him, risking a look at his arse in those black trousers, that I didn’t notice a woman was already sitting at the table.
Savannah watched me move toward her with an uncharacteristically guilty expression. Her short cloud of pale curls was caught up in a black velvet ribbon at her crown that matched the Audrey Hepburn style dress and pearls she wore. She’d always been a vision, even before she took to refinery and elegance—when wearing jeans she bought at Target instead of Walmart was the height of her fashion. Sometimes I missed that girl with the Southern drawl, who ate with her elbows on the table and sang along loudly and off-key whenever Dolly Parton came on the radio.
She’d always been a vision, and she always would be, through all her iterations, because Savannah was a woman who knew her worth and demanded others take note of it. It made her wonderfully compelling, and even after years of marriage, the cracks that had sprung up between us, I felt it still, staring at her in the low light of an Italian restaurant we’d never be caught dead in if not for the magnetism of Sebastian Lombardi.
The sight of her hurt as much as it healed.
She’d caused me more pain than I wanted to admit with her barbs late last night, but ironically, she was the only one who could make them all better.
I wanted her to hold me close and whisper promises into my ear.
I won’t push you so hard.
You’re more than your career.
