Chapter Twenty-Seven
Nash
Nash doesn’t manage to sleep for long before Kurt calls again. Groggy-headed, he accepts that the conversation needs to happen, and answers the phone.
‘Hey Kurt.’
‘Hey bro. Sorry to get back on things so early, but I was just thinking of picking up some breakfast and swinging over to your place so we can talk business. What do you fancy?’
Oh no. He sits up, the blankets pooling around him.
‘Kurt. I’m not there.’
‘Oh. Can you be back this afternoon? I can bring dinner?’
‘No, Kurt. I’m . . . I’m in Britain.’ The other end is silent for so long that he briefly worries the connection died. ‘Hello?’
‘Sorry, I got coffee all down me, because I was taking a moment to consider why my favourite client left the continent and didn’t tell me about it.’
‘Urgh, don’t be mad.’ He regrets the whine to his voice.
‘Dude, why are you in England?’
‘Wales actually.’
‘What?’
‘I’m in Wales, not England. It’s a whole thing.’
‘Okay, sure, Wales. But why?’
This is it. He needs to tell him. ‘I got scared and ran away.’
‘From what?’
‘The deal on the table.’
He can’t hear it, but he knows Kurt is currently cursing him under his breath for not talking to him directly and for being a fucking idiot.
This is the side of Kurt he never sees, but very occasionally hears if he takes a phone call in his presence.
Exasperated-with-clients, getting-the-deals Business Kurt.
‘You’re going to have to explain this one for me, buddy.’
‘I know. I’ve been cowardly, but the reason I’ve been delaying is that I’m feeling a bit burnt out from acting, Kurt.
And I really want to try something new, like writing or directing.
I’ve got ideas I don’t know what to do with yet, and I’m worried that getting tied into this deal is not going to give me any space to grow as an artist.’
The last part feels embarrassing to admit, but there we go. He’s said it now. Radical vulnerability is the mode of the day.
Kurt breathes out slowly, a soft fuzzing sound through the speakers.
‘Well,’ he begins slowly, ‘they’re interested in you as a brand.
I’m sure that if we took this back to the negotiations to see what investment they’d be interested in making in you branching out, we might be able to find a middle ground. ’
What? Is it really that simple?
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yeah, like they really want this franchise to keep going, and these kind of development partnerships are not unusual – look at with Donald Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.’
‘Yes but they’re Donald Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I’m just Nash.’
‘Just Nash? My dude, did you cross the Atlantic and forget who you are? You’re Nash fucking Nadeau.
You’re King of the Seasonal Screen. These guys are desperate to nail you down so you won’t go off and make films with their competitors, who, for the record, have also been sniffing around recently.
You’re a hot commodity and a rising star, and the reason I’ve been harassing you is because they’re desperate to get you signed up. ’
‘Oh.’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, now I feel really stupid for not talking to you.’
‘And running away to Wales.’
‘And running away to Wales and getting stuck here because of a snowstorm that knocked out all the international travel for like an entire country.’
‘Oh no, for real? What have you been doing there anyway?’
‘Accidentally cohabiting with a baker.’
‘Is that slang for something dirty?’ Nash can practically hear the accompanying eyebrow waggle through the phone line.
‘It’s not.’
‘Pity. Well, be nice to this mystery baker. I know what you’re like.’
‘Look, the stunt guy recovered and anyway it was just a misunderstanding—’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘I can be nice.’
At this, Kurt suppresses a loud snort. ‘Yeah, maybe when you’re playing the vet and having a temporary personality transplant.’
‘Aren’t I paying you to be nice to me?’
‘I only get paid when you sign the contracts, my dude,’ Kurt says gently, in a way that makes Nash feel incredibly guilty for all this mess, especially when it apparently seems to have been entirely unnecessary. ‘Hang a moment, will you?’
He does as he’s told, cursing himself for not speaking to Kurt in the first place. How did he take this so casually? And while complimenting Nash and his work? God, this is maddening. He really should have just spoken to Kurt from the first moment he started having doubts.
But then, if he’d been brave from the off, he’d never have met Christopher. Maybe he needed that in order to be brave.
‘Okay, I’m back. So especially with this on the table, I need you back in LA as they’re going to want to talk.
I know ideally you’d get to stay in Wales for now and we do this all over Zoom, but you’re the asset and we need to pony you in front of them a little, if that sounds all right?
