“No,” he answered. “I don’t care about that.”
Another half-truth meant to shield the lie.
“Then what?”
“Jesus, you’re eager,” he muttered, shoving his hands into his hair and turning away. He couldn’t face this version of Sebastian, this man who was bursting at his seams, all full of unrestrained hope and earnest intentions. He wasn’t anything like the Sebastian Remington had been introduced to, the Sebastian from brunch, the Sebastian who was George.
“Remington,” he tried again, reaching out. His fingers grazed across the small of Remington’s back, and that was it.
“Stop it,” he snapped, spinning back around. Remington leveled a warning look that had Sebastian’s shoulders curling inward. Sebastian sucked in a low breath and stopped. And in that moment, they both knew.
“Alright,” Sebastian whispered.
“Stopthat,” he pleaded, throwing his head back and staring up at the sky.
The lights of the city were too bright to allow many stars, but he could make out a few. The handle of the Big Dipper, Orion’s belt… Remington closed his eyes and imagined the constellations spattered across the backs of his eyelids.
“I’m sorry,” Sebastian said, and Remington didn’t open his eyes. “But you need to know I didn’t send the video because of you.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I didn’t send the video to Allan because of you. Because of Remington.”
He scrubbed his hands down his face and dropped his chin, opening his eyes and focusing on Sebastian’s face. It was a stupid face, painfully desirable in its arrogance and innocence.
“I like you, Remington.”
“We can’t.”
“We can,” Sebastian said. “We can and wewere.”
“It was different.”
“How?”Remington waved his hand in front of his face, attempting to show the distance between them.
“It was different,” he said again. “Because you weren’t here. Because you couldn’t look at me.”
“Do you not like how I look?” Sebastian asked. “How I lookatyou?”
“I like both things very much,” he admitted softly.
He stopped himself from saying more, swallowing the words down into his gut. At the end of the day, the man in front of him was still Sebastian St. George. He was a man of means beyond measure and the attitude to match. Remington might not have known him, but he knew his type, and that should have been all the reason he needed to stay away. If only Sebastian would stop talking.
“Did you know it made me hard?” Sebastian’s question came out with rough and scratchy syllables. “When you, when Allan, told me what to eat, what time to shower, what to wear. Remington, it made me so fucking hard, but I only touched myself when you told me to. You can still do those things, and I can do those things, and—”
“Sebastian, stop,” he said sharply, holding his hand up between them. Sebastian’s voice had grown more and more desperate with every word out of his mouth, and Remington was dangerously close to giving in and seeing his side of things. “Not right now, okay? Please, don’t do this.”
“Right.” Sebastian took a step away from him. He swallowed so big Remington saw it, then he threw a familiar and cocky smile on his face. The expression didn’t come close to reaching his eyes, but Remington wondered if anyone besides him would even notice. “Understood.”
Sebastian spun on his heel and marched back into Callahan’s place, leaving Remington alone. Remington muttered a slew of curses under his breath and paced to Callahan’s and back again. He just needed some time to clear his head so he could think straight about things, but the vodka he’d poured down his throat after reading George’s—or Sebastian’s—private message had sent him spinning.
“You can’t be mad about George turning you down and then reject Sebastian,” he said to himself. “They’re the same person, just like you’re the same person.”
Remington leaned against the side of the building and sighed. In his absence, the list of reasons Remington shouldn’t get involved with Sebastian continued to grow, one of the most obvious being the fact that, at one time, Sebastian had been a donor to the museum. Remington didn’t want anything to appear ambiguous, and he would have hated to bring any conflict or concern to his archival program.
Even if he was to entertain a relationship with Sebastian, it would be treacherous. If things went wrong, which they most surely would, how awkward would it get for their friendships with Jace and Callahan? And was Remington expected to tell Sebastian he was a virgin? That he’d never been intimate beyond one horrible first kiss?
Tears pricked the backs of his eyelids. Even if he could talk himself through the myriad of reasons he shouldn’t, the one thing that stood out—glaringly so—was that he wanted to. He was tired of not knowing what it meant to touch and be touched. He wanted to feel something so deeply, so passionately, that the threat of losing it drove him mad. Remington wanted to craft his words in a way that brought Sebastian to his knees.
