Wilder saint, p.1
Wilder Saint, page 1
Copyright © 2026 by Q.B. Tyler
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination and used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Content Editing: Jenny Sims- Editing 4 Indies
Interior Formatting: Stacey Blake- Champagne Book Design
Cover Design: Pang Thao
Cover Image Photographer: Ren Saliba
CONTENT WARNING:
This book contains a scene involving the death of a parent through the eyes of a child.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Playlist
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
Prologue of Always Been You
Acknowledgements
Also by Q.B. Tyler
About the Author
I Believe In You And Me—Whitney Houston
All I Ask—Adele
Man I Need—Olivia Dean
A Couple Minutes—Olivia Dean
Live For You—The Sacred Souls
Sweet Love—Anita Baker
Turning Page—Sydney Rose
So Easy (To Fall in Love)—Olivia Dean
Because You Loved Me—Celine Dion
Dreaming of You—Selena
As It Was—Harry Styles
Bittersweet Faith—Bitter:Sweet
Find Someone Like You—Snoh Aalegra
I Swear—All- 4-One
Perfect—Ed Sheeran feat. Beyoncé
Mirrors—Justin Timberlake
Supercut—Lorde
You Mean the World to Me—Toni Braxton
Never Forget You—Zara Larsson & MNEK
You Send Me—Sam Cooke
A sensation down south pulls me out of my last few moments of sleep, and I push my groin against the smooth, plush curves I know to be pressed against me. My favorite curves. That belongs to my favorite person. My arms are wrapped around her, holding her against me while my nose is still pressed against the back of her neck, smelling her scent that’s damn near ingrained in my DNA at this point. I run my hand down her arm, relishing the softness of her brown skin from the shea butter lotion she applies every night.
Fuck. Please don’t let it be morning already. The morning of October eighth meant arguing. Tension. Tears. Questions as to how long we can keep doing this. Even more questions, like why we keep doing this.
Professions of “I love you” followed by anger and confusion as to why we can’t make this work and why we’ve let things go on for this long.
My eyes lazily flutter open, praying for a still dark sky illuminated by the New York skyline outside her window. Instead, I’m met with bright sunny skies. I internally groan and close my eyes again, willing time to slow down or move backward to two days ago when I first got here. I needed more time with her. I always needed more time with her. But then again, it never mattered how much time we got because it was never enough.
It was the same every year. We spend the entirety of every October seventh fucking over every inch of whoever’s house we’re at that year, and then on the eighth, when we have to go back to reality, we fight so we don’t have to be upset over the fact that our realities no longer include each other.
I open my eyes again and move my hand that’s resting protectively across her stomach up her body to cup her breast, rolling the nipple gently between my fingers before moving it back down her body between her legs. Her legs part like her body knows what to do for me, even in her sleep, and I stroke two fingers through her slit, rubbing her clit in the process, and she shudders against me.
“Wild,” she murmurs, using my nickname, and before I can respond, she’s spinning slowly in my arms and wrapping a leg over my hip to open herself up to me. She snuggles against my chest and tucks her head under my chin. “What time is it?” she asks, and I can hear the trepidation in her voice.
I’m not sure, but I think it’s near the time I need to leave to catch my flight back home. “Not sure,” I murmur into her hair, not wanting to pull away from her for anything.
She nods slowly, then pulls back and smiles at me before she’s entirely out of my grasp and sitting on the edge of the bed. Her naked back is to me, and then she’s standing, sliding that silky black thong up over her hips. I’d pulled that off with my teeth last night in my haste to put my mouth on her cunt for probably the hundredth time in two days. She moves across the room, wordlessly pulling on a silky white tank top and a pair of black sweatpants from her drawer before leaning against it. “Let’s just get it over with.” I can see the tears building in her eyes at the thought of me leaving. I stand instantly and make my way over to her, but she puts her hands up and shakes her head. “No.”
There have only been a handful of times over the course of ten years that she hasn’t wanted my hands on her in some way, so I wince at the implication of what this means. “Baby.”
She shakes her head. “No. I can’t do this anymore. I’m done.” Anxiety slithers up my spine at the thought of her being done with this. With me. “We do this every year, and it’s not enough. I want more.” She shrugs defeatedly, and I hate that I don’t have the answers for her. I hate that I don’t have them for myself either.
I drop back to her bed and prop my feet up on the suede ottoman at the end of her bed so I can rest my elbows on my knees. “We can’t. We’ve been over and over this. For years. Saint, no one will understand.” Halle St. John is her full name, but I’ve called her “Saint” ever since we were kids. I was the only one who ever did so, just like she was the only one who called me Wild after my last name. It was just one of the many things only between us.