I’ll set up a meeting. From what I can see, international flights are back on, we can book you onto a lunchtime flight tomorrow from Manchester from the looks of things.
I’ll arrange for Tessa to send you a car – I’m going to assume she knows where you are? ’
‘Yes,’ he says quietly.
Tomorrow? Is it over already? He’d stopped checking if flights and trains were operational a few days ago, when some small part of him had accepted that this is where he was going to be. Where he wanted to be.
‘OK, I’ll send you an itinerary.’ Kurt is in full business mode, springing into action as always, and Nash is struggling to keep up.
‘If you could write up some notes so that we’ve got something to talk through before we meet the bigwigs, that would help me no end, and then we can present you as a rounder package, OK? ’
His mouth is dry. This is happening. So much is happening at once that all he can do is bleat out, ‘OK.’
‘Are you sure?’
No. Yes. Absolutely not.
‘Sorry, I had a seizure yesterday so I’m a little foggy, that’s all. I’m fine,’ he says, the lie souring on his tongue.
‘Are you safe?’
‘Yes, the baker . . . Christopher looked after me.’
There’s a pause on the line, just for a moment.
‘Good, I’m glad. And look, don’t get all caught up in your head about everything.
This is exciting! I’m excited for you and for us to enter a new era of Nadeau.
The cards are all in your hands, bro. I’ll pick you up from the airport in like thirty-six hours. Sleep well!’ Kurt hangs up.
Fuck.
He drops the phone in his lap. Why does he feel so numb?
He did the thing, finally! That’s what this whole fucking mess has been about – speaking his truth, asking for what he wants.
And yes, deep down it feels good that he is apparently on track to maybe make his dreams come true . . . but tomorrow?
Tomorrow.
He must have slept for longer than he thought because it’s nearing four, which means he has barely any time left with Christopher before . . . the inevitable.
Nash scrambles out of the bed and walks carefully down the stairs.
When he reaches the bakery kitchen, Christopher doesn’t look up, too absorbed in decorating a tiny but perfect gingerbread house.
Something catches in Nash’s throat as he watches him pipe frosting, delicately bringing a world to life.
That’s how it feels. For the first time in a long time, Nash feels animated. Alive.
This man, this strange, awkward, but impossibly kind tall man has worked his way into Nash’s brain and heart and now he has to say goodbye?
It’s some kind of special cruelty that he has to leave the only person he’s had any kind of romantic connection with who didn’t act as if the way his brain misfires is a problem.
The last person he loved told him outright that it was a burden to love him, and that it was too much to expect someone to look after him and love him at the same time.
And he’s believed that was a universal truth for so long that he closed off that part of himself, too scared to show his own vulnerabilities to someone who could love him lest that person throw it back in his face.
Alongside that sharp pain is the waning of friendships, people who have loved and cared for him in vulnerable moments.
Yes, perhaps due to a lack of tending by him, but also other things like geography and changing personalities.
But his personal life has quietly felt like a place of loss, fast and slow, of people still living but moving forward and away from him for so long now. It makes him feel ever more stuck.
He’d become an island. And he’s just realising that he’d been starting to consider a change. A bridge to land of sorts.
What he’s frankly terrified of is that Christopher might be someone who could choose to love him not in spite of his differences and difficulties, but alongside them. They might spark and bite and snap, but he sees Nash as a whole person, and hasn’t backed away.
He knows, deep down, that he would stay, or ask Christopher to follow, if one of them was brave enough to ask and the other to agree, but then he would never want Christopher to accept.
So that would be two people’s dreams-in-progress destroyed, and for what?
A glimmer of lust? Foolish hope? Or, instead, something that could grow to be so much more if they just tended it?
God, he’s going to miss him. He misses him already, and they’re just across the room from each other, Nash on the stairs and Christopher gently spotting the edge of a gingerbread roof with red and white. He could watch him forever.
And when he looks up, there’s just this huge, unafraid smile on Christopher’s lips that Nash wants to kiss and kiss and kiss.
The truth of the matter, which he doesn’t want to look at too closely, is that Nash is going to have to break two hearts to leave.
But not tonight.
He wants one last night when they can just be Christopher and Nash, whatever that means. Another night where he can pretend it’s not almost over.