“WE’RE NOT GOING to sleep yet, old man.”
Seb cracked an eye at her, blocking out the light with his biceps. “Just a catnap.”
“Nuh-uh.” She sat up, pulling at his arms. “No sleep. It’s only 8:45 at night. I’m feeding you instead.”
That had him pulling his arm away. “What are you making?”
“Come and see.”
She slid all the way down his body to slither out of bed, and it was that more than the promise of food that had him lumbering to his feet. She walked, buck naked, out of his bedroom. He had to follow the woman who’d just destroyed him. Destroyed him and remade him. Seb sat up on the edge of the bed and realized that for the first time in three years, he didn’t feel like an imposter in his own romantic life. He wasn’t acting or faking it. He was exactly where he was supposed to be.
He grabbed his briefs off the floor and joined her in the kitchen, squinting against the bright kitchen lights. He watched as she grabbed his T-shirt off the ground and slipped it on, fishing around in the fridge for food. Seb simply couldn’t believe that he got to touch her. He’d been waiting for her for so long that it still almost didn’t seem real.
Seb took a seat at the barstool and watched while she started making pancakes. He could watch her clean a toilet, and he’d still be amazed at her grace. It felt strange to be anywhere but the bedroom. But especially in the kitchen, after their conversation there. The intensity of it still rang in the air.
“How are you feeling?” she asked him, apparently sensing the same thing. “After all, you know, that?”
“All what? The sex?”
“Uh, sure. But I also meant after my total and complete freak-out.”
He rose and went to her, standing behind her while she flipped pancakes at the griddle. His hands slid under the T-shirt she wore and he hugged her back against him. “You weren’t the only one that freaked out. And I feel...like I just ran a race. You know that loose feeling in your chest? Relieved and tired and healthy.”
She turned to him, her eyes cautious. “It’s not going to be the last time that happens, Seb. I’m not always happy. And I’ve been lonely for so long that it’s changed me. Made a real impact on who I am. It won’t always be as fun to be with me as it might feel right now.”
Seb reached out and flipped off the stove. He picked her up by the hips and walked her into the living room. He sat her down on the couch and crouched in front of her. “Via, I can’t help but feel like you’re stating the obvious here. Let me just be really clear, okay? I understand that you are a complete human being, with a lifetime of complications going on inside you. I’m not looking to carve away the hard parts. I’m not looking for three-quarters of a person to be with. I want the whole thing. All of you. I want a real relationship. Where sometimes your shit gets in the way and sometimes mine does, and we’re patient and we talk about it. I don’t expect you to be issue-free. And I definitely don’t expect our love for each other to just magically dissolve our respective hang-ups. All I want is to keep growing. To keep growing alongside someone I can lean on and who leans on me. And to argue and hold each other accountable and celebrate the good stuff with and make love to and come home to.”
He was breathing hard and gripping her knees. She reached forward and just like that, she was the one comforting him.
She slid forward so that she was wrapped around him, mostly in his arms and mostly off the couch. “You said love.”
He leaned back and took her with him so that she sat on him and he sat on the floor. He made sure to hold her eyes with his. “I don’t know what else it could be.”
“You love me.” It was half question, half disbelief. “You’re sure?”
He tightened his hands around her; he wanted to laugh but could sense the seriousness of the moment. He cast around for a way to explain it. “Via, I’m positive. I’d suspected it for a while, but I knew it the second I walked up to the Botanic Gardens before the wedding. I’ll never forget seeing you in that green dress for the first time. It was like being hit with a hatchet. A clean hit. Right down my center. I got changed from one person into two.”
“What do you mean?”
Well, she was really gonna make him spell it out.
“I mean that before that, everything about me was easy to keep track of. All in one place. And then you happened, and now half of me is walking around in here.” He tapped a heavy finger over her sternum. Like she wouldn’t break. And he knew she wouldn’t.
“Oh, Seb.” She was looking at him now, with such tenderness it almost alarmed him. He was hit with the sudden urge to make sure she understood. Everything.