“We’re adults now, though. Like actual adults. I’m twenty-three. You’re twenty-four. Who cares? We don’t have to go into the nitty-gritty details of when this started. And it doesn’t even have to be a whole-ass statement. We could just be us…” She points toward her window. “Out there.” Her eyes well up with tears, highlighting her gorgeous brown eyes, and I hate that I can’t comfort her right now because I know if I touch her, we’ll never get through this conversation. “I want to be with you, Sebastian, and I know you feel the same. We can figure it out. Is this about your mom? What’s she going to do? Ground us? Sit outside your bedroom so neither one of us sneaks out in the middle of the night like she used to? Sleep in my room for the same reason?”
I sigh, remembering those moments vividly. “It’s not just Mom, baby. We’ve been over this. It’s our whole family and the people we’ve known for years.”
“You mean your family.”
“They’re your family too, Halle. I know you think you’re alone, but you’re not. And you have more than just me.”
She scrunches her nose. “Do you really care what anyone has to say? Even now?”
“We’ve just been through so much. We aren’t just stepsiblings. We are so much more than that, and you know it. People will have a lot to say, and I can’t protect you from all of that.”
News reports have come out about our family, specifically about me, when I opened my architecture firm. I’d given countless interviews about my past and what witnessing such hatred so early in life did to me. I’ve also talked extensively about her, and anyone who ran any search on me would come across Halle St. John, who I explicitly refer to as my stepsister. More than a stepsister. Those same interviews also discussed how close we’ve been throughout our lives since we met. I don’t have news reporting on my daily life, but I’m arguably one of the most eligible bachelors in Seattle. If I were to settle down with my stepsister, who I’ve known since I was four, people would definitely have some opinions.
She pulls her hair out of the low bun she slept in, letting her jet-black hair spill around her in tangled waves. Her tresses graze her covered breasts, and I look away, not wanting to focus on her hard nipples pebbling through the thin silk. “You’ve protected me from everything my entire life. You don’t have to all the time, you know.”
“Yeah, I do,” I tell her because even though we couldn’t be together in the traditional sense, Halle was mine, and I loved her more than anything in the world. “I love you more than I love me.” I’ve said those words to her countless times. After what we went through as kids, I vowed to always protect her with my life if we were ever in the same situation again. So yeah, I’d protect her from the vicious public that had the potential to rip her apart over her relationship with me. And the only way I knew how to protect her from that was not to put her in that situation in the first place.
<
Until next year.
“Fine, then I guess you should just go,” she says, lifting one shoulder nonchalantly as if she’s over the conversation. Because she knows that shit pisses me off. I give her a look, hoping she takes it as a warning to fix her attitude because I wasn’t going to leave while we are like this. She crosses the room and picks up her phone from the nightstand. “It’s ten. Your plane leaves in two hours. You should go so you don’t miss your flight.” She doesn’t look at me when she says this, then she heads to the bathroom attached to her room as if we are done talking.
Fuck that.
I follow her and put my hand against the door before she can fully close it. “Don’t do this,” I tell her with a bit of bite in my tone. I know she’s coming from a place of hurt, so I’m trying not to let the same hurt I’m feeling spiral into anger.
“Sebastian…” My heart begins to crack at her use of my full name, which she rarely uses. “I love you. But… it’s not enough, right?”
“Of course, it’s enough. It’s everything. You and us… this is everything.” It has been since the day we first kissed. Probably even before that.
“But…” she says woefully, and the word hangs in the air almost like a complete sentence.
“We always knew this couldn’t be more. We said that from the beginning. We’ve kept this from everyone for years.” And it’s true. With the exception of my mother, no one knew how deep our relationship went. We both kept everyone at arm’s length for years, never letting anyone in but each other, which my mother used to say was the problem. She used to tell us that if our worlds continued to revolve around each other, we’d never be able to have meaningful relationships. That we acted as if it was us against the world when it didn’t have to be.
“Then why do we keep doing this to ourselves? I can’t move on. You can’t move on. I can’t allow myself to even be open to dating because of the hold you have on me and my heart and everything.” Saint and I lost our virginities to each other when we were sixteen and seventeen, respectively. That was seven years ago, and neither of us has been with anyone since. There’s never been anyone else for me but her. Even if this ends tonight, I imagine it would take another seven years for me to fully get her out of my system to be able to even think about another woman like that. I thought she felt the same, but just the mere mention of dating makes me believe that the end of this might be easier on her than it is on me.
