12. Adam
12
ADAM
I t was a good day.
No, not that.
A bloody brilliant day.
The best I’d had in a fucking age.
I felt… light, filled with something cool and clean like the moonlight turning the nightscape around the speeding car to silver.
We’d meant to spend an hour, tops, on set with Andrea, but somehow, time and enthusiasm had colluded to make us lose track of time.
Even when Andrea went back to shooting the final scenes for his upcoming drama, Sebastian’s raw joy at being on a film set had rooted me in place. There were meetings to be at, people to hobnob with if I wanted to secure my BAFTA win in a few weeks, my agent blowing up my phone with new film offers now that the nominations had been released… Endless tasks to see done.
Yet I was transfixed by the Italian actor/writer/chauffeur who stood beside me with the kind of wide-eyed zeal I hadn’t seen on a film set in years, if at all. I’d forgotten, looking at Sebastian, what it felt like to be new to the scene. To watch the mechanics of filmmaking, the multiple camera angles, and the drudgery of repeating your lines again and again to obtain the right nuances for the master shot, for the individual shots, how many people were needed on set for such a variety of reasons a civilian would have no hope of guessing their purpose.
And all of it, Sebastian ate with a proverbial spoon.
“ è meraviglioso ,” he breathed as Willa Trombley cried repeatedly for the camera, each shot absolutely exquisite.
I didn’t speak much Italian, though I took Latin at Eton long enough to parse his meaning.
“It is through your eyes,” I agreed, unable to look away from the Italian enough to appreciate the harmony on set. “You seem to have the ability to find beauty in everything.”
His grin was free, a boyish kind of contentment that he’d earned my praise. The expression made me want to lavish him with poetry in a way I’d never done before. It made me want to put him on his knees and teach him how to earn it from me.
“I learned young. My twin sister and I made it our motto, really. We became determined to find beauty in the darkness.”
“Was your childhood so bad?” I couldn’t help but give voice to my curiosity.
His tone was so casual for the words that came next. “There was a lot of darkness in our lives for a long time. It was either see the beauty in the shadows or give up and let that hungry blackness swallow you whole. It taught me to be grateful every day for the small joys.” He shot me a cheeky grin. “And for the big ones like here, today.”
I thought about my own sense of ennui, how my life seemed to blur day by day into a kind of stagnant, grey-toned reel of B footage. Nothing to punctuate it, nothing to make me sit up and take notice.
How embarrassing it seemed now, in the face of Sebastian’s gratefulness and optimism, to be so jaded when I had untold privilege.
He caught my wince and pulled his attention from the scene to put a hand on my elbow, discreetly enough that no one would notice. Still, his touch was… nice. Savannah wasn’t particularly affectionate outside the bedroom nor had my parents ever been anything close to the touchy-feely types.
But it seemed Sebastian was.
A hand on the elbow, a bump of shoulder into shoulder. Little things that somehow added up to something large enough to weigh pleasantly in my hollow chest.
“Did I say something to upset you?” he’d asked.
It wasn’t his fault that his youthful earnestness made me feel eighty-two and at the end of my life instead of twenty-eight and at the height of it.
“No,” I murmured, but I gave in to my own impulse to touch him and clasped him strongly on the shoulder. “Should we steal something from the craft services table and take it to a place I know?”
Sebastian’s grin turned coy, making my gut clench. For someone who’d never been with a man before, he was shockingly good at flirting with one. “A private place you know?”
“Exactly,” I agreed, already shoving him forward to the entrance.
Andrea was busy, so I didn’t bother with goodbyes. However, I figured we would pop by later to see if he was still filming. In the meantime, I focused on the beauty in the grim blankness of my life that was one Sebastian Lombardi.
He chatted with me freely as we left the warehouse and moved to the craft services tent set up outside. His hands waved to and fro, talking just as eloquently as his words as he told me about his thoughts for Blood Oath . He only paused briefly to contemplate the loaded food tables with slack-jawed awe before grabbing a paper plate and loading it so high that the thin material buckled in his grip, and he had to carry it with two hands.
“Hey, Meyers, looking good,” a friendly, familiar grip called to me as he walked by.
I jerked my chin up in his direction but didn’t take my eyes from Seb as he contemplated his wobbly plate, plucked a breadstick from the masses of food, and stuck it between his lips like a cigarette as though that would help level the load.
“Ready?” he mumbled around the bread.
I cocked an eyebrow at him, but he only grinned. “I grew up poor, okay? If there’s free food, I’m eating as much of it as I possibly can.”
“How you keep that eight-pack is a real wonder,” I grumbled as I took my own sparse plate of protein and some veg and led him away from the tent deeper into the maze of Pinewood Studios.
“I think it’s my youthful metabolism,” he quipped, easily falling into step with me on those long legs when most people struggled to keep up. “When did you lose that, do you reckon, vecchietto ? A decade or so ago?”
I almost choked on my unexpected laughter. “You wanker, I’m twenty-eight, thank you very much.”
He peered at me and then risked losing his plate of food to poke at my temple. “Bit of grey hair there, though.”
“It’s distinguished,” I said haughtily.