“I wasn’t a good husband to Cora,” Seb whispered, the words like bitter poison on his tongue. Via was simultaneously the last person he wanted to say this to and the only one he ever could. “But I’m stronger now. Better now. I understand so much more about the world. We’ll figure it out, Violetta. We just have to try together.”
“Seb, I’m in. I’m really, really in for this.”
“Me, too,” he replied hurriedly, the words tripping off his tongue in relief and rising giddiness. “I mean, obviously I am.” He laughed and exhaled and slammed his eyes shut. I’m in. Her words repeated themselves in his head. He held them tight, like gemstones in a fist. He was never letting them go.
VIA’S WETNESS WAS pressed against his underwear and she ached for him. They’d just had each other, and somehow she needed him again, so badly. It was the complicated expression in his eyes that did it. She’d watched him reassure her and awaken a fear of his own all in the same speech. They were two complicated people who were marked by the losses in their lives. But she hadn’t lost Seb. And he hadn’t lost her. They were here together and she wanted to, needed to, show him that.
Via leaned her forehead against his and trailed her hand down his chest. She danced her fingers at the waist of his underwear, and his breathing became jagged. His hips, under hers, pushed up into her and she felt him waking up.
Emboldened by the desire she saw in his eyes, Via slipped her hand into his underwear. He was very large and getting larger. Her breath caught as she pumped him in her hand. But the dang underwear was in the way and she rose up a few irritated inches and jerked them down to the middle of his thighs. He chuckled at the frustrated look on her face, but the laugh died when she sat back on his lap and pumped him again.
He was spearing up between them and Via needed something to lubricate him. She spit onto him and he swore a blue streak, covering his eyes for a second like the sight was too hot for him to even watch. But he was huge, and it wasn’t enough. So, in a move she’d never even considered executing before, she dipped her free hand through her own wetness and used it to slick his erection. She smiled when his hands went into fists where he leaned back on them.
“Fuck, Via. You gorgeous—gah—just like that. I can’t—oh fuck.”
He was huge and practically vibrating, speaking gibberish, and she was making him like that. She was the one doing this to him. She felt a whippy power curl out inside of her. She understood, in that second, what he’d been describing. That this was what sharing the wheel felt like. Sometimes he drove and sometimes she did. And right now, she was driving.
She rose up on her knees and guided the head through her wetness, swirling it in a tight circle around her clit.
Seb’s breath washed over her and she felt his knees rise up behind her. “Condom,” he bit out.
“Where?”
“Bedroom.”
“Fuck.”
He smiled a helpless, tortured smile at her curse. “Are you on birth control?”
“IUD,” she responded immediately. She understood what he was really asking, and boy howdy, was she on board.
“I’m clean,” he gritted out. “I got tested a few weeks ago after—”
She slapped a hand over his mouth, suspecting he might be about to reveal something about someone else he’d slept with. Yeah. She was not a jealous person, but now was not the time.
“Me, too,” she told him and sank down onto him, taking him in one long, hip-circling downward press that sunk him to the hilt and brought them face-to-face.
Seb groaned, making a noise like he’d been shot. Via loved it. The ravenous look on his face. His hair messy. She flexed on him, made him make the noise again.
“You look wrecked,” she told him, rising up and taking him in all the way again.
“Ah—damn—I am wrecked. You’re wrecking me.”
She got in one more stroke of her own before he gripped her hips, fell onto his back and started pumping up into her from below.
Via was no virgin, and she’d watched a little porn here and there. But she had never seen something like this before. Sebastian Dorner, big bones and chest hair and flexing muscles, the tendons in his neck standing out as he grimaced against the pleasure. His stomach wasn’t extremely defined, it was more a solid wall of muscle, but as he flexed himself up and into her, she saw a hundred different ridges and shadows she hadn’t noticed before. His hips were taking them a good six inches off the ground with every stroke.
Via hinged forward, her mouth falling to his chest, and took everything he was giving to her. Seb braced a hand on her tailbone and growled when she bared her teeth and bit his chest. She’d meant it to be a sweet little bite. A kiss of pain to remind him who he was with. But he swiveled his hips, and the new angle he was hitting had her entire body clenching. Her jaw closed hard on his pec and she screamed her pleasure.
