I couldn’t leave New York, not as fall rolled on and the season started in earnest. Sebastian’s business took him all over the world, so he spent the week attending to a hotel chain here, a negotiation over some islands there. He flew back in at some point on the day before my weekly day off, and I would always leave those shows amped and way overexcited as I headed for the penthouse overlooking Central Park, where so far, we spent almost all of our time naked. Or nearly naked.
He would greet me at the door and most of the time, we didn’t make it much farther. We needed each other, hard and deep and now. We tore off each other’s clothes. We fought to get close. He lifted me against his body and I wrapped myself around him, anchoring myself to him and groaning out the unbearable pleasure of it when finally—finally—he was inside me again.
It was only after we took the edge off—sometimes more than once—that we moved on to other things. Conversation, for example.
At first, it was almost hesitant. Like it really was the early stages of dating someone, without sex or the club or the rest of it.
“I didn’t realize you had a brother,” I said on one of those nights, wearing his shirt like a robe as I sat in the spacious, modern kitchen. Sebastian, it turned out, might not be a gourmet chef, but he could throw together a basic meal, and usually did, because I was always hungry after a show. And after our extended greetings. He always had big plans for the rest of the night, which went on into my one day off each week that required I keep up my strength. “By which I mean, you seem to have kept that pretty quiet on the internet, which is hard to do.”
“It’s not a secret,” he said. I’d gotten to know him better as October had rained and blustered its way into November, weeks passing without the usual irritants—which I opted not to pay too much attention to, in case that made it change. I’d gotten to know him well enough that the shift from how he normally spoke to me—open, focused, and always commanding—to this stiffness w
as...jarring. “But it also isn’t something that either one of us likes to talk about if we can avoid it.”
“Why?”
He slid the omelet he’d made onto my plate and set it before me on the granite countertop. He raked his hand through his hair, then frowned. “We aren’t close.”
“Is that a good thing or bad thing?” I asked. It had been a good show and even better sex, and I was buzzing along nicely. But I could feel my stomach growling, so I picked up my fork and dug in. “Siblings fascinate me. I always wanted one.”
“When I discovered I had a brother, I was overjoyed,” Sebastian said, almost idly, when he was never idle. “It was all I had ever wanted.”
“When did you discover it?” Because that was a weird way to talk about the arrival of a baby brother, surely. Usually there were stories about mommy’s belly and the hospital and all that baby wailing. Not...discoveries.
“When my father saw to it that we were both enrolled in the same boarding school in the same year,” Sebastian said. His blue gaze met mine, and I froze. That was how cold it was. “Ash and I do not share a mother. But no son of my father’s could be raised without the benefit of the education my father values above every other thing on this earth, save money. And if I’m honest, I always suspected that what the old man really liked was the idea of the two of us at each other’s throats. Because that meant he was always the focus, as he believed he deserved to be.”
I was still hungry, but I put my fork down. Especially when Sebastian’s lips twisted.
“But Ash and I became best friends, instead. It was my rebellion, I suppose.”
“Best friends. But you said you weren’t close...?”
“We were close in school. Inseparable, in fact. My mother is a drunk who periodically pretends to dry out but never does. My father was cruel and delighted in it. In many ways, Ash was the only person I was ever close to.”
That was sad enough. But what struck me was that he didn’t say it as if he expected pity. He just said it. Matter-of-factly. That broke my heart all the more.
Even though I knew my heart wasn’t supposed to be involved in this.
“After university, we decided we should take it a step further and go into business together. Our success would be yet another two fingers to the old man. We each put up half the capital. Ash urged caution. He wasn’t sure he liked our potential investors or the fine print. But I didn’t care. I wanted to get the deal done, so I could throw it into my father’s face.”
He was silent for a long moment, a faraway look on his face that struck me as...sad.
I wanted nothing more than to go to him, and hold him, and try to somehow make him less alone than he seemed then. But I didn’t quite dare. He was too remote. Too self-contained and forbidding. I liked those things about him, especially during sex.
But for the first time, I wondered what it must have cost him to become those things. And what he’d lost.
“I’m guessing it didn’t go well.”
I tried to keep that ache out of my voice and off my face.
“We lost everything.” He shook his head. “But when I say that, what I mean is that Ash lost everything. I lost my savings, my father’s respect, and the confidence of the corporate world. But Ash didn’t have what I had. My father might have paid for his schooling, but he didn’t pay for anything else. Whatever I might have lost, I still had a roof over my head and my job in the family company, no matter what. I was not only reckless and out of control, it had literally never occurred to me how much more Ash had to lose.”
He winced at that, all these years later. And my poor heart kicked at me, foolishly.
“Sure,” I said. “But you didn’t lose all your money at him, right?”
Sebastian frowned at me. “As far as Ash was concerned, I was a liar. Untrustworthy and despicable, just like our father, or how else could I have ruined us both so completely? Maybe on some level he was waiting all those years for me to prove that I was no better than the old man. And how could I argue with that? He didn’t want my explanations. Our father died not long after, and left everything to me. It doesn’t surprise me that Ash reckoned I might have known that would happen. Maybe I even went so far as to set him up to take that fall, knowing I’d have it cushy enough in a few years’ time.”
“That sounds a little far-fetched to me. This is your life you’re talking about, not a soap opera.”