Page 65 of Sebastian

He sets the pan on the counter, tosses the jar into the sink, and grabs the paper towels to wipe up the mess. It’s on the counter, running down the cabinets and all over the floor.

“Oh crap, I’m sorry!”

“No! Don’t be!” He ducks behind the kitchen cart and I scramble off the barstool to help him.

“Here, pass me some.” I gesture to the paper towels and he hands me the roll. We’re both crouching on the floor and it hasn’t escaped my notice that he hasn’t responded to my declaration. I sneak a peek at him. He’s got tomato sauce on his nose.

I find a clean spot on my paper towel. “Hey, hold still.” I reach for his chin and when I lift it, our gazes collide. There it is—that’s what I saw. The love I feel reflected right back at me. “I love you,” I say again.

Christian’s chest expands in a silent gasp. “I love you.” His voice breaks and before he can even get the last syllable out, I launch myself at him—tomato sauce be damned.

Christian lands on his ass with a grunt and we topple to the floor, me on top of him. I kiss his mouth, his cheeks, his eyes, his brows, his forehead, even his tomato-sauced nose. I kiss every inch of his face and pepper in those three little words in between.

“I love you. I love you. Fuck, I love you so goddamn much.”

Christian’s laughing. I can feel it reverberating from his chest straight into mine. He rolls us so I’m on my back and his thigh is wedged between mine. “I love you too.” Then he captures my mouth in a searing kiss that I feel to the tip of my toes.

“You do?” I ask when he finally relinquishes my lips and I find the air to speak. I know he does and yet, it still so freaking surreal. Like I fell into a dream all those months ago when I walked into Mars and haven’t quite woken up from it.

“I really do.” There’s not a single shred of doubt in Christian’s voice, in the way he’s staring into my eyes. “I never realized how much life I was missing out on before you waltzed into it. I never knew what it meant to care about someone so much that my every breath and every heartbeat aches for them. This thing I feel when I look at you, when I think about you—it’s so big and overwhelming and sometimes it feels like I’m drowning in it, but all I want is to keep diving deeper. You’re my inspiration. You’re my bright, shining light. I don’t know how I ever lived without you.”

His words seep into me and fill me up with all that joy and happiness and bubbly, fuzzy goodness. I’m so full of it that it’s leaking out of my eyes in tears.

“Hey.” Christian wipes at the stray drops escaping down my temples. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just love you so damn much.”

Christian leans his forehead against mine. “I love you that much too.”

We kiss again, slower this time, sweet and tender like we have all the time in the world and we’re going to enjoy every second of it.

I sniffle. Something acrid teases my nostrils. “Christian?”

“Hmm?”

“Is something burning?”

“Oh shit!” He jumps to his feet and pulls the oven door open. A plume of smoke billows out and the smoke detector goes off.

We scramble. I grab the hand towel and try to fan the smoke away from the detector while Christian yanks open every window. It takes a minute for the smoke detector to calm down and by then Christian’s assessed the damage. The frozen meatballs he put into the oven are burnt to a crisp.

He turns to me and puts his hands on his hips. “Order pizza?”

I wind my arms around his waist. “Order pizza.”

“I love you, Sebastian.”

“I love you too, Christian.”

Later, after the kitchen’s cleaned up and the pizza consumed, we lie on Christian’s bed together—I’m the little spoon and he’s the big one. My laptop is open in front of us and I’ve got the footage from Chicago pulled up.

“Are you sure you want to watch this?”

Christian takes my knee and lifts it so he can wedge his thigh between my legs, right up against my taint. Then he slips his hand under my shirt and his fingers immediately latch onto a nipple. “I am,” he murmurs into my ear.

I whimper as my body responds to him, as my heart swells with love for him. I hit the play button. The footage is completely unedited so there’s a lot of downtime in between the good stuff and I manage to stay focused enough to jump to the exciting bits.

Like me with my foot hiked up on the bench in the shower. Christian’s kneeling behind me and the camera angle perfectly captures his tongue licking my hole.

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