Jealousy spikes in my veins, and the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. “So this is about other men?”
“It’s about wanting something past a secret relationship that I can only have behind closed doors. And if you can’t see that I deserve better than this, then you’re selfish as hell,” she snaps. While I’m not used to this commentary from her, I can’t blame her for feeling this way.
I take a step into her personal space and box her against her counter. “You’re right, I am fucking selfish when it comes to you.” I close my eyes, trying to rein in the previous fire that was coursing through me over losing the love of my life. I should be used to it, after having this argument over and over, but something about this time feels different. The distance between us is already forming in my bones, and I wish I knew how to fix it.
“Not only do we not see each other much, but we barely even spoke this past year,” she continues.
I rub my jaw, scratching the longer-than-usual hair after not shaving for two days, as I recall the few times we’ve spoken over the past year. It wasn’t much, but I had tried to intermittently check in on her even though I put an entire country between us to avoid falling back into old habits. We live on opposite coasts, and I can’t count the number of times I contemplated moving my architecture firm to New York just to be closer to her.
But I couldn’t because no one would understand.
Hell, I barely understand.
Well, that’s a lie.
I understand her and us and why and how we bonded the way we did. It was something no one else could understand. Not even the woman who raised us both, my mother and Saint’s stepmother, turned guardian after her father died right before our eyes when we were barely old enough to understand the concept of death.
“I know. Sometimes it’s just too hard talking to you… knowing what we can’t be,” I explain. I thought about her every day. There were days when it was constant and so intense that I could barely focus on anything else. And the moments when she wasn’t, thoughts of her were never far away, but I didn’t reach out as much anymore. I don’t know when we went from talking all the time to barely a few times a month. But somehow, the time between conversations grew longer, and the times we did talk often felt awkward and forced.
I hated it.
She lowers her head and nods slowly, and I can tell she’s trying to hold back tears. “I know. I really thought… we’d eventually make it work.” She sniffles. “I can’t believe this is it.”
I don’t know what to say because admitting that this is the end goes against every thought I’ve ever had regarding the woman in front of me. So I go with the easiest words I can think of that encompass everything. “I love you, Saint. Always have and I always will.”
“I know that too,” she whispers. I can tell she wants to say she loves me, too, but she doesn’t, and I think about that as I leave her apartment. I think about it on the ride to the airport and throughout the five-and-a-half-hour flight home. I think about it when I text her that I made it, and she does nothing but heart the message. I think about it for the next week. I think about whether this was really the end and if Halle and I were really done this time.
It isn’t until about a month later that I get a text from her with the four words I’ve been hearing out of Halle’s mouth since we were kids.
Saint: I love you too.
And instantly, we’re right back in it.
One year later
Halle: 24 years old
Sebastian: 25 years old
My God, she is so fucking beautiful.
I am trying my best not to fixate on that as she walks toward me. But I can’t help it. I drag my eyes all over Halle St. John as I stand from the table I’m sitting at and hold my hands out in preparation for her to launch herself into my arms like she always does. She’s wrapped around me instantly, and her sweet scent fucks with every single one of my senses as soon as she’s in my arms.
“Saint.” I let the word out like it’s my salvation because, to be honest, most days it is. She is. I envelop her in a polite hug, letting my arms wrap around her back even though I want nothing more than for her to try to climb my body like she’s been known to do and wrap her legs around my waist. My hands itch to grip her ass or her hips so she’ll do just that, but I refrain because I’m not sure where we stand.
“Wild,” she whispers against my neck like I’m that same salvation. She drags her lips up my neck before she pulls back and looks at me. Her big brown eyes are glossy with tears, and my heart squeezes in my chest like it always does when I see Halle tear up. I fucking hate watching her cry. Ever since we were kids, it was the thing I did everything in my power to prevent. She blinks them away and gazes up at me through her long lashes like she’s waiting for me to make the next move.
She moves her lips a little closer to mine, and I want to back away because the last time we saw each other, we said we shouldn’t be doing this anymore.
But I don’t move, and when her lips brush lightly against mine, I allow myself one second to indulge in her. In us. In the fantasy that we aren’t who we are in each other's lives, and that we could be together every day, and not just for a few days in October every year. I pull back while keeping her in my arms, not wanting us to get too far into this fantasy because it only takes a moment for us to revert to our old ways.
But…
I also haven’t seen her in a year, and the way she feels against me reminds me of home and love and lust all rolled into one memory. She pushes her face against my chest, keeping her arms still wrapped tightly around me.
