Chapter 3
THREE
Watching a hunky blacksmith at work wasn’t exactly the fantasy Bax had imagined it would be. He’d been all set for Nick stripped to the waist and glistening with sweat as he wielded a heavy hammer. He had pictured sparks and fire as the sound of iron on iron rang out in the hot space of the forge.
Instead, he’d been fascinated by the precision of Nick carefully fastening tiny waves of thin metal to a surprisingly delicate unicorn’s head while swathed in safety gloves, goggles, and a thick apron.
Honestly, he wasn’t sure which was more attractive. He would hold onto his hope of seeing Nick sweaty and soot-covered someday, but in the meantime, simply watching the love he had for his work and the care with which he built his tribute to Raina warmed him more than the fire of the forge had.
He wasn’t even upset when Nally came along to burst the cozy bubble the two of them had found themselves in. Bax felt like he’d had a glimpse into a side of Nick that not many people saw, and as they headed up to the house to change into costumes for the crowd scene being filmed out in one of Hawthorne House’s distant meadows, they kept that new connection between them.
“It’s cold out there, people,” the small, pert production assistant in charge of making sure the extras Uncle Robert had thrown together at the last minute made it into the right costumes called out as everyone dressed in the dining room. “Keep your coats and thermals on under your costumes, but make certain Wardrobe conceals them and approves of you before you leave the house.”
“Something tells me Wardrobe will never approve of me,” Blaine commented as he adjusted the ragged tunic he’d been given over his dark blue coat.
Bax laughed. “No one ever completely approves of you,” he said, nudging his twin.
“Oy! Alfie approves of me,” Blaine snapped back.
“Where is Alfie, then?” Bax teased him. “And why are you back here already? I thought the two of you had an appointment at the orphanage.”
Blaine sent him a wary look. “Alfie is at the appointment. Uncle Robert phoned to tell me I had to come back and be a medieval peasant or heads would roll.”
“Aren’t heads rolling in this particular scene anyhow?” Nick commented as a harried PA worked to fasten his costume around the bulk of his coat.
“Good point,” Bax said, grinning. He was impressed that Nick would try to joke with him. Then again, he’d delivered more than one off-color joke to Nick before, and he had no intention of stopping now. Maybe he could be a good influence to get Nick to loosen up a lot more if they became friends.
Right. Friends. Because that was all Bax wanted from Nick…not.
They were friends, though. As the costume fitting progressed, the two of them continued to banter and grin at each other over the whole ordeal, and when they were shooed along to make-up, which Nick insisted he didn’t need, since they would just be part of the crowd while the real actors did the work but which he got anyhow, Bax watched him carefully for any signs of whether he stood a snowball’s chance in hell at more.
It was impossible to tell.
“You’ve got fantastic lips,” the buxom make-up artist painting Nick’s face flirted with him as she had him captive in her chair.
“Thanks?” Nick said smiling a little, but mostly keeping his face neutral so the woman could work.
“I bet your sweetheart loves kissing lips like those,” the woman went on, leaning closer to him.
Bax knew a come-on when he saw it, but Nick, bless him, was clueless.
“I don’t have a sweetheart,” he told the woman.
“No! A catch like you?” She swayed even closer, breasts first.
“My wife was killed in a car crash twenty months ago,” Nick said, like he was pointing out the weather.
The make-up artist immediately pulled back, her face falling. “Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry,” she said, then proceeded to finish Nick’s face with utmost care…and no flirting.
Bax fought not to grin as his make-up was finished, too. It felt wrong to laugh at Raina’s expense, but Nick was just so beautifully oblivious that he couldn’t help but smile.
As they were moved along, out of the house and down to the field that had been set up like a medieval town square for the execution scene, Bax kept a sharp eye on Nick’s interactions with everyone from the production crew to the students.
“Isn’t this fun?” a young woman who evidently knew him asked as they were moved into positions for the scene.
