Chapter 6
SIX
It was a mistake. Or was it? Jude couldn’t decide.
All he knew was that his lips continued to tingle long after Nally took a seat at the control table with Hannah Peel and put on the headset he was offered.
Jude felt as stunned as Nally looked, but he was much better at hiding his emotions than his friend.
“You’re going to do just fine,” Hannah told Nally, the sound broadcast into the anteroom through a pair of speakers in the front corners of the room. “We’re just going to talk about your work, your inspiration, and what’s coming next for you. I won’t bite.”
Nally’s glazed-over look lifted, and he managed a smile. It was one of those sweet, winning smiles that made Nally look beautiful without even knowing it.
A shiver passed through Jude that he tried to ignore. He shouldn’t have kissed him. Nothing good could come out of kissing his best friend like that. Shades of Timothy were everywhere. He couldn’t go through that crash and burn again.
Except that Nally wasn’t Timothy. Their friendship was so much stronger than his with Timothy had ever been. Maybe good things could come out of taking things further. The best and healthiest relationships Jude knew started with friendship. Maybe he and Nally….
No, he was playing with fire to even entertain the idea. Nally wasn’t Timothy, he was so much more. Trying and failing would kill him. There was no such thing as friends with benefits.
And why was he thinking about sex with Nally anyhow? He should be focused on Nally’s career, both the interview he was sitting through now and everything that might come in the future.
Nally did a fantastic job with the interview, of course.
Hannah Peel was incredibly nice to him, and once he got over his initial jitters, Nally answered all of her questions easily and insightfully.
Jude stood on the other side of the glass, listening to everything, smiling at Nally, and taking a few pics for social media. Fuck, he was proud of his friend!
“Do you want to grab a bite to eat somewhere?” he asked an hour later, as the two of them left the studio.
Nally was considerably more relaxed now that he knew he could ace an interview. “Yeah, I guess. But I’m not really in the mood for people right now.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Jude huffed a laugh. Technically, he wasn’t sure where Nally was coming from, but he felt something prickly and sensitive that made peopleing in London the last thing he wanted to do. “Want to get some sort of takeaway and head back to my place, since it’s closest?”
Nally exhaled and glanced to Jude with a smile as they walked on. “That sounds amazing.”
They were close enough to Mayfair and there were enough restaurants on Oxford Street that within fifteen minutes, they’d walked from the BBC studios, grabbed horrific fast food, and made it into the Georgian splendor of the Cranleigh family townhome.
They set up shop in Jude’s bedroom suite, and as he sat at his computer desk to eat and check on all his many social media accounts, Nally sank to sit against the wall beside the desk, pulling his cheap burger and chips out of their sack.
All was right with the world, and the vibe between Jude and Nally was as far from any sexy danger zones as could be.
“When all is said and done, I think I did alright,” Nally said before biting into the burger.
“Alright?” Jude glanced down at him incredulously. “Mate, you were stellar.”
“Hardly,” Nally laughed as he chewed. He swallowed, then said, “I would have come off as a complete wanker if you hadn’t been there to hold my hand.”
“I did not hold your hand,” Jude said, ignoring the soft feeling that came over him at the adoring look in Nally’s eyes. “More like I punched you in the arm then threw you into the lion’s den.”
Nally laughed, nearly sputtering the drink of soda he’d just taken. “I don’t know why I was freaking out so much,” he said, continuing with his meal a thousand times more relaxed than he’d been earlier. “I do that, you know? I hate that I do that, but I can’t help it for some reason.”
“Do what?” Jude said, clicking into one account and scrolling through the dozens of unread messages.
It was impossible to keep up with the volume of responses he got to his posts, and he’d put up a particularly fun one that morning, before meeting Nally for the interview, with his commentary on To Serve Him and why everyone should go see it.
“I panic in advance about things that turn out to be no big deal,” Nally said, thought about it, then chomped on a chip. “I should just loosen up and learn to be more like you.”
“More like me?” Jude grinned at the idea, tearing his eyes away from the screen to look at Nally again.