She pushed herself back, one hand on either side of his head, and saw the bite mark that she’d left. It was small but deep, feral and territorial. This was her man who was fucking her brains out on his living room floor.
“No one else,” she told him. She was shocked at the words that she would never have said to anyone else in a million years. But if he was shocked, he didn’t show it.
He merely locked eyes with her and nodded, his lips pulled back to show his teeth. Via pressed her palm to the bite mark, and Seb pressed his hand over hers. Together they sealed in her claim on him.
His other hand dropped to her clit, and Seb made sweet, lazy, little circles that completely belied the possessive, vicious strokes of him inside of her.
She said it again. “This is it for me. No one else.”
With that, he was rearing up and pulling out of her. Via gasped at the loss of him but it didn’t last long. He set her on her hands and knees and was suddenly behind her. She’d never loved this position before, but with Sebastian, she was leaning back into him, spreading herself as wide as she could. She wanted him to have everything.
He stroked into her, solid and confident, before he fell over her, bracing his hands over hers and placing his mouth at her ear. “Ever,” he told her. “No one else, ever.”
A sound left her, wild and weak and as bright as the light of a sparkler. “Yes.”
He humped into her from behind, every stroke sending them a few inches forward. The carpet burned her knees and the heels of her hands, but she loved it. Everything, even the air against her breasts, was filled with charge. Hot and delicious. When his fingers found her clit again, Via flexed every muscle. She didn’t care about what looked cute or being ladylike. She simply made her hands into fists, threw her head back and bore down on him fully. She was dimly aware of his teeth at her neck for just a second.
But then the entire world was ash white and full sensation, there was nothing but bright, high-speed cloud rushing into her from every angle. She was disintegrating and shrinking at the same second. Her body wanted to contract into nothing but was stopped by the heavy, pulsing intruder between her legs. All she could do was contract around him, so hard she felt dizzy.
She could hear Sebastian’s voice in her ear but couldn’t tell one word from the next. All she could feel was the pounding of his heart at her back, the relentless pump of him inside her. The orgasm finally released its delicious claws from her, and her elbows wobbled, her vision going fuzzy as he pulled out of her. She heard him grunt, felt him at the small of her back. She felt his hand press his wet hardness against her, and he gave one, two more pumps before hot silk spread over her back. She clenched once more, this time around nothing, and let his weight push both of them to the ground.
His stickiness was between them, his chest to her back and suddenly, they were both laughing their fool heads off.
“Sorry. Probably should have asked before I did that. You all right?”
“Are you kidding?” she asked, her cheek against the carpet and the whole of her body just sandwiched under his weight. “That was the hottest moment of my life. But now I need a shower, and I definitely need those pancakes.”
Seb pulled them up off the ground. “I manhandle you a lot,” he noted as he tugged her toward the bathroom.
“I wish I could return the favor. Pick you up and toss you around and show you how fun it is.”
“Maybe in a pool or the ocean.”
“Coney Island this summer.”
He stopped halfway through turning the shower on. “Yeah. Wow. We’re gonna do summer stuff together. The three of us.”
“Hell yeah.” She stepped into the spray and winced when it was too hot; she leaned down to adjust the handles. “We’re gonna do all the stuff.”
THEY ATE PANCAKES that night, smelling like Sebastian’s soap and sitting on the kitchen floor. The next morning, they woke up in a tight knot of each other’s limbs and stayed in bed until they absolutely had to get up. He drove her home, watched from her bed while she changed her clothes, and then took her to school for professional development.
He picked her up from work, too. They spent the night at her house, and Seb was so wildly taken with her bedroom. He just loved it. Her full-size bed that was way too small for him, her delicate white comforter and the fussy, colorful lamps. He loved the artwork she’d chosen—bright watercolor portraits—and the scent of her everywhere.
He took her to school and back the next day, too. When they woke up in his bed on Thanksgiving, it was with just the slightest air of melancholy. He’d go back to White Plains that day. Sebastian couldn’t wait until he got Matty and Via in the same place again. Because even now, with Via laid across his chest, his heart was in two places at once. Even with all the FaceTime calls, it had been too many days since he’d seen his son. But that didn’t make leaving Via any easier.
