Chapter 1. Unholy reunion
The family room at Müller & Sons Funeral Home smells like lilies and bad decisions.
I should be in the main parlour, paying respects to Greta Huber’s memory like a decent human being. Instead, I’m bent over the arm of a burgundy velvet couch in the family consultation room, my funeral-appropriate Balenciaga hiked up to my waist, getting thoroughly fucked by her son.
Grief makes people do stupid things. Apparently, lust makes us do stupider ones.
“We still fuck like we did in our twenties,” Sebastian grunts against my neck, his breath hot and urgent.
“No, we don’t,” I pant, one hand braced on the couch’s carved wooden frame, the other gripping his shirt hard enough to wrinkle the expensive fabric. “I’ve got an IUD, and you got snipped. I can let you go raw without spiralling at the end of the month, wondering if I’m growing your spawn.”
“Jesus Christ, Fleury.”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
He pulls back half an inch, just enough to look at me with those stupidly intense brown eyes, like he’s weighing a retort, then decides his brain doesn’t have enough blood flow for clever comebacks.
“I’m too turned on to speak in full sentences.”
“Yeah, yeah. Stop talking and fuck me before somebody walks in looking for tissues or whatever the hell people need at funerals.”
He does. Honestly, he’s not entirely wrong about the twenties thing, we were never good at appropriate locations.
Back then it was youth hostels with paper-thin walls, his ancient Volkswagen with the seat that never quite reclined enough, and that flimsy tent we swore had a broken zipper when really, we just liked the risk of being caught.
Some things never change, but at least we’d graduated from semi-public to semi-private.
The other difference now is that he’s stronger, all that offshore engineering work has been good to his arms. And I’m still bendy, morally and joint-wise, but with significantly better lingerie underneath.
I arch my back, digging my nails into the couch upholstery, keeping one eye on the door like some sexed-up meerkat. The thrill of potential discovery only makes everything more urgent, more desperate.
Then he grabs my hip with one hand, my carefully constructed chignon with the other, and suddenly I stop caring who might walk in. Let it be the funeral director. Let it be the priest. Hell, let him bless this unholy reunion and throw in a Hail Mary for my thighs while he’s at it, because baby, I’m ascending.
I cross my ankles tight, locking him in place, making everything tighter, more impossible to escape.
“I’m coming, Sunne,” he growls against my nape, his lips brushing that spot that makes me shiver. That old nickname vibrates through me and still makes my spine melt.
“Good,” I breathe, my voice barely there.
“Where?”
“Inside me,” I command, clenching around him with a pulsing grip that makes his eyes roll back. “But if you get a single drop on this dress—” I hold down a whimper as he hits exactly the right angle.
“Do you know what Balenciaga costs these days?”
He makes this sound—half laugh, half groan—that I remember from fifteen years ago, right before he used to completely lose his mind.
“Your priorities are fucked, Fleury.”
“Look who’s talking,” I snap, tightening my inner walls around him just to make my point more literal.
“Don’t—” he starts, but then I do this thing with my hips that I perfected sometime around 2015, and whatever moral crisis he was about to have gets shelved next to the rosary beads and inherited guilt. Probably forever.
The noises in the hallway get louder; footsteps, distant chatter, and you’d think we’d have the sense to disengage. But no. We’re locked together, bodies and histories inseparable, and the only thing more mortifying than getting caught would be admitting that neither of us wants to stop.
Then we both shatter, his forehead pressed against mine, and for thirty seconds the world narrows to just this;two bodies remembering what fifteen years tried to make them forget.
The couch creaks ominously. I briefly wonder if Müller & Sons has insurance for furniture damaged during inappropriate sexual encounters, then decide that’s tomorrow’s problem.
Today’s problem is the fact that Sebastian Huber still knows exactly how to make me forget my own name, and we’re about to attend his mother’s funeral together like civilized adults who definitely haven’t just desecrated a room typically reserved for discussions about casket upgrades and flower arrangements.
The man has always had terrible timing. Apparently, so do I.
Which is probably why we’re perfect for each other.
And exactly why this will never work.