In a way, Nally still looked like the kid he’d been when they’d met ages ago.
He would always look younger than he was, and he still had a carelessness in the way he carried himself.
Jude found himself thinking that he would have to give his friend lessons in deportment, how to stand, and how to angle himself for a camera, if his career kept skyrocketing, which, of course, it would.
In other ways, Nally was totally different than he’d been throughout their childhood.
He was definitely an adult now. His body had long since toned up and filled out.
He had the barest scruff of a beard forming, which hinted to Jude he had forgotten to shave that morning.
Nally definitely had an artistic temperament when it came to forgetting key things like shaving or wearing matching socks.
Things like that didn’t matter when you were a creative genius.
What Nally really needed was someone to be there for him every day, to make certain he put on clean underwear and made it to his appointments on time.
The Hawthorne family wasn’t exactly famous for keeping it all pulled together that way.
Maybe he could take the job. Maybe he could be the one to wake up with Nally every morning, cuddle for a bit, then get him up and at ’em so he could become the big star he was meant to be.
“What?” Nally asked suddenly, jerking Jude out of his thoughts. “Do I have ketchup on my mouth or something?” He wiped his mouth.
Another burst of warmth shot through Jude. He remembered what those lips tasted like. He could still feel the imprint on his own lips. He shouldn’t have tried to tongue kiss Nally the way he had. Or else he should have pushed through and really made out with him.
Fuck, it was going to be Timothy all over again.
Jude blinked and shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, turning back to the computer screen and frantically clicking to another window to distract himself. “I was just thinking about—” Nothing. He had absolutely fuck-all to follow that statement up with.
Nally was quiet, which made Jude turn to check on him. Fortunately, his silence was because he’d taken a big bite of burger and had his mouth full.
“We should make a video of you practicing piano or composing or something for your social media today,” he said, ignoring the awkwardness between them and forcing himself to focus. “I took a few pics of you being interviewed, but it’s video content that really gets the algorithms going.”
“You took pictures of me being interviewed?” Nally asked, perking up.
“Yeah, you wanna see?”
Without stopping to consider whether it was a good idea, Jude slipped out of his chair and sat against the wall, his side pressed up tightly against Nally’s. He pulled his phone out and scrolled through the pics he’d taken that morning.
“Those aren’t half bad,” Nally said with a smile. He put down his soda and took Jude’s phone. “Some of these are really good.”
Rule number one. Never hand your phone to someone to show them a picture.
They always kept scrolling to other pics you may or may not want them to see.
Nally did just that, flicking through a dozen borderline tawdry pics Jude had taken of himself for different social media moods.
Some of them would get his account closed if he actually posted them.
But those weren’t the pics that made Jude’s heart thump or that had heat radiating from Nally.
Beyond the selfies was a section of pics Jude had taken the night of the premiere, and the morning after.
He hadn’t taken anything particularly salacious, although he should have grabbed his phone and snapped one of him and Nally in bed before he’d come up with his humping joke.
There were others, though—Nally looking at the computer in shock when he saw what was going on with his early social media efforts, the two of them goofing around at breakfast, and the two of them sitting on the couch together later, when they were just watching the telly.
They were simple, everyday pictures, but they had Nally staring even more than the ones of Jude half naked.
“Is this the kind of thing I should be posting on social media?” Nally asked, handing the phone back to Jude.
“Sure, if you’d like,” Jude said. He had to clear his throat, then reached up onto his desk to get his soda. “Anything that engages people and makes them see you as human and not some untouchable star.”
“The last thing I want is to be an untouchable star,” Nally said, grabbing what was left of his burger. “I like to be touched, thank you very much.”
“Trust me, I know,” Jude said with a teasing purr.
Nally had just started swallowing his bite and nearly choked on it.
It was exactly what Jude needed to shake himself out of the weird feelings that were chasing him.
He laughed and hauled Nally away from the wall to bang on his back, like that was helping him not to choke.
Nally started laughing instead, which only encouraged Jude to tumble around with him a little more, and within seconds, they were sprawled on the floor laughing.