Her eyes were full of stars and admiration for Nick, but Nick just answered, “Yeah. Who would’ve thought this was what we’d be doing today, eh?”
As they waited for further instructions and for the cameras to be put into place, Bax started to see the whole thing as a kind of game. Just because Nick didn’t flirt back with the two women who had smiled at him didn’t mean he didn’t like women.
He watched to see if Nick spent a little too long staring at the male star of the film, who was wrapped in a down coat, as he and a few of the other leads waited for the scene to start. When Nick didn’t show much interest, Bax tried following his line of sight to see who Nick was staring at. Mostly he was busy watching the cameras or gazing off in the direction of his forge.
“Filming is such hard work,” he said, deciding to try a different tactic and attempt to snag Nick’s attention himself.
Nick laughed and pivoted slightly to face him. “I’ve heard people say it’s mostly a lot of waiting around.”
“It definitely is,” Bax grinned. He inched slightly closer to Nick, then said, “We need to figure out something to do to pass the time.”
“Yeah, that would be helpful,” Nick said, glancing toward his forge again.
“I guess orgies are out,” Bax said.
His comment had exactly the effect he’d hoped for. Nick whipped to face him, and even with movie makeup, his face glowed red.
Bax laughed. “I imagine that they got up to all sorts of mischief in the Middle Ages,” he went on, backing off just slightly.
“I suppose so,” Nick mumbled.
“Right, then,” Bax said with a nod. “I’m imagining that my character is the town crier. By day, he goes around calling out announcements when people need to know things, and by night he cries out for other reasons as he partakes in subversive bacchanals.”
“Didn’t they burn people at the stake for being witches when they did that back then?” Nick asked.
It was just a question, but he inched closer to Bax, almost protectively, as he asked it.
“Nah,” Bax said, even though he wasn’t actually an expert on the history. “Burning at the stake was reserved mostly for heretics. And the witches that got into the most trouble were women who were guilty of the heinous crime of having a backbone and sticking up for themselves.”
“Wasn’t sodomy punishable by death, too, in the Middle Ages?” Nick asked.
Bax gave Nick a look like he was impressed. It could have just been a throw-away comment, or Nick could have been talking about him, since he was openly gay. Then again, maybe he was thinking about himself and how he would have been treated in the Middle Ages, too.
“It depended on where you were and who you pissed off,” he answered. “As with most of history, they didn’t have social media, so if you weren’t blatantly obvious about who you liked to get naked with, no one would really know.”
Nick hummed sagely and nodded.
Bax was teetering on the edge of asking something outrageously bold, like “Do you ever fancy men?” when the director called them all to attention.
“Right, you lot. In this scene, Henry is being marched up to the gallows, so we need you all to cheer and holler or look horrified as you see fit, got it?” the director instructed them.
What followed was fifteen minutes of pandemonium as the extras dove into their roles while the lead actor marched about twelve yards six or seven times. After that, everything stopped again as the cameras were adjusted to shoot the same scene from a different angle. For continuity’s sake, the extras were all told to stay right where they were.
“So what do you think?” Bax asked as the production crew’s attention turned elsewhere.
“About what?” Nick asked, swaying a bit closer to him.
Bax wanted to turn and throw himself into Nick’s arms so they could cuddle for warmth. He might be able to get away with saying it was platonic. Not that he wanted it to be platonic.
“Are we for this Henry bloke having his neck stretched or are we against it?” Bax asked.
He got lucky when one of the other extras accidentally bumped him from behind, giving him an excuse to lean into Nick for a second.
Nick reached out like he would balance Bax. His hand spread across Bax’s back to steady him. Bax wished he would keep it there, but he let it drop.
“I’m against anyone being hanged for their crimes,” Nick said, sounding adorably good as he did.
“What?” Bax teased him. “Even last week, when Boris the miller’s son was caught drowning that sack of puppies in the river?”
Nick snapped a look at him and said, “What?”
