Chapter 21

(Sebastian’s POV)The photograph appeared on a Wednesday.I’d been going through a box of things I’d pulled from the back of my closet during a bout of end-of-year tidying, the kind of unsentimental organisation I did every December, keeping what was useful and discarding what was only taking up space. Old cables. A jacket I’d outgrown in the metaphorical sense if not the literal. A folder of documents from my previous job that had no reason to exist anymore. At the bottom of the box, tucked inside a book I hadn’t opened in three years, was a photograph.I was twenty-three in it. Standing in front of a lake somewhere in Colorado with two people I’d since lost contact with, squinting into the sun, looking like someone who was doing a reasonable impression of being happy. My hair was shorter. My expression had the unguarded quality of a younger face that hasn’t yet learned to manage itself.I held it for a moment. Then I looked up and found Reed watching me from across the room.“What i

Chapter 22

(Sebastian’s POV)Three days before Christmas, Marcus called to ask if I was doing anything for the holiday.It was a reasonable question. For the past four years the answer had been a version of the same thing: a quiet day, some work I’d told myself I wouldn’t do and then done, a phone call with my mother who was usually somewhere with better weather than wherever I was. Christmas had never been a production for me. It was a day that required a certain posture and I’d gotten good at maintaining it.This year the answer was different. This year I had Reed.I told Marcus I had plans and left it at that. After I hung up, I sat at my desk and looked across the apartment to where Reed was on the couch with his current book and thought about what Christmas actually meant, for both of us.“Have you ever done Christmas?” I said.He looked up. He thought about it with the honesty he gave all questions that required him to examine his own experience. “No,” he said.“Do you know what it is?”“I

All Chapters of Satisfying My Hungry Succubus: Chapter 21 - Chapter 22

Chapter 21

Chapter 22