“Please don’t…” I moan as I feel his lips at the place where my tear had fallen.
“Let me, Lu… I need to make this right. I can’t be away from you anymore. It’s not right. I can’t function without you near. I’m broken without you… without your touch, your body, our friendship.”
These words still me, they sound foreign on his lips but I understand them completely. It’s exactly how I feel. Looking up into his eyes, I ask the question I’ve pondered on since Sunday. “Where is Ray now?”
“She’s on a plane somewhere - I don’t know and I don’t bloody care!”
“When did she leave?”
“Nathan took her to the airport on Sunday - 15 minutes after you left.”
“She’s gone?”
“She’s gone.” He smiles softly at me - I can see the worry in his eyes.
“Toni did this to us, you know. She’s a total bitch - she played a corker and you did naff all to rectify it!” My bottom lip trembles again, the tears increase and slither over my cheeks.
“I know, baby. CRAP!” he yells into the room in anger scraping his hand crudely across his head in exasperation. “Revenge is sweet – but let ours be so much sweeter – don’t let her break us. What this has made me realise is that this is YOU AND ME. We’re not some fling, some proposition or brief affair – we’re serious, for keeps Little One. The proposition may have got us to open our eyes at last but now we can have it all! I ache for you – need you, want you, like no other before you and I can’t live without you. Don’t shut me out. I’ve been a total dick for not standing up for us. Please give me a second chance? I miss you, I miss what we had.”
“We had nothing, just friendship and a recent proposition for you to service me.”
“You don’t mean that - it was amazing - monumental.”
“We had good sex.” God I sound cold
“Don’t say that. You don’t mean that. It was special.”
“Bullshit! You don’t know what special is – now there’s something you can’t have and of course YOU want it - poor Sebastian is not getting his own way.” My voice is bitter and nasty and I dislike myself more with every word - I thought they would make me feel better, more empowered but I’m fast feeling worse, and cheaper by the second.
“Don’t say that, Lu.” He repeats, his liquorice blacks willing me to retain eye contact with him. My mind is full of his words, but I can’t bring myself to concede. What he’s telling me just isn’t enough. I need more. I need to know he feels the same way I do. I’ve bared my soul, told him I loved him but he’d never repeated the words back to me. But like the mind reader he is, he rectifies that and changes everything with five words - five momentous words. His face crumples, the sheer devastation clear on his beautiful face as he watches me for my reaction.
“I fucking adore you, Lucia.”
I hear my breath hitch, emotion welling in my throat. He’d nearly said it - Surely that means enough?
“I adore you so much. You’re the only woman I’ve ever wanted to make love to and then laugh with. Let me show you, baby.”
What do I do now for fucks sake? This is what I’d wanted wasn’t it? I’d needed to hear him explain things clearly and tell me he’d been going crazy without me? You love him, Lu? Is it really worth putting yourself through all this pain when you know deep-down that your destiny is with this man?
I’m not sure who moves first but in a split-second, my lips are crushed against his. I have to have contact with him; some form of contact, even if it goes against every fibre of my being. The torture of not being able to touch him, when he is so near, is agony. I can taste the salt of my tears on his mouth and feel the desperation between us, and the urgency to connect. He draws me to a standing position and crushes me to his body, wrapping his arms around me so tightly I can barely breathe. I understand his need to be close though, so close that we are nearly joined; so close that his heart beats against mine and I’m not sure whose pulse it is throbbing manically.
“God I’ve missed you, lady.”
I feel his palms on either side of my head and I raise my own hands to his, cupping them as we passionately kiss, tonguing each-other, bashing our lips against one another, lust-filled and desperate, full of bottled-up frustration and eagerness. I rub my core into his erection and groan at the constricting layers between us. Seb understands my annoyance and slides my jacket down over my arms, letting it drop to the floor, then splays his large palms possessively across my back, lightly tracing my spine, through the transparent fabric there.