Bax grinned and continued spinning his tale. “If you ask me, Old Boris has always been a nutter. Remember last year during harvest, when we were helping the farmers to bring in the sheaves and he was caught enjoying himself a little too much with Dan the cartwright’s donkey?”
Nick laughed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Bax took a risk of pushing things a little farther, all in the name of research, of course.
“We’d gone off to sit under the shade of an old oak tree, just the two of us and a jug of Matilda the Brewer’s finest mead. The lord of the manor was off fighting the Crusades and since no one was watching, we decided to cuddle up for a quick nap.”
Nick sucked in a breath, but whether that was because he’d caught on to the fiction Bax was weaving or because he liked the idea of the two of them cuddled up under an oak tree with a bottle of mead was yet to be determined.
“Right,” he said, drawing the single word out. “It was just after we’d danced the maypole and…and did whatever else people did to entertain themselves back then.”
“Which also involved dancing the maypole ,” Bax said, throwing as much innuendo into the comment as he could.
Nick flushed a deep shade of red and glanced down with a smile. It was the single cutest thing Bax had ever seen anyone do, but it still didn’t enlighten him as to whether Nick was strictly straight or not.
“I suppose you think this Henry bloke should hang,” Nick went on, throwing himself into pretend. “You were cheering awfully loud just then.”
“I’m the town crier,” Bax said with a shrug. “I do everything loud.”
“Everything?” Nick asked, a decidedly naughty look in his eyes.
Bax thanked all the old gods and the new that he was such a bad influence on his friend. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” he asked, arching one eyebrow.
Nick laughed and blushed, but whatever hope Bax might have had of digging a little deeper to find out if he had a chance was cut short as the production crew ramped up activity again.
The rest of the morning was spent in the same stop-and-start cycle of filming what would probably end up being three seconds in the film, finishing one bit, then reworking the camera angles so that they could shoot the same bit again. They’d progressed a little by lunchtime, enough so that they were filming longer stretches of dialogue as Henry talked his way out of being hanged. By the time they got to that point, though, most of the extras weren’t needed as the scene could be shot in such a way that they weren’t in any of the shots.
“I can’t decide if I’m happy about being cut from the rest of the scene or ecstatic,” Bax said as he and Nick walked back up to the house along with the others who the director had decided wouldn’t be needed for the rest of the scene.
“I’m ecstatic,” Nick said, a heaviness in his voice that said he meant it.
“Aaw, don’t you like spending time with me?” Bax asked. The question was a risk, as was the way he threw his arm over Nick’s shoulders like they were best friends.
“No, I love spending time with you,” Nick said, too fast to be anything but perfectly honest. That had Bax smiling from the inside out. “It’s just that I’m desperate to get work done on Raina’s unicorn.”
Whatever warm, fuzzy feelings of hope had been building in Bax flattened. “I’ve lost out to a unicorn,” he said, letting his arm drop. “I can’t say that would be the first time.”
The joke went over Nick’s head.
“No, I didn’t mean that I don’t like being around you,” he said, stumbling over his words a bit. “I definitely like spending time with you. I don’t really have a lot of friends, well, other than the Hawthorne family, and it’s just nice to spend time with you.”
Bax grinned, his hope sprouting anew. He still didn’t have the first idea if he actually stood a chance of having his fantasy of Nick naked and covered with sweat coming true, but he didn’t feel like that door was entirely shut either.
“Do you need help polishing your unicorn?” he asked, unable to keep a straight face.
Instead of blinking and blushing, Nick sent him a sideways look and said, “That one was just blatant.”
Bax laughed out loud. “I can’t be subtle all the time. Sometimes you just have to ask for what you want.”
They were near the fork in the path that led either to the house or to the forge, so Nick stopped, causing Bax to stop with him.
“What do you want?” Nick asked.
There was a sort of frustrated spark in Nick’s eyes and a tension to his shoulders that puzzled Bax. His first instinct was to make some sort of joke that wasn’t a joke in return, but he didn’t see that going over well. If he didn’t joke, though, he didn’t really know how to respond.