“Sure.” He crunched the breadstick and ate it carefully without the use of his hands.
It was quite entertaining.
The gardens at Pinewood Studios were a massive appeal of filming at the lot. They had the forest abutting the back of the property that had stood in for France, The Balkans, and mystical woods like the ones in Harry Potter . But I led Sebastian to Heatherden Hall, a magnificent manor home ringed in cultivated gardens with a small pond and pretty stone bridge crossing it.
We were both quiet as we stood on the bridge and looked out over the water, the sound of the fountain a quiet trickle in the background. The house itself rose from the pretty gardens in all its pale yellow and cream splendor.
“It’s gorgeous,” Sebastian said quietly, as if in reverence to the grandeur of the faux estate.
I grinned, but it felt a little wrong on my face as I settled on the steps facing the house, and Sebastian followed suit. “I grew up on an estate much like this.”
“I could pretend to be surprised by that, but I did do some research before I agreed to be your live-in house boy,” he admitted unashamedly, before ripping a mammoth bite out of his turkey sandwich.
“It wasn’t quite as pastoral as this lot. Cornwall is all cliffs and vivid greenery and crashing ocean waves. It smells like salt, and the wind always bites, even on a balmy summer’s day.”
“It sounds like you love it there.”
“Does it?” That surprised me. I hadn’t been to my father’s estate near Falmouth in over half a decade. “I didn’t as a boy. That’s certain.”
Sebastian slid me a careful look as he chewed before saying, “I didn’t grow up enjoying Naples very much, but I love it. The heat in midsummer, the stink of the ocean and the sear of the pavement through your thin-soled shoes. The food. Uh, English food is nothing in comparison.” He made such a face of disgust I had to laugh. “I think loving and hating our hometown is the same kind of necessary tension we have with our parents. We love them because we have to, we want to, and we’re wired and raised to. But we can hate them for all the ways they’ve wronged us.”
He was silent then, looking out over the gardens, lost in his own reverie. Shockingly, I found myself wanting to join him there. Savannah and I had something of a silent agreement about our pasts: we didn’t talk about them. As though they would cease to exist by not acknowledging them.
It was unlike me to even mention my childhood home, let alone indulge in conversation about it, but Sebastian seemed to stir up the murky banks at the bottom of my gut, revealing things I’d thought long since lost.
“Shall we share our sad little histories, then?” I suggested casually, as though my heart wasn’t doing something funny in my chest. “Tit for tat.”
He looked down at his plate, fingered the edge of a spring roll, and then put his plate to the side. “All right, then, if you want.”
I wanted to talk about my own life like I wanted hemorrhoids, but I was too curious about his to be cautious.
“What do you want out of life?” I asked, casting a wide net, not because I wanted a generic answer but because I wanted every answer he had to give me.
Surprisingly, he ducked his head to smile secretively at his hands.
“What?” I pressed, hooked by his uncharacteristic bashfulness. “Don’t think I’ll shame you for saying fame and fortune, mate. It would be rather hypocritical of me.”
His laugh was an exhale. “No, no. I mean, of course, I’d love to have the pick of films to star in. Funding for any screenplay I write. But truly? My dream will seem childish to you, and I may only be eighteen, but I don’t want you to see me as naive.”
“Well, you did willingly enter into a scandalous affair with a married couple, so I think the ship sailed on your naivety long ago,” I quipped just to see him grin.
“ Va bene ,” he murmured, tipping his head to the rare sight of the British sun bright in the sky. “I want l’amour che move il sol e l’altre stelle .”
Before I could translate the beautiful phrase using my grade school Latin, he looked at me with those sun-gold eyes and repeated in English, “I want a love that moves the sun and the stars.”
I blinked, struck physically by his confession.
Love?
The eighteen-year-old sitting before me with scads of talent and beauty on the cusp of recognition and acclaim wanted something so transient and intangible as love ?
What happened to teenage boys wanting to shag anything in a skirt and eschew all sense of emotion and responsibility?
His chuckle was sad and a little bitter. “I can see you judging me, Adam.”
“Processing,” I corrected, but I felt off-balance and a little defensive.
If he wanted that kind of emotion, why was he with Savannah and me? He had to know there was no way we could ever give him… that .
I wasn’t sure we could even give him enough emotion to move a bloody paper clip, let alone a fucking galaxy.
“Don’t worry,” he said, staring off over the gardens as if he was looking into a kind of future where that love awaited him. I tried not to feel irrationally and unfairly envious. “I know this isn’t that.”
I wanted to argue at the very same time that I wanted to bury this conversation six feet deep in an unmarked grave so we’d never stumble upon it again.
So, like the emotional coward I was, I tossed out, “You mentioned a twin sister.”
“I did,” he said, and everything melancholic in his demeanor evaporated in the heat of that bright smile. “Cosima. She’s my best friend, but then, that’s probably not surprising.”
“Do you read each other’s minds or anything?”
