Chapter Eleven #2
Although he was a little unsure about the whole idea to start with, Christopher really comes alive when he realises he could bake things for people, too.
He suggests sourdough loaves, some flatbreads for the chilli, and perhaps a run of biscuits.
He picks up a few things for the baking, grumbling at the price compared to wholesale, but still smiling when he adds them in.
‘You load, I’ll bag,’ says Nash when they get to the tills. He passes the cashier, saying hello, but Christopher gets into a full conversation with the young girl. Typical.
Nash can’t help but watch as Christopher leans over to pick up things to place gently on the conveyer belt.
They lock eyes, but Nash styles it out by making a very big show of shaking open the carrier bags.
His eyes wander again even as he bags things together.
And when Christopher gets out his wallet to pay, he rolls up the sleeves of his shirt and jumper, as though he’s about to do manual labour rather than simply tap a card against a reader.
In the soft white underside of one arm is one lone freckle, and Nash has to bite down on his lip to drag his attention away.
His mind wanders, imagin- ing clasping his hand right over that freckle, and pinning Christopher’s arm above his head.
God, really? Is this what Stockholm Syndrome feels like?
Being held hostage and developing feelings for your captor?
But instead of romantic feelings, Nash is just thinking about the way the freckles dapple across Christopher’s shoulders.
He’s pretty sure he listened to a podcast about how Stockholm Syndrome was all made up anyway.
Either way, it seems a little unfortunate that this weird guy’s vibe seems to be doing this much for him at this very moment.
‘Ready to go?’ Christopher startles him so much that he drops a bag of canned goods a little too heavily into the trolley. All the nearby cashiers look over at them, alerted by the noise.
‘Yes,’ he says, a little too quickly.
‘All right,’ says Christopher, with that soft lazy smile that makes Nash want to . . . well.
This is bad. This is really bad, he thinks. He needs a cold shower. Perhaps a walk in the snow. Maybe he should get into that angry sea too, just to be safe. Swim home.
* * *
They load up the van, and as they pull out of the car park, Nash flicks on the radio. Someone is speaking in Welsh, but it quickly gives way to Caroline Polachek’s ‘So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings’, which Christopher hums along to.
Against his better judgement, he decides to find out more about Christopher. ‘So do you speak Welsh?’ he asks.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘The radio, and I heard you saying a few things to the cashier.’
‘I’m learning, or trying to. I’ve always been quite good at languages; the Latin-based ones are what I was most exposed to. I very much felt that if I was going to come here and open a business, the least I could do is learn the language.’
‘Do lots of people speak it?’
‘Apparently a third of the country, but it might take a while for them to speak to me.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I’ve got to prove myself, haven’t I?’ Christopher says simply, shrugging his shoulders ever so slightly.
‘Plus, it’s just easier for us all to speak in English if I’m doing a really bad job of Welsh.
But also, I came here, and bought up retail space because I was lucky to have London property money.
I’m young, so I guess it could seem like I’m not serious.
Like I don’t care about this community. But I do. I want to prove that.’
‘I guess moving into a small community is always tricky but even more so when it’s a different country.’
‘Essentially. And I suspect you don’t get taught much Welsh history at all – I certainly was not – but there’s a history of English colonisation here.
I don’t want to inadvertently be another part of that.
There’re so many people here with holiday homes that are just never here, never giving back to the community.
It’s just . . . it’s all on my mind. That privilege. ’
‘That’s admirable,’ Nash reluctantly admits. He kind of wishes Christopher would go back to being prissy and annoying, instead of earnest.
‘It shouldn’t be. It really is the least I should be doing. And my Welsh is truly atrocious. You just can’t tell because you don’t speak it.’
Nash wonders if Welsh is on Duolingo because making fun of Christopher in Welsh could be extra fun.
But before he can open the app, he realises his screen is full of messages from Kurt.
Variations on my dude, let’s talk. He hesitates, not quite ready to click on them and find out the full extent of Kurt’s messages yet.
After all, they’ve got two more days, right?
That’s plenty of time to deliberate privately.
When they pull up to the bakery, Nash leaps out of the van and picks up the heaviest bags from the back.
If he’s not going to get a chance to do any proper lifting, this will have to do.
At least Christopher seems happy to let him, and takes the remaining bag under one arm.
Once inside and de-booted, Christopher goes to walk upstairs when Nash stops him. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To . . . put the shopping away? In my house?’
‘Shouldn’t we cook down here? Might just be easier if we’re cooking for ten to do it in a kitchen where we can swing a cat.’
‘Good point.’
They dump the bags on the floor of the bakery kitchen, and Nash starts grouping ingredients together into ‘soup’, ‘bolognese’ or ‘chilli’ on the massive table in the centre.
While he loves to cook, he doesn’t get to do much of it at home.
Plus, the strict diets he ends up on pre-shooting aren’t exactly a joy to cook – no inspiration ever came from plain grilled chicken.
When he was little, he would cook with his nonna, and she always insisted on setting everything out ready before you even thought about prepping, never mind cooking. That’s stuck with him.
British through and through, Christopher takes a few bags up with him, and goes upstairs to make them tea. Nash drags a stool over from a corner and settles on it, his elbows on the prep table in the centre of the room, and opens up his message chain with Barbie.
Nash: don’t worry. I have been kidnapped but adopted by locals and am being looked after, though they insist that someone sends a lot of money before I’m allowed to leave, and they keep taking photos of me with the newspaper. All very weird.
Barbie: lol
Barbie: good.