“We’ll be back tomorrow,” he decided on the spot, cruising a hand up and down her smooth back.
“But you’re supposed to stay until Sunday!”
“Doesn’t matter. Matty and Crabby and I will be back tomorrow. I wish you could come with me today.”
They’d talked about it, spending Thanksgiving together. But in the end, decided that Matty and Cora’s parents probably needed a bit more time to adjust to a new reality with Via in it. A holiday was too high pressure. And besides, she had traditions with Fin to uphold.
“Me, too. But this way is good, too.” A sudden shyness crept into her expression. “Do you wanna get together tomorrow?”
He laughed at her question. “Violetta, yes. Why do you think I’m coming home early?” A thought occurred to him. “Can we come see you right when we get home? I think I’ll explain everything to Matty on the way home and then he’s probably gonna wanna talk to you about it.”
“Of course.” She snuggled into him. “I’ll be free all day. And I’ll have Thanksgiving leftovers.”
She played with his chest hair for a minute. Enough to make him squirm a little. Gathering her courage, she finally asked, “Maybe this weekend you could bring my furniture over?”
“Your furniture?” he asked, leaning back to look in her eyes. “I thought you weren’t accepting it?”
“Well, if you’re still offering it, I really want it.”
“I’m still offering.”
SEBASTIAN CALLED TYLER from the road on his way back to White Plains.
“Lemme guess,” Ty said, without even the courtesy of a salutation. “You’re calling from some tacky chapel in Vegas.”
Seb rolled his eyes and laughed as he merged onto the highway, talking through speakerphone. “And rob you of the joy of wearing a tux and making a best man speech? Never.”
There was a weighted pause. “Wait. You didn’t actually propose, did you?”
Seb laughed harder. “Jesus, Tyler, we’ve only been dating for like two weeks. No. I haven’t proposed.”
“I mean, don’t get me wrong. I like Via, a lot. But damn, you almost stopped my heart.”
“I rushed things my first time around,” Seb said carefully. “And I’m not beating myself up over it or anything. But yeah. No. Slow and steady, that’s more my and Via’s style. Gotta make sure Via has her feet under her before we move forward too much. Gotta make sure Matty has his footing, too, you know?”
“You sound different, dude,” Tyler said. “Younger. Kinda like the old you.”
“Hmm.” It would be ironic, he supposed, if after all that worrying about their age difference, actually being in a relationship with Via was what helped strip away some of the worn-out weariness from Seb’s shoulders. “I feel good.”
“A sex marathon with a pretty girl will do that for ya.”
“Apparently.”
Seb waited for another joke from his friend. But there was just a long pause, heavy with some emotion he couldn’t quite put his finger on. “I’m happy for you, Sebastian. This whole thing, you deserve it. You really do.”
“Ty—”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. Gimme a call when you’re back in town. I’ll come over. Your girlfriend can make us brunch.”
When they hung up a few moments later, Sebastian couldn’t quite decide exactly which aspect of his life was filling his gut with champagne, making him want to laugh like a maniac, put the windows down in the flurrying snow. He also decided it didn’t matter.
This was his life. His. He wasn’t acting a part. He wasn’t pretending. He wasn’t watching the world move on all around him. He was living.
The next day, Via opened her door to Seb, Matty and Crabby. Matty’s fingers were a brilliant red from his refusal to wear mittens, and she couldn’t help but kneel down and squash them between her warm hands. “You look like a popsicle,” she told him.
Matty laughed. “There’s snow outside!”
“I saw. It’s been snowing all morning. I was worried about you guys driving in it.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Seb said, kicking his shoes off and making eyes at Matty to do the same. “How was your Thanksgiving?”
“Excellent. And yours?”
Via rose up, and he bent down and gave her a perfect kiss. Fresh from the cold weather and warm with affection. After helping towel the snow off of Crabby’s feet, she led the Dorners into her kitchen, where she had some snacks laid out. It was a few minutes later that Matty leaned across the table and started playing with the gold thumb ring she wore.