He laughed and I had the thought that if I died with that sound ringing in my ears, I’d be happy to go. “Not quite. But we know each other in a way that’s hard to explain. Not telepathy exactly, but, hmm, I think it’s like reading braille, maybe? I can feel her thoughts and emotions. Even now with her back in Milan, I can feel her sometimes. A kind of premonition if she’s having a good or bad day.” A frown flittered across his face. “I’ve had some bad feelings lately, but she’s assured me everything is going swimmingly. And it seems to be, financially at least. I wish I could do more, but for now, she’s our family’s primary breadwinner.”
“Well, if she looks a thing like you, I’ve no doubt she’s in high demand in the model industry.”
Sebastian rolled his eyes, but the quirk of his full mouth, shadowed by the beginning of an inky five-o’clock shadow I wanted to scrape with my teeth, gave him away. “I told you flattery wouldn’t get you anywhere.”
“I beg to differ.” I opened my hands to indicate our setting, quite romantic, and our closeness, his knee knocking companionably into mine. “It got me in this lovely garden with an even lovelier man.”
“Touché,” he conceded gracefully. “You know, speaking of my sister, I think she’d like you. She always preferred British cinema and actors best. Our father is Irish, you know, so maybe it’s in our blood.”
“Irish and Italian?” I whistled. “That explains some things. Quite a volatile combination of cultures.”
He punched me playfully, but that little grin broke open into a full-fledged smile, and honest to Christ, it made my breath stop in my throat.
“It’s made me doubly passionate, maybe, and it definitely helped me learn English. Even though he was an Italophile, he made sure to educate us in all things British. Cosima and I took to it best, though.”
“You have barely a trace of an accent most of the time. It’s quite remarkable given you’ve only been here, what, a handful of months?”
“Half a year. I was fluent before moving, but I’ve picked up some Britishisms, I think.”
“Well, you’ve certainly picked up one Brit,” I teased, putting my finished plate aside to angle my knees into his, pressing between one of them so I caged a strong thigh between my own.
“Have I?” he asked, his gaze warm on my mouth.
I licked my lips just to watch that golden gaze darken to syrup. “Truthfully, I didn’t expect to like you this much.”
His lips twisted into a wry smile. “Don’t tell me I’m the first man you’ve taken on a date.”
I reeled back just a bit, struck by the realization that this did, in fact, seem like a date. It hadn’t been my intention at all. The venture to Pinewood was meant to be about business. Sebastian had more than just talent on stage; his screenplay was truly magnificent, and I was excited to have a hand in getting it to the silver screen. Andrea was a natural fit, and he happened to be filming in the country.
But no, looking at this frankly stunning man sitting beside me, caged between my thighs like I couldn’t be without his touch, I had to re-evaluate.
Of course, it had been more than business from the start.
Savannah and I had agreed to no more lovers for a while. Not after what happened with Oscar. Not with what was happening to our marriage, crumbling at the edges like an old painting.
But then, there he’d been, devastating Savannah’s iron control and razing my own the moment I saw him embody a dead soldier in an indie production at Finborough Theatre.
Something in him called to me, beautiful and deadly as a siren’s song.
I wanted to disregard my rules and throw myself boldly into his arms.
The worst part of it was I thought he would catch me.
Reputation be damned, the irreparable damage to his fledgling career would take a back seat to the desire I saw so blatantly in his gaze.
Social constructs and the petty injustices of our industry would not rein in this man of passion.
But he deserved more than that.
Just being our driver and live-in lover.
He deserved a golden statue the same shade as his eyes for acting and writing.
He deserved fame and acclaim and whatever his heart desired because he was a good man, and I had the awful feeling he’d been exceedingly unlucky in life thus far.
And here I was, ready and shockingly eager to change that.
So maybe this was a date.
Maybe I wanted to go on three dozen more, with him, with my wife, our marriage revived by his rawness and fire and honesty.
But for him, for her, for me… my career, I wouldn’t.
We had all, in our own ways, worked too hard to give it all up now for something that had no guarantees, no money to live on or success to soothe our brittle insecurities.
“It’s a business lunch,” I corrected Sebastian, but softly, the words tempered by the hand I clasped on his knee, the squeeze I gave that firm thigh. “And we best be going.”
“Okay,” he said easily because I was discovering he was just like that, good-natured and easygoing except when he was riled. “Don’t think I won’t remember you owe me something about your history when I shared and you haven’t. But… thank you, Adam, for doing this. I know you said my work merits it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express how much your faith in me means. It’s… well, it’s everything.”
He looked at me then a little differently than he had in the car on the way up from London. Not like I was Adam Meyers, the actor, but more like I was Adam Meyers, his friend. A little warm, a little possessive.
The sentiment was punctuated by the hand he lifted to squeeze my shoulder, closing the loop between us, a current running through my hand to his thigh and back up through his hand to me.
I wanted to kiss him more than I wanted my next breath.
But we were in public. Though the gardens seemed deserted, you could never trust a setting rife with film folk not to capture something interesting on their phones and sell it to the paps.
“It’s my pleasure,” I told him sincerely, and then, risking it a bit, I pushed my hand up his thigh to squeeze again near his groin. “Or it soon will be.”
Sebastian had laughed, bright and happy, so he didn’t see the way I looked at him and wondered what it might be like to prioritize this… friendship over all the fears I had that lay between us.