Barbie: or not good? Is this even Nash I’m speaking to?
Nash: send over ￡100k and we’ll tell you for sure
Barbie: hmm I’m not sure he’s worth that
Nash: rude
Nash: I mean…
Nash: You should send it
Barbie: you should tell Nash that if he signs his new contract, they can get the money that way
Barbie: (sorry)
Nash: not you too
Barbie: babe you know I do not love the reality of the biz, but like I gotta eat, you gotta eat, the crew have to eat, let’s just do the thinggggg
It all sounds so reasonable when she says it.
But it’s another year of his life, at least. More than that really, because this is actually a multi-year deal, multiple films. If it was just the last Christmas at the Clinic film then that would be a different conversation, but the execs made it very clear to him, before he fled LA, that if he didn’t agree to do more films, it wouldn’t just be hurting his career, but perhaps hers too.
Not that he’d told Kurt that, because he’d then have to tell Kurt about all the rest of it.
At one point, this kind of deal and the security that comes with it had been his dream. But now it feels like a trap.
A gilded cage.
All this feels so much worse now that Barbie is rightfully on his case. There’s no way he can tell her that he’s being blackmailed with her own career security, and that’s part of the hold-up. Another thing that Kurt probably could advise on.
But the thing is, he needs to protect her.
After Parental Units got cancelled and everyone went their separate ways, he was kind of afloat in the industry.
He was a young adult actor in a sea of them, and even though Kurt was great at getting him into the audition room, Nash just wasn’t having any luck.
It was months and months of showing up and sitting alongside the same four or five guys who looked exactly like him – blond, slightly preppy, all built like greyhounds – reading the same scripts.
It wasn’t always the same guys, because every now and again someone else would get their big break – they’d get a season-long role or a nice guest star appearance, and someone else would rotate into his slot in the audition room instead.
Eventually, they ran out of greyhounds and he’d got lucky with a pretty terrible made-for-TV film role, but he and Kurt agreed the only reason to do it was the strangely high pay (thank you to all the product placement), as they all agreed the script was a dud.
But strange things can come from terrible movies, because Barbie Glynn, rising star of social media and darling of the girls-next-door, had seen him in that stinker of a movie and wanted him to play alongside her in her first movie.
He’d been a little sceptical to begin with; how could he not be?
It was her first movie, basically written for her, and arguably the execs had her follower numbers translating into dollar signs in their mind.
She was a bit younger and he wasn’t sure if she’d done any acting at all.
Plus, they’d never met. And yet, she wanted him to audition for Christmas at the Rink, in which they’d play rival ice-skating coaches training their youth teams for sectionals, or regionals – he forgets which.
It turned out they had amazing on-screen chemistry.
Like, the type that made Nash wonder very briefly if it wasn’t real, but no, he tends to like his real-life love interests with more stubble.
Even so, just watching the tapes back for the chemistry reads they did together, it was clear for everyone to see that they were it.
They had a good time filming, too. Mostly, he just got to drive the Zamboni while Barbie wore the most incredible yet impractical, aggressively fluffy faux-fur coats in every scene.
And then, it really took off. He was officially a leading man, albeit in small-budget, made-for-television or straight-to-streaming romantic comedies, but the work kept coming. Screenwriters wrote scripts with them in mind. It was kind of magical, while he wanted it.
If it wasn’t for Barbie, he’d probably have left the industry by now.
And it feels very much like the weight of her career is also on his shoulders.
He writes back that he’s ‘working on it’, hoping this is vague enough that she won’t see all the way through to the void of I can’t think about this not even a little bit in his brain.
Barbie: no probs, good luck escaping that hostage sitchhhhh
Yeah, he probably needs all the luck he can get. Especially given that the weather warnings seem to just keep getting redder. He sends back a thumbs-up emoji, possibly the least convincing way of conveying he’s totally fine.
Before Nash’s brain can run off into an anxiety-induced imagination spiral of whether Christopher could actually feasibly kidnap him, the man himself walks into the kitchen, teas in hand.
He sets them down on the counter and brushes his hands together, as though brushing away flour that’s not there.
‘Ready to—’ he begins, but they’re interrupted by a knock on the back door. Christopher lopes off to open it and is greeted once again by Shaz-en-knitwear.
‘Hiya boys. Get your warms on,’ she says, rubbing her mittened hands together.
‘Our what?’ asks Christopher.
‘You know, your coats and stuff.’
‘I did not think that’s what you meant,’ Nash says.
‘Hurry up, will you? You’ve got to come with me. Have you not seen the new weather forecast? They’ve put out a bunch more alerts on top of the alerts there already are. It’s going to get worse overnight.’
Nash’s stomach drops. He really isn’t getting out of here any time soon.
‘They’ve called an emergency town meeting to work out how to help everyone. And seeing as you two have already been such good little elves today, I figured you should come along.’
‘You don’t have to come,’ Christopher whispers to Nash, which makes his stomach twist in a different way.
He’s here, isn’t he? He fixed the van. He helped with the shopping and was about to start cooking.
Why does Christopher keep trying to leave him behind when having something to do is the only thing keeping his sanity in check?
Does he think Nash is that much of a jerk?
The thought makes him feel strangely small.
Unseen, perhaps. He’s not sure why it bothers him this much, but then, who likes being misunderstood? It’s probably just that.
Hot irritation rushes up his neck. It makes him want to itch or fight or go for a run. ‘Let’s go,’ he says, grabbing his coat from the hook.
‘That’s more like it, American boy,’ says Shaz.