What did he want? To get in the pants of his dead cousin’s possibly straight husband? That didn’t seem right. To have Nick smile at him and call him a good boy, like he had with his toddler son? That didn’t seem at all right either. To have a genuine and yet also sexual connection with a man he admired and felt drawn to? That was definitely it, but without knowing which way Nick went, asking for what he wanted could backfire on him spectacularly.
He was saved from a potentially disastrous answer by his phone pinging in his pocket. It was just a WhatsApp message, he could tell from the sound, but instead of ignoring it like he should have, he scrambled under the layers of costume and coat to reach for his back pocket.
“I can give you some privacy if you’d like,” Nick said, turning like he would head on to his forge.
“No, it’s just a text,” Bax said, praying Nick wouldn’t walk away.
Nick waited as Bax freed his phone and tapped the screen a few times to get to the message. What he saw sent his heart plopping to his feet.
The message had been sent to the group chat for his former coven. It was an announcement of their upcoming Imbolc celebrations and a request for people to help out with the feast and ritual preparation. In the past, Bax had always been the one to plan the midwinter ritual welcoming the first signs of spring and to gather the elements they would need.
“Is something wrong?” Nick asked, taking a step closer to Bax.
“No,” Bax answered, lowering his phone. He cleared his throat in an attempt to banish the knot that had formed there, then said, “I’m still on the group WhatsApp chat for my old coven. They’re just planning for Imbolc.”
“What does planning for Imbolc mean?” Nick asked.
“Imbolc is one of the eight major holidays of the pagan calendar. It’s High Winter, a celebration of the first signs of spring.” He gestured to the set where they’d just been filming. “The Early Christian Church changed it into the celebration of Candlemas, when the candles in churches would be blessed, which is basically celebrating the return of more light to the world. It’s generally celebrated with a similar ritual of light and with a feast. I used to be in charge of my coven’s?—”
His babbling explanation was cut off by another notification from his phone. Bax lifted his phone to take a look only to find a notification that he had been removed from the group chat.
It was like a dagger in his heart. Just like that, someone had clicked a button somewhere, and now he was truly cut off from the people who had played such a meaningful role in his life for the past few years. It hurt more than the conversation he and Damien had had that had ended things.
“You okay?” Nick asked, stepping closer to him still.
“Yeah,” Bax lied. “I think they sent me the message by accident. I’ve just been removed from the group.”
He swallowed, then glanced up and met Nick’s eyes. He saw sympathy and strangely enough a similar sort of grief.
“That sucks,” Nick said.
He then did the last thing Bax expected and the one thing he wanted more than anything. He stepped forward and folded Bax into a warm hug.
It was everything Bax had dreamed of. Nick’s body was bigger than his and so solid. He could lean into it, close his eyes, and feel truly enveloped. Even though they’d been outside all day, Nick smelled of fire and metal. He hugged Nick back without thought or expectation. Instead of being something sexual or a prelude to more, the hug was affectionate, genuine, and perfect. Nick wasn’t just an object of lust, he was the kind of man Bax could see himself spending his life with.
“Hey, you two. Don’t wander off with those costumes. They belong to the production company,” Robbie’s amused voice broke the moment.
Bax sucked in a breath—which was probably the wrong thing to do, since it filled his nose with Nick’s smoky scent—and rocked back.
“Shit. I don’t have time to go up to the house and change,” Nick said, almost like the two of them hadn’t had a moment. “Can you take this back up for me?”
He started shrugging out of his costume even before Bax said, “Yeah, sure.”
Bax would have made a joke or said something witty and brilliant about helping Nick to undress, but all the energy had been sucked out of him and even Nick’s brilliant hug hadn’t put it back. He was a man without a coven. He would need a lot more hugs from Nick to replace the part of his soul that had just been ripped out.