“Via,” Matty asked, twirling the ring, “Dad says that you’re in love with each other.”
Her eyes snapped up to Seb’s. He froze for a second. He’d referred to love between them a few times. But the phrase in love fell between them like a sack of potatoes.
Seb broke the tension by shrugging his shoulders like, duh. Via couldn’t help but smile.
“Yup,” she told Matty, but her eyes were on Seb. She watched him absorb the impact of her words. I love you.
“Okay.”
He was quiet for a minute, still fiddling with her ring. “Matty, do you have more questions? Seems like you do?”
“Well...” He shrugged. “Are you in love with me, too?”
Her breath caught as her entire world zoomed in on the little person in front of her, a blush on his cheeks and that mercurial brown hair looking almost blond in the sunlight. She could feel his legs kicking under the table like he was super nervous. There was nothing else except for Matty in that moment. Even Seb was blurred away. “Matty, I love you very much. You’re very easy to love.”
His eyes slipped up to hers for a second and then drifted away. “Okay.” Then he turned to his dad, a small smile on his face and his little fist in the air. “Knuckles, Daddy.”
IT WAS A few weeks before he said it back to her. The three of them were watching a movie a few days before Christmas. Matty was stretched out across them, his cheek on Via’s leg. Almost asleep toward the end of the boring Christmas movie, Matty rolled over and reached up to touch the ends of Via’s hair.
“Love you,” he mumbled right before he buried his face in her stomach and fluttered off to sleep.
Seb had tears in his eyes when she turned to him, joy rising within her like a geyser. It was a feeling she’d become very familiar with in the weeks since Thanksgiving. Maybe she wasn’t the most thrilling twenty-eight-year-old in the world, but her preferred lifestyle fit with Seb and Matty’s almost flawlessly. Lots of home-cooking and chilly afternoons at the playground. She’d introduced them to the rustic joys of the Cobble Hill theater over the big movieplex down the street and the three of them had been back to see three movies together, Matty and Via hogging all the popcorn between them.
There’d been strangenesses as well. The first night that Via had slept over had felt odd for all three of them and had required quite a bit of conversation between every person involved. Although, in the end, Matty seemed to have adapted to Via’s presence in their lives even faster than Sebastian had. For a while, it seemed he couldn’t help asking her if she wanted him to get a babysitter so that they could go to the bar or—gulp—a club. She’d laughed at that last suggestion and firmly persuaded him out of the first. When she wanted to go to happy hours with their school friends, she did. When she wanted to see Fin, she did. She’d even started spending more time with Mary, which was a very happy side effect to becoming part of the Dorners’ lives.
That night, still over the moon about Matty’s confession to Via, they put him to bed and went to Seb’s bedroom themselves. They snuggled in close, only using up approximately a quarter of the bed, the way they always did.
Via pulled the covers up over Sebastian’s shoulder, because he refused to sleep in anything more than underwear but he always ended up a little cold in the middle of the night. She rolled onto her back and closed her eyes as he absently drew patterns on her belly.
“Are you all right?” he whispered, apparently sensing her tension.
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess I’m keyed up from Matty. But, also, there’s something that’s tugging at me. It’s like something is missing, but I don’t know what?”
“Missing...” Seb asked, drifting toward sleep himself but at least making an attempt at being helpful.
Via cocked her head up and looked around the room. She hadn’t moved in, but there were marks of her everywhere. A picture of the three of them on the nightstand. A small jar of multicolored flowers. Her clothes spilling from one of the drawers.
It hit her, all at once, what was missing.
“Seb,” she whispered to him excitedly, her face pressing close enough to touch noses.
“Hmm?”
“I figured out what’s missing.”
His eyes came open. Realizing how close she was, he rubbed his nose on hers. “What’s that?”
She kissed him, snuggling even closer. “I’m not lonely. There’s no loneliness here.”
He stared at her for a moment, coming completely awake. His hand slicked up her back and he drew her mouth to his. “I know, baby. I know.”
If you loved the charm and romance of Just a Heartbeat Away, don’t miss Tyler and Fin’s story, Can’t Help Falling.
Read on for a sneak peek...